6 Little House on the Hudson
SIX
Little House on the Hudson
Dad had big news.
“We’re moving! Your mother and I are building a house in another town.”
Jansen was just a baby, so I took on the role of being excited for both of us.
A new house meant more room and new friends.
No more feeling like the odd person out and no more scolding from my teachers.
Best of all, no more harsh, judgmental Mrs. Rogers.
Mom also assured me famous artists lived in our future town, which, in my mind, would make the fact that I was on TV seem completely normal.
“Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh once lived there,” she said. “And now Baryshnikov does!”
The town we’d be moving to was called Snedens Landing, and it was about ten miles south of our current house in Congers.
But Snedens Landing wasn’t any old town; it was known as a “historic hamlet.” Snedens Landing had been developed as an artists’ colony in the early twentieth century, and the names of its oldest houses reflected its distinct personality.
There was the Clock House (yes, there was a massive clock on the roof); the Ivy House (large and covered in ivy), the Ferry House (near the Hudson—you take a guess); and the Pirate’s Lair (no clue).
Some of its one hundred houses even predated the 1800s, like the Ding Dong House, built in 1750 and formerly home to a giant bell with a really wimpy name.
In addition to Mikhail Baryshnikov, Bill Murray lived in Snedens Landing, as did Jon Voight’s French ex-wife, who’d moved there with her two children after the divorce.
Mom said one of the kids was named Angie.
In Snedens Landing, Halloween was the event of the year, with trick-or-treaters running up and down the streets, knocking on the doors of pointy-roofed wooden houses that looked like they might belong to witches.
The acre of land Dad was building on was right in front of a small, historic church called Palisades Presbyterian, and there was a swim club less than a mile or so away where I could join the swim team.
The only issue we faced was that the house wasn’t ready yet. Until it was, we’d live in a small guest cottage on the construction site.
“Guest cottage” is a generous term. The building was more like a metal box.
I might have been a tomboy up for most challenges, but this shack made the cabin in Little House on the Prairie look like Buckingham Palace.
The place was just weird. The entrance led directly into the kitchen and the living room, and when you walked through them you found yourself in the bathroom.
Yes, the bathroom was right smack in the middle of the house, surrounded by all the other rooms. I don’t remember any of the bedrooms, but that’s probably because the bathroom loomed so large in my mind.
It was always a little drafty, but Dad assured us we would be fine.
In fact, a cool house was a good house because we didn’t have air-conditioning.
No big deal. We’d only be there a few months until we could move into the house of our dreams.
A few months passed. Fall turned to winter. And just after 1995 became 1996, a historic blizzard hit.
On January 6, 1996, an arctic high-pressure system formed somewhere north of New York City, and over the course of a few days, the entire Northeast became a dumping ground for snow.
Construction on our new house ground to a halt as big, white drifts piled up in our driveway and yard.
Six-year-old me normally would have begged Mom to let me bundle me up in my snowsuit and run outside to play, but I couldn’t get out the door; the wind was blowing the snow sideways, blocking all the exits to our house.
Then things got much, much worse.
“Skip!!!” Mom yelled as the sun dipped in the sky one afternoon. “The heat’s off. We have no heat.” She was holding Jansen, and his little teeth were chattering.
Dad was the consummate handyman and was always fixing something around the house, but his skills extended to flooring and fires, not extreme cold and snowdrifts. Or maybe he just hadn’t faced that kind of challenge.
“We must have run out of propane,” he said. “And there is not a damn person in this county who can drive on those roads to get propane. Not me, not anyone.”
Mom’s face was white, and for once, she was speechless.
“So, grab all the blankets you can,” Dad said assertively. “We’re going to hunker down tonight, and tomorrow I’ll get propane if it kills me. And it just might kill me.”
That night, Mom bundled me and Jansen into our snowsuits, hats, and wool mittens. She placed us in the middle of the bed, and then she and Dad climbed in on either side and wrapped their arms around us. Then Jansen started to cry.
“It’s okay, Jansen. We’re going to make it,” I said.
All night long, we clung to each other under blankets, desperate for any bit of heat our bodies could produce.
Mom whispered words of encouragement while Dad tried to make it seem like a grand adventure.
Dad was great at that. Every time we drove to see Mom’s parents in Indiana, he took the middle seat out of the beat-up burgundy van he used for his flooring company and made a fort.
Then he plugged a TV and VCR into the cigarette lighter so I could curl up in blankets and watch movies on VHS tapes the whole drive.
“We’re just a family sitting in our igloo,” Dad said in a singsong voice. “We’ve spent all day outside in the freezing cold, and now it’s time to go to bed. Let’s sleep a couple of hours, and then I’ll go out and gather berries.”
By sunrise, we weren’t suffering from frostbite, but none of us had slept a wink.
Dad extracted himself from the bundle of blankets and my arms, walked to the window, and opened it. A pile of snow fell inside the shack, and Dad stuck his head out, then turned to us and smiled.
“It stopped. I’ll be back with propane soon.”
Dad was an even bigger hero to me after that.
When the house was finally move-in ready, I created a space in the corner of my room and placed a framed picture of him on a side table.
He was surrounded by his firefighter friends, young and smiling, with that baby face that had won Mom over.
Looking at it, I could almost smell the smoke that clung to his clothes after twenty-four hours at work.
He was wearing his suit and helmet, just like all the other guys in the photo.
A lot of those same faces would be gone forever on a sunny September morning a few years later.
I didn’t realize how hard it must have been for Mom, with me idolizing Dad.
He got to walk in and be the hero, while she was the stickler and the one who put her foot down when Dad said, “Go talk to your mother.” But that was just their dynamic.
It was what Jansen and I knew, and for a long time, it worked.
I adored our new house. It looked a lot like an old home, but not one of those witchy ones with a funny name.
It had a gabled roof, dormer windows, and two wooden fireplaces with mosaic tiling, all of which made it look like it was part of a fairy tale.
Thanks to Dad’s business, we got the best floors possible: hardwood throughout, with parquet in some rooms. Jansen’s floors had a light blue tint, and since Mom was still determined to make me a girlie girl, she asked Dad to make my floors lavender with white borders.
Then she hung shades in the windows that had angels on them.
I didn’t argue because it was not a fight I was going to win.
It was a lovely house, the kind of place that held promise and that four people with a desire to love, grow, work, and be a family could settle in and flourish.
Mom and Dad had put their hearts and souls into it, as well as their life savings.
It was four thousand three hundred square feet, after all.
I didn’t fully grasp it at the time, but they’d done this for me and Jansen.
They wanted us to feel rooted in a comfortable, protected place.
This house was that and then some. I immediately set off into the woods, imagining that I was on an adventure and that no one would ever find me.
I stayed there half the day, happily. Our property had become my secret hideaway.
For the first time in as long as I could remember, I began to feel truly safe, secure, and at home.
There was an unstated understanding in Snedens Landing that it was okay to be a little artistic or unconventional; like the Ding Dong House, we were all impressive, but just the tiniest bit weird.
I started to make friends who didn’t raise their eyebrows at me or question the validity of what I did.
If I dug below the surface, I discovered that their hobbies and lives and families were different, just like mine.
It was a breath of fresh air, and I loved exploring and taking it all in.
One of my first friends was a girl named Madison who lived nearby.
Her dad was a doctor, and they owned a huge property I could ride my bike to.
If you headed down their driveway and through the woods behind their house, you’d stumble onto the small farm Madison’s family kept, with two donkeys named Jackpot and Maggie May, goats, and a beady-eyed, nocturnal creature called a sugar glider.
Closer to the house was an enclosure with chickens and a very mean turkey who I soon learned to respect rather than fear.
Madison and I created a game called “Get in the Cage,” where we’d lock ourselves in the enclosure and scream when the turkey ran after us.
On the outside of the enclosure roamed their peacocks; they were gorgeous, but they really got around the neighborhood.
After a playdate at Madison’s, I’d return to my bike, and without fail, it would be covered in peacock poop.