Ancestor Work
By Lindsey Danis
My wife and I looked at over fifty houses before we found the farmhouse, high on a hill above Rondout Creek, in the Hudson Valley. The old house had good bones, but the owner had hoarder tendencies and a cat obsession: there were cat shower hooks and cat hand towels, cat fly swatters and cat knick-knacks; ascending the hall stairs, where most people put family photos, were portraits of long-deceased cats.
Visiting with our real estate agent, I stood in the backyard and considered the property. If I went back inside, I’d have a crisis of faith over the overstuffed furniture that blocked the natural light and gave the house a cave-like atmosphere. Here in the yard, the place felt right. We’d declutter and turn the summer kitchen, cluttered with antique cane chairs, into a writer’s shed for me. We’d put in a big garden. We’d make the farmhouse ours.
We put in an offer.
The owner left us a welcome gift. “I hope you’ll be as happy here as I was,” she wrote in the attached card. Alongside hand towels and French-milled soap was a framed photograph of our house with its original owners. Someone had sent it to her in the mail years ago, she explained, and she wanted the photo to stay with the house.
In the sepia image, the original homeowners stood in the front yard. The husband wore dark pants and a long-sleeved shirt with a button-down vest. His wife wore a dark dress with puffy sleeves, corseted at the waist. An older child stood to her mother’s shoulders, dressed to match. Off to one side was a nanny with a baby. The couple was younger than we were now, in our early thirties, but seemed much older. Somber expressions masked their true emotions.
Behind them stood our house, a two-story brick home with a Y-shaped chimney at the south end. The chimney had since been removed, but you could trace the scars it had left along the exterior wall. The trees that dotted the front lawn were bare-branched saplings.
Now, those saplings were 100-foot-tall black walnut trees whose mossy branches grew wood ear mushrooms. After rains, bits of bricks sometimes turned up in the yard stamped with REYNOLDS, the name of a local brick maker.
Our town was old enough to have its own municipal history book from the “Images of America” series. On page 46, we found our house. A caption added these details: Nearly adjacent to the tiny VanAken cottage is this wonderful brick home. This was the homestead of the Isaac and Serena Freer family. Isaac was a highway superintendent. This is the second Freer house of several on Main Street. The tall chimney rises from the kitchen wing.[1]
Another photo gave the names of the Freer’s two children. Elsie was the oldest, her unruly brown hair tied back with a ribbon. The baby, Ruth, later settled in the family homestead with her husband, John DuBois.
Although the Freers were long-dead strangers, I felt a connection to them. We tended the house they’d built. We gathered nuts from the black walnut trees they’d planted.
Black walnut trees didn’t bear nuts for twenty years and couldn’t be harvested for wood for sixty; they were planted by grandparents for grandchildren. Now, they were our dubious heirlooms. The nuts were edible but impossible to open; a neighbor recommended we run them over with the car to crack the shell. We loaded them in a wheelbarrow and dumped them in the woods for squirrels.
It was November when we moved in, a time when the veil between worlds was thin. While cleaning and painting the walls, shortly after we moved in, I heard Big Band music. We didn’t have a radio. Our neighbors weren’t playing music. House ghosts were making their presence known, I decided.
As we settled in, the ghost radio quieted down. The spirits were happy with us; they appreciated our care for the house. Those other old homes had been torn down to make way for raised ranches and kit homes, cookie-cutter houses that lacked the uniqueness of an older home.
I searched for traces of Isaac and Serena in the small gated cemetery behind the Dutch Reformed Church, but there were too many Freer headstones to pinpoint theirs. They were buried in the town where they’d lived, surrounded by family; they didn’t need us to remember them. We hung the photo in our living room, choosing to honor our house’s rich history and those who’d come before us.
Cleaning, painting, renovating a dated bathroom: settling in felt like a game of house. It wasn’t until we put in a front-yard garden that the farmhouse began to feel like a home.
We’d grown plants before, but we weren’t sure how to work with black walnut trees—garden nemeses that poisoned other plants with ‘acid rain’ from the juglone found in the tree’s roots, branches, leaves, pollen, and nuts.[2]
We measured fifty feet from the tree canopy, the recommended safe zone from juglone, and staked out a bed. Over the next two years, one bed grew to six, stretched across our lawn.
At gardening talks and plant swaps, my wife and I were often the youngest people. We traded surplus ferns and hostas for ornamental grasses and brown-eyed Susans. We showed up, over and over again, to learn how to garden better. Local gardeners provided inspiration and advice. Even if we were doing all the work ourselves, we were part of a community.
In everyday life, I rushed from one deadline to the next. In the garden, time expanded. I harvested yellow pear tomatoes and red Thai chilies. I watched monarch butterflies touch down on zinnias. Overnight, mice nibbled on sunflower seeds and left behind a trail of droppings. The garden wasn’t easy, between the towering black walnuts and the deer who leaned over the fence to nibble plants, but it was mine. To solve its problems—voracious deer, cabbage worms eating holes in the kale—I had to think creatively, try solutions, and be willing to try again when they failed.
This was relationship work, and it made me rethink my relationships with ancestors.
My grandparents divorced when my mother was in college. My grandmother, Chessie, asked my mom and her sister to choose sides. My mother resented this and pulled back. When my mother was pregnant with me, she tried to reconcile.
Chessie crocheted me a baby blanket, which sits in my mother’s attic. She visited a few times, but things soured when I was an infant. I knew her only from photos. Sometimes she would send birthday cards signed “Love, Chessie” or “Love, Nana.” The cards were generic, her handwriting unfamiliar. There was never a kind note or a check, like in the birthday cards my real Nana sent.
When I was twelve, my mother and I met Chessie for lunch. Chessie ordered fish and rice; I had fish and chips. She was dressed up with costume jewelry and dark lipstick, but her hands shook from years of drinking. My mother had mentioned Chessie’s drinking over the years; that day, I saw for myself how sick she was. Her alcoholism was the real reason she wasn’t part of our lives.
When I was fourteen, Chessie died. My aunt and uncle cleaned out her house. Chessie’s antiques, knick-knacks, clothes, and costume jewelry came to our house, alongside boxes of old family photos.
In grainy images, Chessie grinned with a devil-may-care smile, on the arm of a handsome soldier. Model pretty with a slim waist and wavy red-brown hair, she could have been anything, but she met my grandfather at a military dance and ran off with him. Her parents didn’t approve of the relationship and stopped speaking to Chessie. They never reconciled.
By the time my grandfather left her, my mother was in college and my aunt was sneaking out of the house to party. Once my aunt moved away, Chessie had no one. When she died, the animals she kept for company were so neglected, they had to be euthanized.
While I gardened, I imagined alternative lives for my grandmother, drawing on the little I knew of her. Chessie loved animals, even if she’d been too sick to care for them. She played bridge and liked to garden. She would never have grown vegetables because my grandfather refused to eat them. Flowers, then: fragrant roses or hardy annuals as fiery as her hair.
What if she established a career after the divorce? What if she met someone new or found solace in the places women gathered—hair salons, card tables, and garden clubs? What if she’d found healing, rather than numbed her loneliness with alcohol? What if I’d called to say thank you for those birthday cards, and we’d gotten to know one another?
In late summer, gladiolus bloomed along the garden fence in yellows, oranges, and reds. My mother had planted gladiolus in her garden. As a kid, I’d marveled at the tall stalks of vibrant blooms. Growing my own gladiolus was a way to bring the magic of my childhood home into my adult life, to honor past versions of myself and nourish the future me.
Like my mother, I was a child of divorce. I’d been six when my parents separated. Rather than choose a side, I shuttled between homes in a custody schedule I couldn’t control. In early adulthood, I lived a not-quite-nomadic existence, constantly changing cities and apartments in a quest to find somewhere I fit. The constant change mirrored my upbringing.
I’d never learned how to put down roots; all I’d known was change.
In the farmhouse, tending my garden, I built a home for myself. It was a place I could leave on my terms, a place where I would always belong.
From that growing sense of safety, I reached one hand back, attempting to root Chessie’s wayward soul by giving her tragic story a happier ending. My attention couldn’t soothe the pain of her disconnection, but my house had room for ghosts.
If she wanted, she could stay.
[1] Wick, Karl R. and Susan B. Esopus (NY) (Images of America), Arcadia Publishing, September 2003
[2] Diane Brown, "Growing vegetable gardens near black walnut tree," Michigan State University Extension, April 22, 2016, https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/growing_vegetable_gardens_near_black_walnut_trees
Lindsey Danis is a queer, gender expansive writer whose writing has appeared in Longreads, Catapult, and Kitchen Table Quarterly. Lindsey is writing a book about queer travel and runs the queer outdoor travel blog Queer Adventurers.