We had seen Steve’s sister Sandy and her husband Blair in Istanbul, where we had all gathered for their son’s wedding. The wedding had been fun, but we were looking forward to hanging out with them at their house in New Hampshire. So we rented a car in Manhattan and drove up to Milton Mills, a tiny town near New Hampshire’s border with Maine. It had been a couple of years since our last visit.
Sand and Blair’s barn was painted a beautiful deep red, and looked great! They have started building an enclosed passageway connecting the barn to the house, and are getting ready to renovate the kitchen. Blair is handy and likes to do a lot of the work himself. Fortunately, they are both retired and have plenty of time for house projects (and for visiting their two grandkids).
With their dog Leika, we took a long walk through the woods adjoining their property. There were old parallel stone walls used in the 18th and 19th centuries for herding livestock between farms. The fieldstones came from clearing the fields for planting. It was a reminder of how, for hundreds of years, farmers toiled very hard to survive in eastern New Hampshire.
The next day, we had a group project. Sandy and Blair have many fruit trees on their property. The organically grown apples had funny lumps - not very attractive for eating, but perfect for making pressed cider!
Blair and Steve pulled apples down from the trees - several different varieties. Sandy and I cut the apples into large chunks, leaving the skins and seeds, but discarding any bruised or rotten parts. We used a large food mill to grind the chunks and filled a clean pillowcase with the pulp. Blair had rigged a cider press using a spaghetti pot insert, blocks of wood, and the hydraulic jack that had been used to level the barn. After a few pumps of the jack handle, juice squirted from the holey pot and dripped into the big jar below. Voila - freshly pressed cider! Fun to make, and delicious!
We stayed two nights with Sandy and Blair and ate very well the whole time - freshly baked biscotti, homemade chili and cornbread, roasted vegetable paninis, pizelles warm from the griddle. Yum! We enjoyed talking about the wedding in Istanbul and their vacation afterward in southern Turkey, together with their kids and grandkids.
On the way back to New York City, we stopped in Connecticut to see our friends Dawn and Noel. They have a big, beautiful, custom-built home with a wrap-around front porch. The walk-out basement houses Noel’s photography studio. What a fun contrast, to see houses built 235 years apart on the same trip!
We drove back to Manhattan along the scenic Merritt Parkway. By that night, our time in New Hampshire already seemed like a dream, so different from the noise and bustle of Times Square.
