Friday, April 22, 2005 Site Reconstruction News I am currently developing our new site and it will be ready quite soon. I hope you will enjoy it. If you have any ideas and tips for the site, please leave a message in the forum. I would love to hear from you. The new web address is: http://stillmeadow.ecwhost.com/ Thank you, Susan Stanley. Gladys Taber wrote straight from her heart. She had that magical ability in her writing to share her world with you, so you're not just reading her books, but sharing with her, her life in the country throughout the four seasons of the year, her problems, her challenges and her joys.
At Stillmeadow you put in your own garden,
tend it, then enjoy eating food grown with your own hands, of canning and
freezing it for the winter ahead. You lovingly cut your own flowers and make
comparisons with those grown by your neighbors. You meet the tradesmen, farmers
and friends who call at the farm and you learn their fascinating stories.
You share the thrill of discovering early American antiques; learn the secrets
of New England cookery. Above all else, you have the privilege of visiting
leisurely with her and all the unusual guests who have the habit of dropping
in at Stillmeadow Farm at all hours and from all sorts of places.
You are introduced to every one in the village, romp with the most lovable and mischievous group of dogs ever to chew a guest's hat, or win an occasional blue ribbon at the local dog show. There is never a dull moment during your year at Stillmeadow, and when you leave you know that you will return again and again, because it is no further away than your favorite chair. Mrs. Taber wrote with a warm and earthy humor, laced with wisdom and lovingly tied with a mature faith in God and humanity. Once you meet her and have shared with her her thoughts on life, you will feel uplifted and see life with a different outlook. It just isn't possible to do justice to her Stillmeadow books with this general description, because they have a spiritual, lifelike reality which only comes from reading them and of joining in with her personally.
Go straight to your bookstore and
order one of them, or look in used book stores or libraries. You'll see,
once you get to know her, you will not want her books to end.
Gladys
Taber's
books speak of serenity;
the delight in the day's tasks; the companionship with dogs and cats; the
pleasures of nature in the seasons' round; the appreciation of books and
music; the friendship of people; the deep and abiding conviction of the author
in the essential goodness of life.
She died on March 11, 1980, in
Orleans, Mass; on Cape Cod. She was 81 years old.
TRIBUTE
PAGE
I look out past the great sugar maples that overshadow the little house, and on to the meadow and the hill where we planted the Christmas trees. The bottom of the meadow is a wild tangled thicket, half swampy, and there grow the wold cranberries and the dark wild iris and at the edge the wild red grapes with their sweet musky flavor. Pheasants flash up from the meadow, and the rabbits and woodchucks live there, and the little velvet field mice, and now and then a secret otter follows the course of the hidden brook. The deer do not venture so near the house, but sometimes a red fox streaks up the. hill We have lived here more than fifteen years, but a lifetime is too short to experience fully the beauty of the meadow, for every day it has new loveliness, new wonder to discover. And yet it has not changed much, although I can mark how the young thicket has grown. We have left it to its natural existence and that is why, perhaps, it symbolizes to me the security we seek in a world highly unstable and changing. The rest of our forty acres more or less has, indeed, been a little changed. The old orchard lost a few trees during the hurricane of '38, and thirteen came down in the back yard. The woodland has more fallen limbs, and the cliffs are overgrown. The baby fruit trees in the flowering lane are large and sturdy and have flowers in spring, and once we had two seckel pears and three sweet apples! The plum tree did begin to bear just as it got some kind of disease and had to be cut and burned. During the war, we turned over all the arable land to our neighbor, friend, and mainstay, George, and cabbages and corn and tomatoes and potatoes and cucumbers and squash grow thriftily where the Indian paintbrush and black-eyed Susans and daisies and violets and wild strawberries spread their delicate beauty. Finally we began the farm pond. This, in a way, is a restoration, for there was a pond there once where the brook runs along the lowland, but the brook had been choked and lost itself in a swamp. When the great steam shovel was lifting the black loam up and making a steep hill of it, George stood looking thoughtfully at it. "That's all the land from my upper fields," he said. And it is. The pond is eight feet deep, provides swimming in summer, skating in winter, fire protection all year round, and a place for fish to grow. The banks, set with wildlife planting, help birds through the cold seasons. In our part of the country, nobody is ever quite sure where the boundaries of the land are. Old fences, long since gone, or gray rocks, or a certain dead chestnut tree, or a brook which may have changed its course, these mark the edge of one's property. Now and then a surveyor may scramble around a day or so and deliver an expensive piece of paper, but the farm folk go right back on using the woodland or picking the grapes where they always have, and this is as it should be. We do not own the land, the land owns us. The survey we had when we wanted to turn over land to George for his house was like a Christmas present, for it turned out we had considerably more than forty acres, enough to let William, George's brother, have a house too. Once in a while I try to picture what life in the country might have been if George and William had not lived right across the road, and then I know the main thing in buying an old house in the country is to settle near good neighbors. The natives on our valley are not the quaint folk so many writers talk about; the only quaint folk around here are the few city week-enders, and some of them are quaint enough for any fiction. When we bought Stillmeadow, it was on a purely emotional basis. I knew the minute I set foot in it that this was the house I belonged to. I had no remotest idea of whether it was sound, and a good buy, and would be easy to live in. We never even looked in the well to see whether there was any water in it or not! It was winter, and we had to walk down the road up to our knees in icy slush. There was the little white farmhouse under the great spread of the maples, and there was the worn doorsill deep with snow, and inside there was a great fireplace, blackened with the smoke of a century. Old iron kettles rosy with rust hung from the heavy crane. Actually the house was in terrible shape. Renters had let the plumbing fixtures freeze, cracked bowls and burst faucets were upstairs and down, the wallpaper was stained, and the plaster fallen from some ceilings. the floors were patched with old cigarette tins. Debris sifted over every room; one wonders where all the old rags and broken bottles can come from ! There was a furnace, flaking with rust, and a cracked boiler, an ancient sink propped on unsteady legs, and rats had spread their ruin everywhere. Climbing the steep stairs, we had to be careful not to fall through into the cellar. We didn't have any money for repairs either. Taking on the mortgage was an act of rash courage; the down payment scraped the bottom of the barrel. But the house spoke to me. So we moved in and began to learn how to put on wallpaper without having it fold back on us, how to patch plaster and not get duck soup from it, and various other skills. Now, as I look back, I often think of all the people who lived and loved, were happy or sad, those who were born and those who died in this house. For there is a continuity of living if your house has sheltered its own down the long sweep of years. In our turn, we have cherished it, warmed it, and it offered us days rich with contentment. It has given us back-breaking hours of work and the satisfaction of tangible results from our work. It has given us fire on the hearth on long evenings, spring sunlight through the windows, cool moonlight on the doorsills in autumn. This is a small house, but wide enough for fifteen cockers, two cats, an Irish setter, children growing up, friends who drop in overnight and stay three weeks. The story of our life is written in the white tulips set in the Quiet Garden, in tomatoes ripening on the vine, in puppies bouncing through the great snowdrifts. It is inscribed with the scent of dark purple lilacs, the satiny touch of eggplant, the swift falling of golden leaves. As seasons come to our gentle valley, Stillmeadow is always our personal adventure in happiness.
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My special thanks to all the friends
I have made since starting this page,
and for the help that they have given me.
Gladys Taber always wished for better communication between people..."There are no strangers-only friends we have yet to meet." This page is for those of you who would like to have your name and e-mail address placed together on a page. If you would like to include a favorite quote or short passage from one of her books, you are most welcome. Just e-mail me and please state which book it is from.
The music you are listening to is, Vissi
D'arte by Tosca
I would be very happy to receive input, ideas and criticisms and more information about Ms. Taber. If anyone has something they would like to to add to this site, please let me know.
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A TRIBUTE TO DIANA, PRINCESS OF WALES
Webpage design
by
Susan
Stanley
I created this background, matching title graphic and
decorative bar especially for this site.
Please do not take. Copyright © 1997, 1998, 1999.