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The View from Mary's Farm A collection of essays from Yankee Magazine's beloved writer by Edie Clark $14.95 Softcover ISBN: 0-9719934-2-4 Cookbook “Folks may still call it Mary's Farm but New England's best-loved columnist, Edie Clark, is its sentinel, scribe and savior. With the help of neighbors, she rescued these magical fields and flowers from the scourge of developers' greed. She lovingly restored the house and grounds and spirit. And she shares with us, in these splendid and eloquent pages, the vast and intimate treasures of a place so vivid, we too feel we can almost call it home. ” –Sy Montgomery, author of Journey of the Pink Dolphins

Not long ago, I met an old man at a wedding. He inquired where I lived and I told him I had bought Mary's farm up on top of Beech Hill. His rheumy eyes grew animated with recognition, oh, yes, he said, he had spent many a summer day on that farm. He especially remembered the lightning in this high place. "Does the phone still jump off the wall in a lightning storm?" he asked. I told him I'd never seen that happen. "Well," he went on, still clearly in the grip of these summer memories. "I can remember one storm, oh, it was a doozy. The cow was standing under the apple tree and a bolt came down and struck her. Dead as a mackerel!"

Most of our winter storms are northeasters, which last two or three days. My house, perched as it as atop a high hill, became like a ship at sea in a furious storm. For days, the dim light outside revealed only horizontal snow racing past the windows. The deafening sound of the wind–a cacophony of screaming, howling, whistling–kept me awake more than one night. During one storm, I watched in alarm as snow piled against the window pane like water rising. Daylight did not come through that window again for weeks.

This house has been here since 1762, a history even longer than our nation's. A young man who worked on the land here once uncovered a silver buckle in his digging. He polished it and framed it and gave it to Mary and she hung it on the wall in her kitchen. When I bought the farm, he came by and left me a brown bag full of pottery shards, buttons and glass chips, things he found here, things he felt should come back here.