Return to Parksville

We loved our haunt in Parksville, New York, for over half a century. It gave us so much joy, and hardly ever any sorrow. Plus, there was never a fire that could have killed us all in our sleep. That was a true miracle.

When you have buildings that are made out of kindling — dry wood that was best suited for igniting the coal in the stove where Pop made us hot water early every summer morning — and those structures have no protection whatsoever against fire, you are at risk. We knew nothing of smoke alarms, fire escapes, powerful hoses, fire extinguishers, or any plan for evacuation. And on Friday nights, especially, people were soundly asleep after fully packed Shabbat dinners. Their assorted kitchens always included the magical glow of numerous Shabbat candles. Lots of candles; lots of magic. There were no nifty signs pointing to exits like you always find in contemporary hotels. Worst of all, each floor in each building had only one way out, a flight of stairs. We all know that fires love to climb stairs. When that happens, all those caught in the smoke and flames are doomed. We didn’t even consider how lucky we were not to have been snuffed out.

But that bad stuff never happened. The property‘s ultimate demise was done by man in partnership with the United States Postal Service, which chose our very spot to erect a new post office, unneeded by the tiny town but extant today anyway. In spite of our remarkable love affair with the majestic seven acres that constituted our place in the country, our attachment to spots like LOOKOUTBELOW, where we slid down a rocky hill in the muddy soil, trying to avoid rocks and pebbles and often not succeeding, and the PIANOROCK for sunbathing, which is now covered with so much overgrowth that it cannot be seen, or found. I suspect that if we only dug deep enough we could find one of the many soup bones that our series of beloved dogs hid away, each of them not fulfilling their plans to return and retrieve them. But even they might have been confused by a modern new building holding sway where we had once lived and loved.

If not for our neighbors, all of whom were long ago laid to rest in the Parksville Jewish Cemetery, but whose properties still sit untouched across the road from the Post Office, what would there be to refresh our aging memories?

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Our neighbors were all Jews. I am pretty much positive that their replacements are all not Jews. But, in our days, there were a series of homes facing us, unchanging over many decades.

I will tell you about them. This may take a while! This is Chapter One.

That first house was a charming Dutch colonial owned by the Tellers, our attorney Moe and his wife Channah. Moe was a lovely, social guy with one quirk. He seemed to have an obsession with trimming his hedges. Perhaps I exaggerate when I tell you that he trimmed them every single day during the summer, with a manual clipper yet, but they were so perfect that it was hard to believe that they could ever NOT be that way. Sitting on our porch it was impossible to miss Moe trimming those bushes. So every summer for many many summers we took note of the hard work and his drive to do it.

He and Channah had a wonderful life together. Their two daughters, graduates of the two-room schoolhouse a bit up the road, both went to Vassar College and then decided to lead their lives elsewhere, so Moe and Channah were proverbial empty nesters. But they enjoyed and loved each other. We know that because every evening, when the clippers were already returned to his storage hut, he and she would stroll up to the waterfalls, holding hands. He was a creature of great habit and they never were seen on their stroll without holding hands. I used to think that his hands must be very callused because the manual clippers did not lend themselves to smooth skin, but I never held his hand.

One winter, Channah died. I never heard why and since I was a teenager then it wasn’t my business even to ask. But Moe was bereft. Not bereft enough, however, to stop the clipping. He clipped away, but gave up the evening walks.

A year or so later the walks resumed, hand holding and all. Moe had remarried. Scandalously, she wasn’t Jewish. Tongues wagged. How could he? Nevertheless, he continued to clip away at the hedges.

A few years went by and then Moe too died, leaving his second wife with the lovely Dutch colonial and the hedges. From then on, no one ever clipped the hedges. They grew wildly into strange formations, as tall as trees, uncultured, untrimmed, unkempt, unMoe.

These days, when we visit the post office, which we do on occasion, we see Moe’s house with its overgrowth of hedges. We don’t know who lives there now. The holiday decorations in December are an indicator, though.

But it’s the hedges that are painful to view. So much of a life was spent devoted to their vitality and beauty and they now thrive without all the effort, looking natural, unstructured, but yes, unloved.

This week we will make another pilgrimage to our youth, vitality and beautiful memories in Parksville. Yet again we will take note of the hedges. They will still be there.

Rosanne Skopp of West Orange is a wife, mother of four, grandmother of 14, and great-grandmother of nine. She is a graduate of Rutgers University and a dual citizen of the United States and Israel. She is a lifelong blogger, writing blogs before anyone knew what a blog was! She welcomes email at rosanne.skopp@gmail.com