Dancing Barefoot

Dancing Barefoot

You, might call it a commune. We didn’t. We called it home. Those were the years spent on a twenty-acre farm in Ayers Cliff. Ayers Cliff is a small town located in a part of Canada known as the Easten Townships. The Townships are dotted with villages, hamlets and towns with names like North Hatley, Massawippi, Way’s Mills and Magog. They are located about sixty miles south of Montreal and roughly twenty miles north from Derby Line, Vermont.

It was in the early ‘70’s when I went there with two girlfriends, Annie and Sue, and our five kids. We made the long drive up from New York City in a rumbling old station wagon filled with second hand camping gear. We set up camp at different state parks along the way until we reached our destination … Ayers Cliff. A friend of Sue’s owned thousands of acres in the Townships. He told us we were welcome to set up our tents for the summer pointing to a bucolic clearing near a fast-flowing stream.

Once we settled in, we cooked over camp fires and sometimes on an old Coleman camp stove. One day when I was in the village luncheonette I heard about a farmer who was selling a wood stove. How perfect that would be for us. That’s when I met Carl. He wasn’t a farmer and he wasn’t selling a wood stove. But he did live on a farm. Carl bought the place in the ‘60’s during the time he was teaching English at the University of Michigan. After some years of that, he went home to Canada to live a quiet life of writing and fixing up the dilapidated farmhouse.

The moment I met him I knew he and Annie would fall in love. And they did. More about that in a little while … but first more about the camping adventure.

Summer was busy with all sorts of fun … swimming in the stream, toasting marshmallows on birch branches found in the woods, making friends with Madame Vien who ran the local grocery market and post office, telling scary stories at night, buying greasy Pommes Frittes at local stands and sprinkling them with malt vinegar, and dealing with nightly visits from hungry racoons. But as summer began to wane friction developed between Annie and Sue. It was always over silly things. And then it happened. An all-out brawl broke out between the two at the laundromat in the nearby town of Magog where we did our weekly laundry. In the time I had taken the children for Sno-cones, Annie and Sue went at each other. It seems the fight was about who wasn’t using bleach to get baby Justine’s food stains out. The two women punched and kicked and screamed at each other. But of course, it was much more complex than who didn’t put bleach in the laundry.Tension had been brewing between the two head strong women. Until that point, I was the referee during their squabbles. But after the big scene in the laundromat, there was nothing more I could do to ease tensions between my two friends.

Soon after that Sue left with her 2 children and boarded a train back to New York. I was sad to see that it had come to such a bitter end of their friendship. Annie and I stayed on, camping in our tents, for the remainder of the summer. We both loved the area and decided to rent a house there for the winter. We didn’t have luck in finding one that was suitable.

As I mentioned before Annie and Carl had fallen in love. What happened next was that Annie moved into Carl’s old farm house. I was about to take a bus back to New York when they both assured me there was plenty of room for my son Jude and me to stay. We moved into the house and lived happily over the course of three Summer Solstices.

About the house … it had no running water, no electricity and no heat. In time we learned how to survive without those basic “necessities.” We collected rain in a big barrel to wash dishes. We bathed in a cool clear stream. We collected fallen branches from the many pines, birch and cedars in the woods.We used these to fire up three wood stoves for heat. We grinded grains to make flour to bake bread in the kitchen wood stove. We planted vegetables and after the harvest we stored carrots, potatoes and turnips for winter, in the root cellar we dug in the basement. We snowshoed and cross country skied. On winter nights we read Dickens aloud by candlelight. On Spring nights, we danced outside. Spring mornings we picked and ate wild cabbages and dandelion greens and steeped clover tea. When the Summer Solstice arrived, it was the biggest celebration imaginable! The ground was soft and covered with tender grass. We decided to make it a “Barefoot Solstice.” We invited everyone in the area to come barefoot to our farm to celebrate in our woods. We offered them fermented cider from our apple trees, marijuana from our organic plants and fresh goat cheese from a neighboring farmer we called Billy Goat. Locals called us Hippies and called the farm a commune. They were curious about us and they liked us. Everyone showed up barefoot with gifts of food and wine. It was a grand party!

The first two years of the barefoot Solstice celebrations I felt anxious and uneasy. I didn’t mention it to anyone though. You see I had been instructed since a childhood diagnosis of Type 1 Diabetes to NEVER go barefoot. If anything happened to my feet they would have to be amputated!! Can you imagine! This traumatic news would put a scare in anybody. It surely did for me!

But the year of the third Summer Solstice in Ayers Cliff something changed. I had an epiphany about my feet! These are my feet, I thought. They are good feet. They allow me to walk, to run. to ski, to move and to dance. Why must I listen to information from people I didn’t know and who didn’t know me or my feet? They don’t know how healthy I am and how happy my feet are here on the farm in Ayers Cliff. Why am I afraid to let these feet be free? To go barefoot!

And so it happened that I threw off my shoes and danced barefoot through the woods on that third Summer Solstice.

Note: That Fall I left Canada to go back to New York City. I felt rejuvenated and healthy. I’m sure it had something to do with bare feet. Annie and Carl stayed on the farm for another year or so then they went their separate ways. Annie went home to California. Carl headed up to Montreal to teach at a university.

So many years later the three of us keep in touch. We’ve had a couple reunions on the farm (which now has running hot and cold water, electricity and heat). We laugh and cherish the magical memories from our years together as farmers, and friends in Ayers Cliff.

That was a time when life was carefree and joyful. We worked hard and reaped the benefits of toiling together in harmony. The world has changed so now. If only we could find that sense again… remember back and flow forward into carefree and joyful times once again.

And just to let you know … whenever I get the chance, I still dance barefoot on Summer Solstice nights.