November 15, 2024
When I head out to the barn each morning, I can’t help but take in the view from our ridgetop home. Farmington is blessed with so many trees that most of its houses are hidden under a canopy of leaves, so when I scan the valley, there is very little evidence of human “civilization.” That suits me just fine! The view is timeless, the feeling is tranquil, and I cherish the early morning solitude.
Once the weather turns cold though, there is always one sign of life that never fails to make me smile. As the sun starts to come up, a single wisp of smoke can be seen rising above the trees in the valley. It took us a while to figure out who else was up at that hour, and what inspired them to make a small fire which never lasted very long.
Eventually we pinpointed the smoke to the farm in Avon where we buy hay. Every morning Douglas builds a fire in the wood-fired cook stove in his kitchen - as he says, “just enough to heat the coffee and take the chill out of the room, but not so much that you’d be tempted to linger.”
Hidden beneath his formidable demeanor, he has a wonderful sense of humor, and was therefore amused when Anne called, one cold November morning. She told him that when we saw the smoke rising from his chimney, we figured that it meant he was still alive and knew he’d want to know.
He thanked her and said that even though he checks the obituaries every morning to see if his name is listed, he knows it takes a few days for the Courant to publish the names of the recently departed, so it would be great if we would indeed give him a heads up - just so as he’s “not caught off guard or anything.”
It’s become a yearly ritual now. After the beauty of the foliage starts to fade and a hard frost settles in, we’ll see the smoke rising in the valley once again, and Anne will give Douglas a call just to let him know that he’s “still not dead.”
As much as I love the seclusion of our ridgetop home and worship our tree covered and house-less view, there is something very reassuring about seeing smoke from Douglas’s chimney. His family has farmed that land for more than a century and even though the pigs and the cows are long gone, he’s still there, baling hay and warming his coffee on his mother’s wood cookstove.