This is Laura Shaine Cunningham's story of her lifelong quest for the perfect country place, a tale anyone who has ever dreamed of a little piece of earth will cherish.
Cunningham's excursions into the country ranged from playing chaperone to her uncle at a Catskills resort's singles weekend to an ill-fated role in a wicked 1960s sci-fi movie, filmed "entirely on location" on a decrepit Woodstock chicken farm, before she found herself engaged in hot pursuit of the house of her dreams: scenic, authentic, private, green. After the requisite real estate dead-ends (the "charmer" tucked behind a nuclear power plant; the creepy retreat of a dead Nazi; the Dutch colonial under the flood plain; houses that "cried internal rain"), Cunningham hit pay dirt with a romantic nineteenth-century stagecoach inn set in the heart of a great estate and bordering a working dairy farm.

Laura Shaine Cunningham is a playwright and journalist whose fiction and nonfiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, Vogue, and Mirabella, among other publications. The recipient of numerous awards and fellowships for her writing and theatrical work, Cunningham divides her time between New York City and her "place in the country."

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Chapter One

Desire was there first, before memory. I can't remember a time when I didn't long for "a place in the country." From the beginning, I can recall the warmth of my mother's handclasp as we toured model homes on sequential Sundays, seeking, always seeking, the house of our dreams. Those dreams wafted a specific scent: fresh shellac and new paint.

"Someday," my mother, Rosie, would say, as we walked through the vacant rooms full of hope, "we'll have a place of our own. A private house outside the city."

"A private house." Even today, those words hold a potent magic for me. Then, they were more than enough to propel us every weekend on buses and trains to differing destinations we called the "country." On the buses, I commandeered the window seat, the better to scan the roadside, my eyes searching for the corridors of evergreen, the hidden paths that led to some ultimate, secret oasis. It seemed to me that the scenery flashed by too fast. Was that a house, set back in the woods? A haunted house, abandoned. Perhaps available? I hunted for the shadows, too, for pure adventure--was that rock overhang hiding a cave?

I flush to realize how close the "country" was then. We seldom left the city limits, except in spirit. Wherever the shade extended for more than a few feet and sunlight dappled the leaves--that was our "country." I'm embarrassed to admit I confused the Mount Vernon that borders the Bronx with the "real" Mount Vernon, where president George Washington lived, down in Virginia. Both my mother and I regarded suburbs like Rockville Centre, Long Island, as rustic.

One of the country homes we coveted stood in pitiful proximity to our Bronx high-rise apartment building, AnaMor Towers (named for its owners, Anna and Morris Snezak). My first dream house of record was a cottage a block away, a clapboard house that had been left after the construction boom of the fifties leveled most of the South Bronx. While the rest of the neighborhood had given way to tall brick apartment houses with deluded names ("Roxy's Mansion," "The Albermarie"), one small white farmhouse remained. The cottage stood, constricted between high rises, so squeezed by progress that it looked as if its windows would pop.

A little girl lived in the private house. She seemed as unlikely as the cottage itself, as if she, with her pigtails and gingham jumper, had been transported along with her house, like Dorothy to the Land of Oz. This impression was heightened by the angle at which the house seemed to tilt, following the descent of the street.

Every morning, on my way downhill to the public school, I passed this house. I never ceased to marvel at the way the girl--who had the equally unlikely name of Orietta--flew from her own front door and raced down a set of plank steps to the sidewalk. It may not be easy for people who have always lived in private houses to understand how exotic this simple action appeared: a girl, flying through her own front door, straight to the outside, without having to navigate the usual urban intermediary zones--the hallway, the elevator, the lobby, the foyer--before finally reaching the street. She never needed to be buzzed in. Her door seemed always to be unlocked.

Orietta had her own flower garden, albeit a skinny urban version--a lone line of tulips bracketed by a metal guard to keep out poodles who might lift a leg on her blossoms. Sparse and endangered as it was, it was still a flower garden, and Orietta could be spotted watering it, even plucking the occasional bloom. In summer, the entire house appeared trimmed in morning glory vines, a living valentine to the past. In winter, her narrow yard seemed to accumulate more and better-textured snow. Orietta had her own shovel, and we could see her dig a white-walled path to her front step. She could, with her brothers and sisters, pack the excess snow into a bona fide snowman, complete with corncob pipe jutting from his chill mouth.

During every season, the country house seemed to emit a light different from that of ordinary dwellings, one more lemon-colored. Warm drafts of odor wafted from the ever-baking oven inside--the aromas of hot bread, cookies, and cakes. Some days the scent was so strong, so spicy and enticing, it anesthetized me in midstep; I would have to stop halfway up the hill on my walk back from school.

The world of the country house struck me as another culture. There always seemed to be someone inside, calling out that supper was ready or to remember your hat or your gloves. Every time the door flew open, I could glimpse a center hall and a wooden staircase. Children could be seen running down that staircase, pell-mell, from what I imagined to be a warren of bedrooms in the even more exotic territory of the upstairs.

To me, an upstairs was the height of luxury. Everyone I knew lived in apartments. You were judged by the size of your apartment. I envied girls who had their own rooms, who inhabited a junior four instead of a one bedroom or a studio. My mother and I lived in what was called an efficiency--a studio with a kitchenette along one wall, and a bath. Because my mother worked long hours in the netherworld of downtown, I often spent my after-school weekday afternoons alone in that one-room apartment that my mother had decorated for us.

Life inside that frame house must be very different , I thought. Countless children seemed to run in and out, without any need of keys. As I watched them, I felt a pressure in my chest, right behind the dog tags that I had to wear, the tags that bore my name, my mother's name, my birthdate, and which linked me, bead by bead, to the unwritten fate of my father, who, I was told, had been "lost in the war." The tags themselves were a little scary. They would be used to identify me if some unknown, awful thing were to happen to me. The tags related, too, to the frequent atomic bomb drills at P.S. 35, when, at the wail of a siren, all the children had to duck under the desks to await possible annihilation.

The bomb never landed on me, but those tags continued to hang heavy, along with my set of keys, which hung from the same chain. I carried three keys--one to the lobby of AnaMor Towers, and one each to the top and bottom locks of 3M, the studio I shared with my mother, Rosie.

I used my keys to let myself into 3M, dense in its atmosphere of solitude. More than once, I forgot to wear my keys and dog tags, and when I reached AnaMor Towers, stood on the welcome mat and wept. Even though I knew, at age six, that my fear was unrealistic, I was afraid that without the keys I might never again be admitted to a home I could call my own. The sanctuary of 3M had been too hard won. Before we could afford that apartment, my mother and I had lived in a holding pattern, moving from one relative's apartment to another, being accommodated in odd slices of space. We'd slept in foyers, entry nooks, living rooms. For a time, we slept under a long mahogany dining table. For the first four years of my life, Rosie and I had been transient, taking up as little space as possible in other people's homes.

These apartments were already cramped. My aunt Tessa lived so tight, we had to squeeze sideways through her living/dining room, passing through a crevasse created by looming bookcases and an upright piano. Living there was an exercise in compression. The apartment was set into a complex of subsidized buildings called the Dorchester Houses. The design had been inspired by feudal times and captured the repression of that era. A half-dozen buildings were grouped around a sunless courtyard that held limp, dying trees. The trees were supported by girdles, as were most of the women tenants. The daytime population on view were stocky housewives who seemed to have rolled over from the Slavic countries pushing loaded carts.

The gimlet-eyed apartment buildings were vast, but they had been designed without generosity. There was no main entrance or gracious lobby. Each "sector" had its separate entry, a narrow door at the top of a stoop that was pitched too steep. Entering, one had the sensation of lurching into the building, then being constricted into an elevator packed with pregnant women pushing prams. The buildings smelled of cooking cabbage and garbage incineration.

We lived in 5R, my aunt Tessa's apartment. We were seven people in three rooms. Because of the number of people and the oversized furniture, 5R seemed more storage unit than habitat. The living room was lined with the ceiling-high bookcases, piano, and a breakfront. The dining table filled the center of the room, seven chairs jammed against it. There was no space for the sofa, so it sat, wedged against the window and the radiator, becoming in winter, a literal hotseat.

At the rear of 5R were two tiny bedrooms--the master, where Aunt Tessa slept with her husband, Saul, a young Russian-born rabbi. They lay on twin beds, surrounded by stacks of books (his) and recipe files (hers). My aunt Tessa collected recipes, hundreds of recipes that she planned to try someday, just as my mother and I planned to move to a private house. The second bedroom held their three teenage sons, my boy cousins, who lay stacked on bunk beds amidst the chaos of basketballs, hockey sticks, bats, and an inanimate fourth brother, the dummy Charlie McCarthy. Every time my aunt screamed, "Go to your room!" her boys had the perfect retort--"How?" The door to their room could open only partway.

There was a single bathroom for all seven of us. Every morning, a conga line of urinary urgency formed outside the door. "Emergency!" was a cry that was often heard; everyone else crossed their legs and danced. Every evening, the adults tended to find a position and remain in place. The boys bounced basketballs against the ceiling and ricocheted off the walls.

Adding to the general confusion was the punctuation provided by actual alarms--5R faced a fire engine company. Night and day, fire trucks roared forth, sirens screaming, giving vehicular voice to our frustrations. From age one to three, I lived there, accustomed to emergency, to the constant need for more air, more space. My aunt was always opening the windows to take advantage of 5R's single virtue, what she called its "excellent cross-ventilation." Every day, the adults cried out for more Luft, Luft being a breeze of fresh air or something indefinably better--a draft of hope, a whiff of escape. "Luft," they said. "We need more Luft ."

All spring and summer, the windows were kept open. The windows led to exterior extensions of our living space--the fire escapes and the tarry subroof. Every day, my uncle Saul, always attired in his rabbinical yarmulke and summer outfit of undershirt and suspendered trousers, would climb out the bedroom window to the asphalt terrace beyond. Often, he lifted me over the windowsill so that I could help him tend his vegetable garden.

This was my first farm--Uncle Saul's rows of balsa-wood boxes packed with dug-up park dirt. We had no gardening tools, so we used urban substitutes from 5R we watered with a juice pitcher, dug with a soup spoon or a kiddie shovel. In spite of our equipment, we produced bumper crops. By midsummer, the tomato plants stood high and tangled, drooping under the weight of their red fruits. The tomatoes were so big and juicy that they split under the pressure of their own growth. I was told that I could pick and eat the "broken" ones straight from the vine. I can still taste their salt-sweetness, feel their skin burst to the bite. As exciting as their flavor was the tomatoes' green perfume, the fragrance of farms far away.

Uncle Saul hovered over his vegetables. He walked that outdoor aisle between his balsa-wood boxes, watering here, pinching there, picking here. He was a sweet man, with brown eyes liquid with intellect: a gaze that addressed you more often than his voice did. He was so quiet, I cannot hear him, even in memory. But I do remember him holding me, helping me over the window ledge, guiding my hand with the water pitcher.

Saul was the opposite of his wife, my aunt Tessa, who shrieked, "Don't make me scream! I'm hoarse from shouting!" She yelled continually, trying to discipline her three sons, who leaped away from her, mischievous, rebounding off the confines of our constricted world. Tessa had two verbal styles--the yelling and a monologue on her own cheerfulness: "They call me Mrs. Sunshine. Wherever I go, I brighten every room." In the crowded living/dining room, Uncle Saul sat at the table, sometimes resting his cheek on his Talmudic studies. In summer, weather permitting, he climbed out the window to tend his crops.

There was something off with Aunt Tessa and Uncle Saul's eldest son, Willy. Willy slurred his speech; he dragged his feet. His face appeared sloped, distorted, like the reflection on the back of a spoon. His big brown eyes were like his father's, but they protruded slightly, showing the whites. It made him appear melancholic; his eyelids drooped. His hands hung heavy, too, and it seemed he did not know what to do with them, until he took my hand in his: for a time, when I was three and Willy was thirteen, we were inseparable, and it was he who led me closer to what we regarded as the country.

Most afternoons, Willy took me for a walk. He seemed not to have any friends, and I needed minding. Our needs meshed. Every day, we walked farther and farther, until we reached a place where the pavement ended and marsh grass began.

These vacant lots were not pristine. Refuse and rubble, even the rusted shells of wrecked cars, lay hidden in the grass. Willy and I would explore, poking through the underbrush for interesting bits of trash. One afternoon, we walked farther than we had ever gone before and discovered an old steamer chest. We unlocked the chest, and it exhaled a musk to match any mushroom. Inside the trunk, papers had almost turned to compost. But the chest had once held items of value; it was beribboned within, divided into tiny drawers and compartments. Willy and I called it the "treasure chest."

Just past the treasure chest, the marsh grass began to grow in earnest, high enough to hide the trash, even the old stoves that lay scattered like dominoes. As we walked on, the garbage receded and the grass and scrub bushes dominated. Birds nested, and an occasional rabbit hopped past. For the first time, I could see a horizon, detect a curve to the globe of our earth.

We walked and walked, aware that we were out too late but unable to deny the pull of that horizon line. In the violet urban dusk, the sky fired hot with the magentas of pollution. Willy and I reached a spot where the land seemed to roll down away from us into an expanse of gray-buff wilderness.

"This is it," he said. "This is the end of the city."

From that evening on, this place became our destination.

"Oh, take me there," I'd beg Willy, and he would. And each time we reached that high ground with the view, he said in exactly the same important tone, the voice of the explorers Lewis and Clark at the Continental Divide:

"This is it. This is the end of the city."