How to Catch a Frog

by Heather Ross

  Friends who knew me at fifteen and seventeen and even twenty—when all I cared about were swimming holes and cigarettes and troublesome boys with dusty cars, and I barely had the life and social skills to survive the dorms at a state college in Vermont, much less a large, sophisticated city—marvel at the fact that I now make my home in New York City, even though I’ve lived here since 2005. I want to tell them that it’s easier here. There are jobs for artists here. This is public transportation and heat and air-conditioning. Nobody I know has to chop firewood or hold a blow-dryer to their water pipes the morning after a freeze. I am not judged by who my parents are, though I suppose many others are. In a small town, it can be easy to become consumed, or at least distracted, by what others think of you and of your family, but there is an anonymity here, at least for me, that has meant finally feeling free of that pressure—real or imagined—to be less different. This was the word that followed me around when I was a child, that clung to me. In a small town, being different meant being an outsider. Nobody uses the word “different” in New York when they describe another person. What would they be referring to? Different from what, exactly? From whom?

  Unfortunately, though, New York is not a complete cure. It won’t erase anything, it just overpowers the senses and distracts the heart. And almost every day, it fails you in some small way, which is exactly what happened when I walked into the Tribeca Whole Foods, dressed like every other busy Lower Manhattan working mother—in cashmere and premium denim, and practical, expensive flat boots—with a short list in my hand that included a ten-dollar bag of granola and a package of organic bacon for my one-year-old daughter. There, I stopped short with my mouth open in front of an Easter display. I cannot claim that I didn’t know what would happen when I picked up the tastefully designed shoebox-size package with the solemn bunny on it, standing just below the opening in the top of the box that revealed its contents with no paper or plastic to protect them. “Timothy’s Real Vermont Hay,” it read, “for Easter Baskets.” From Greensboro, not forty miles from where I was born. I knew what might happen, but I picked it up anyway and let every bit of air out of my lungs before I closed my eyes and took one big gasp of an inhale.

  And then, standing between the Toms shoes and the Dr. Hauschka lip balm, I burst into sobbing, heaving tears.

  I don’t know how many of us there are, children who spent days and weeks and whole summers in stacks of hay bales, mid-wiving kittens, and building huts and ladders, or who walked through fields that had just been cut or who spread broken, mildewed bales onto our mothers’ flower gardens or pushed them into the noses of horses through barbed wire fences, or built shelters out of tall goldenrod, twisting their flowered heads together and lying underneath them in a cloud of their dusty pollen. And I don’t know how many of us are left with the smell of it all still in us, even though we left. And of that number I don’t know how many of us shop at places like Whole Foods, but I know that Timothy has come for us. He knows where he will find us, among expensive specialty foods and organic skincare products that are among the rewards of the success that was our way out. This Timothy, assuming he isn’t actually a bunny, or maybe especially if he is a bunny, is a genius. He has taken the smell of the home that we cannot go back to, and he has put it into a pretty box that costs eleven dollars.

  As much as I love the city, for at least for the first few years, it felt to me like a very unnatural place to spend a summer. As soon as The Red House sold, TC and I began to look for a country house. Not only did I feel that our family needed fresh air and a place where we could run free in nature, but like my grandfather, I felt compelled to compensate for the sense of not belonging that plagued my childhood by creating someplace grand where we could belong now.

  Briar Rose was an old, faded house, left for dead but still grand on that Saturday in April when we first saw it. The woods around it had nearly swallowed it; there had not been water or plumbing or heat in it for decades. It was near a lake and even once had a view of it from a third-floor balcony but didn’t anymore because of the pines. These pines had grown so thick and so tall, in order to drown out the more slow-growing hardwoods, that the ground beneath them, on almost all of the five acres around it, was thick with ferns. It was named Briar Rose already, by someone who believed it to be a Sleeping Beauty, a noble lady forgotten and caught under a spell, waiting for someone to come along and love her, and wake her up.

  TC thought she looked more like a beaten down old lady than one imbued with magic, but, like me, he could also see what she could give us. We could have wood fires, we could swim in the summer and cross-country ski in the winter, we could walk in the woods with our dog and sit on our porch at night. I could cook in a spacious kitchen, and Bee would have a sleeping porch, where she could invite friends and cousins to stay up late with her. I could have my own bonfires, perfect in the moonlight, and listen to the radio while I cooked, and pick berries, and mushrooms, and flowers from my own land. It was an ambitious, expensive dream. The possibilities reminded me of my aunt Jane, who taught me that traditions need not be old, or inherited. And it was the perfect location; it was the country house but not quite the country, exactly halfway between New York City and turning into my mother.

  We opened up the walls and ceilings, working carefully between the ornate woodwork, and filled them with warm insulation. We installed new furnaces and a radiant heating system through the house’s floors, and replaced the plumbing and the electrical. We sanded down the old pine floors and sorted through stacks of screen and storm windows. We pulled down the highest, most opportunistic pines and saw the hardwoods begin to stretch out. We ignored the chipmunks who jumped from their branches and down our chimneys to the places that they deemed safe enough to store their collections of seeds, which for another year we would find in neat piles under our pillows. We battled mice, by the hundreds, and an overweight groundhog who barely hurried out of our way when we crossed paths on what seemed to be his front porch. Like the owl that watched us from a high branch at the edge of our forest, they all seemed to think that the house was still a part of their world, not ours. And I feared that they were right.

  We finally moved in, after a solid year of renovation, with our brand-new baby girl. TC and I were exhausted, sleepless new parents who had just spent every dime they had between them to save a house and to make a place that was supposed to feel like home now, but somehow didn’t, not exactly. Everything was still new and a little foreign. It would take some time for it to feel like home to TC and me. But not to my tiny daughter Bee, who slept so peacefully there from the beginning, in a cradle pulled close to my bed because her nursery felt too far away. This place, to Bee, was already home.

  Bee can grow to love this place in that way that children love a place because of the way they are loved in it. The smells and sounds that seem new to me, that will probably always seem new to me, are already part of her own chemistry: the rustling of the pines when they sway, balanced on their shallow root bases; the echoing taps of the woodpeckers that come for the hardwoods when they begin to die because the pines steal their sun; the hoots of the owls that are proof that this is a safe, good place; the odors of old, musty stone walls, mountain laurel, and cut grass. She will be made of this in the same way that I am made of a different place. I can’t promise Bee that Briar Rose will always be hers, because none of us can know what the future holds, not exactly, not with certainty. But now, while she is still young, I can give her a home that can, at least in my most ambitious dreams, always be hers, and that will always be—and feel—this way.

  And I am determined to build a future here, as well as a past. Briar Rose is where we spend summers and holidays, and each of them brings opportunities for new traditions. We have a bonfire every summer, in late August, when there isn’t any moon and you can see the most stars. For New Year’s and for TC’s birthday we have steak, because in TC’s family there was never any money for steak. For Christmas I make a bûche de Noël, with choco
late bark, and for Mother’s Day we take a picnic into the woods and pick tiny wild violets and daisies. For Bee’s birthday, in the middle of the summer, I make a cake that looks like a beehive and I set a table for twenty-six on our massive stone porch, and our neighbors and their children come, straight from the lake with their wet hair, leaving their bicycles in a pile in our yard.

  TC loves winter and Bee will probably love summer the most, but I love spring above all, and we celebrate spring on Easter Sunday, which is a wonderful hybrid of TC’s Catholic upbringing and my pagan one. We pull down the storm windows, throw open the doors, and hide eggs in the woods, where tiny green shoots of grass are already appearing. For Easter this year I made Bee a chocolate rabbit with a vintage mold I found that reminded me of Mexico, of the first Easter I remember, with my sister, when we ate chocolate together while our mother slept. I left a space inside the rabbit big enough for a small gift and asked TC to find something for her, and he produced a tiny silver charm. I filled a little white basket with the short green grass that had just begun to come up around our house and with Timothy’s hay from Vermont. I put the chocolate bunny inside and waited, sitting on the floor outside Bee’s room in the quiet, blue light of early morning. I waited for Bee to wake up, for her spring to begin.

  acknowledgments

  THIS IS THE SORT OF BOOK THAT COULD NOT HAVE ever come to be without a lot of encouragement and support. I am lucky to have had a steady, daily supply of both from my husband, TC Fleming, and my editor and dear friend, Melanie Falick. It’s also the sort of book that I could never have found the courage to put out into the world without my sister’s promise to love and support it without even having to read it (because, as she likes to point out, she is my sister and that is her job), or my father’s proud encouragement, even when I am writing about him.

  Thanks also to my cousins, the most loyal and steadfast band to which I have ever belonged, most especially to Martha and to Jon. And to my uncle Chris, whom I love very much. I am honored that you trusted me enough to support my writing this book.

  Thanks to my good friend, talented designer Brooke Hellewell Reynolds, who I’m sure will one day turn out to be my own distant cousin, because even though we could not be more different we are also a little bit the same, and to my agent, the incredible Steven Malk, who has taught me to value the work I do as an artist and author, and in doing so, has given this book a happy ending.

  I am very fortunate to have been born to parents who taught their little girls to be brave, to take risks, to make mistakes, and to stand up for themselves. They also taught us the most important lesson of all, which is that failure is not something that we need to worry about, it is something that happens, something that changes us and makes us better, and something that we should not be afraid of. Not ever.

  And finally, to Lobo, who couldn’t care less what I’ve done, where I’ve been, or where I’m going, as long as he gets a treat and a scratch behind the ear the absolute moment I return.