Sometime I've got to tell you about Firdale. It hasn't existed for decades, but it was a sweet little place up a long road, along a little stream that red salmon struggled to ford in the late fall. Milk sometimes gut put out on the post if Granny and Grandpa had cows that year. The garden was fenced to about 10 feet in an effort to keep the deer our so a huge long pantry could be filled every year. There was an outlet, and the tubs were tin. Chickens were whirled and broomed not long after the fresh rolled noodles were hung on the porch clothesline to dry. It was a long, long ride to town, and sometimes the old Packard would get snowed in for a month at a time. 

I remember how impossible it was to get comfortable stretched out on a bed with a deep bow in it. There'd be a flicker of light on the ceilings all night as the wood fired Monarch stove kept us warm, and did it's thing to the sourdough hanging in a pan on the back of the stove. Butter was churned in an old wooden thing. Water was hand pumped when you wanted to wash up after a hike up the hill past the pig pen to the outhouse. There was no TV in the early days, though we sometimes listened to stories on the old radio, or listened in on the twelve party line. There hung in the livingroom next to the fireplace an oval picture that I can still see in my mind, of a white horse in a swirly background up on it's hind haunches and ready to pounce. The only table in the farmhouse was the big oak one we ate at, and around which seances were held a time or two in my memory with spiritualists who were visiting. 

Granny and Grandpa died a long time ago. They'd been born before 1880 and lived along the Columbia all of their lives. "Jerry's" papa was one of the first kids born to settlers in Oregon Territory, his own father having walked out with an Ox train from Southern Illinois before the goldrush. His grandfather had probably been born in Paxtang of Pennsylvania, and made it to Virginia where he took over 500 acres in the hills, built sawmills, a grist mill, and manufactured gun powder from bat droppings from a cave I've visited near Petersburg. His cousin had lived next door to Abe Lincoln's slave-owning grandfather in Rockingham before the time when George Washington walked through the area following his presidency after a failed trip to Ohio where he couldn't get squatters on his land to pay any rent. 

I made it back to Firdale not long ago. It's not on a map anymore, and nobody knows exactly where it was. I had not clue as I left Raymond, 30 miles away, which roads to take, though I followed my intuition at many turns. My heart was starting to sing on a long straight run of dirt road when we passed over the little bridge and when up the road in the clearing on the right where the house used to be, the lillies that had been outside the front door were in full bloom. And I felt the same kind of reverence recently, standing at a creek out Clark's Valley near Dauphin in Pennsylvania, when a fisherman catching trout on a foggy morning knew that Jacob Eiman had settled the land in 1749 and put himself up a distillery as a lot of those old Swiss farmers did.