The Estate – the people

When I took my early morning walk on the lawn, it had evolved and become complex. There were many Kennicotts living on the other end of Kennicott Grove. They were less classy then my parents. They were in the flower business…..Peonies.

My father was a professor. And his parents had given him and his wife, my mother, the tenant house on their land which they had subsequently put a little money into, and built an extension, and a playroom for me and my brother, and a bigger living room. In other words, they had fancified it.

So the traces of that history were all around. In this tenant house, the original small living room had mementos of the ancestor who had gone to Alaska; it had a fire place, and over the fireplace hung a model kayak and umiak. The new living room was bigger.

This history and its scars were everywhere. In fact, there was supposed to be an Indian buried under the big oaks. We never met this Indian, but it was part of the legendatiosness of this place. We always wanted to dig him up, but our parents wouldn’t let us.

Again, about the history manifest in my childhood, my grandmother, who was an extraordinarily adept and dedicated flower gardener, had this extraordinary perennial garden. And this very beautiful garden was bifurcated into two pieces, and the division was an osage orange hedge. And it wasn’t until I was reading the history of the region that I read that before they had barbed wire, they used to plant fence with osage orange hedges, which are excruciatingly thorny.

The Redfield estate? That was a more recent house that was built with what must have been legal-finagling money. It was my grandmother’s second husband who made some money and caused to be built that new and I thought odious house.

I don’t know who’s managing it now, but the new and I thought odious house, with the balconies, and so on, pretentious features, is now being managed as a business, and they hire it out for weddings. As for the Kennicotts, they’re still doing peonies over yonder, there.

Louise Peattie and the naturalist [Donald Culross Peattie] had been living in France with the idea of living in a literate manner in the south of France, and they didn’t have any money and they had to come home, that must have been humiliating. They lost a daughter, in France, just my age. She got some strep infection, people used to in those days. It was very painful for me too, because she was exactly my age, and when we were very young we used to hang out together. She died when they were in France. I was 12 or 13 when Tito died. My childhood was dotted with death. You wouldn’t see it now. There was a kid who died in the 4th grade sort of over the weekend, and then they gave me her locker. Which they thought was a kind thought, but it wasn’t really that kind. You never hear of children dying, now. People do, but people we know, their kids don’t die.

I never got the family wholly sorted out. There were Aunt Agnes, who was an old aunt, who had an adorable old-fashioned house with stairs so narrow you could barely climb up them, you know the kind of thing, and then there was Aunt Josephine, who had a little bungalow. I know that Aunt Josephine had this little house and Aunt Agnes had this bungalow, and I used to see her because she was half- way between me and the peony Kennicotts, so it was a nice little walk to stop in and see Aunt Josephine, and she had doll dishes to play with; somebody told me, years later, that Aunt Josephine was really an illegitimate daughter of Aunt Agnes’s and they had set her up in this bungalow. I think that’s what they said. That’s what I heard. Anyway, anybody could be an aunt. So Windy Pines consisted of what seems now like a huge piece of land populated by mysterious cousins and aunts and so forth.

It didn’t have retainers. What it had was some money that kept coming in, enough to run the lawnmower. And who put up the lawnmower, I couldn’t say. Where did the money come from? I’m not clear. I know that my grandfather was a lawyer in Chicago and  dabbled in politics and used to take his son around, introducing him as Robert Emmet Redfield and so forth. Whether he was the source of the money, I couldn’t say. They had an Irish sort of attachment of some sort. They weren’t Irish. They were just finaglers. Anyway, the lawn kept getting cut.