Fun & Fancy Innisfree
A bye week for memory essays: here's a moment of zen instead.
Hello subscribers! There are more of you now than a few weeks ago, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for paying attention to my work. Your interest in reading about home—my past and present homes, your home, our home as citizens—inspires me and keeps me going.
As midsummer nears, my family’s usual rhythm drifts lazily away from our normal school-work-life schedule of the school year. With one kid in day camp and one definitely not, it was hard to find time to write a longer and more meaningful memory essay this week. I’m working on a few seasonal offerings but they need a few more hours to coalesce into sentences, so we’ll return to our regularly scheduled program soon.
Instead, this week I am sharing a few snaps of one of my favorite places in the Hudson Valley, Innisfree Gardens in Millbrook. This landscape is quite different than our garden at home—I said to Bob recently that I garden like I bake. Rustic, without artifice, showing definite signs of handiwork, with a healthy dash of barely contained chaos. Innisfree was inspired by Japanese cup gardens, implemented on a grand scale around a small lake.
I’ve been wanting to make a return trip for years now. It became a running joke. Bob would say, “What do you want to do this weekend? Visit Innisfree, I bet?” Yet the timing never worked out. “These kids have no interest in gardens,” he said.
“I don’t care, at this point. I want to go!” By luck, we had a relatively unscheduled weekend and the weather did not include massive amounts of precipation, so we finally made the drive up to Millbrook.
The day my family and I visited was ideal for a summer outing. The weather was warm but not too humid, and clouds shielded us from intense sun. This was my third grader’s first visit and I was excited to see his reaction. He was not impressed with the initial view from the parking lot, though the lily pad-covered lake seemed beautiful to me. He complained about the walk. The temperature. The fact that we made him leave his Nintendo Switch in the car.
As we neared the bottom of the hill and turned onto the main path, a frog nestled among the lilies let out a burpy gulp. Third Grader’s face brightened immediately. “Are there frogs in there?”
“Yes, probably a lot of them,” I said. He glanced at another hill in front of us where a flock of geese clustered under the trees.
“I’m gonna catch a duck!” he announced as he sprinted ahead.
“I got attacked by a goose here last time,” Bob admitted. We walked on. Once we got to the hardscaped structures at the center, including the bat grotto and water features, Third Grader was completely absorbed.
Bob set out to take the little one on the path around the lake, but the bridge was out. His brother and I waited at the Point. I asked him if he remembered his previous visits at all. He was about five at the time. He claimed to have no recollections, though I know he enjoyed running through the fountain as much as his brother.
On the walk back to the parking area, Third Grader collected goose feathers. “Do we have ink? This one looks like a quilt.”
I smiled. “Do you mean quill? We don’t have ink but we can try writing with it using paint.”
He gathered several different quills, and now we have several choices of writing implements. I don’t know who exactly taught him about ink and quills, but I am so pleased to hear him making connections and finding real-world examples of what he was taught in school.
When we got back to the car we appreciated the AC and our water bottles. We stopped for lunch at La Puerta Azul back in town and their huge portions completely ruined my plans for dinner. I didn’t mind too much.
Our day trip felt like summer, for sure, and yanking our sullen indoor-loving teen out for some sunshine and fresh air felt like a victory. Though he resisted at first, by the end of the afternoon and a gigantic burrito, he was in a jolly mood and actually joked with us.
Once we got home, I passed out in our hammock underneath the dogwood bush, worn out from heat, walking all over Innisfree, and a hearty meal.
I am working on more summery essays for later this month. In the meantime, get outside and touch some grass if you can! Can you believe it’s almost August already?