Cup of COFFEE: A SUMMER TO REMEMBER, AND FORGET

Cup of COFFEE: A SUMMER TO REMEMBER, AND FORGET

By Sean Clancy

How was your summer?

It’s the easiest, most innocuous icebreaker at each event any September. We ask it. We’re asked it. At Hill School events. At fall races. At sidewalk meetings between the bakery and the post office.

I used to answer it the same way: “Great…fun… too short…” If they wanted more or knew us more, I’d add in details of baseball games, eight weeks putting out a newspaper in Saratoga and maybe a road trip to see my parents. They would share their stories, beach trips and backyard barbecues, trips abroad and dreams achieved.

Sean Clancy

This year, I hesitate for a moment, stutter for a second and wonder how I should answer it. Do they know? Do they care? My answers depend on each.

The Saratoga Special. August 6.“Our barn’s on fire...”Annie’s call at 11:50. Saturday morning.

The centerpiece of our farm, the 1800s bank barn. Green, with white trim, the criss-crossed stall doors, the old one-piece metal roof, the shedrow annex, three stalls, the perfect sidekick. A masterpiece of simplicity. Those beautiful lines, built into the natural slope of our 30-acre farm in Middleburg.

It’s like the barn came first and then God laid the land around it. It’s why we bought the farm. It’s the beacon. We moved the driveway so you would see it first as you visited the farm, drift past, a long, slow admiration, and then to the house. People couldn’t drive too fast up our driveway, off the driveway sure, the barn grabbing them like the first notes of Miles Davis, the first strokes of Munnings.

We bought the farm right after having Miles nearly 13 years ago. Our place for him to grow up, for us to grow old. We didn’t even like the house. We loved the barn…

Our life’s work.

Sure, a working barn, cattle first, the late Duffy Rathbun’s homegrown broodmares and foals and then our horses. Teddy and Border and Blue and Kiss and Eagle Poise and Perfect and White Man and Roy and Apse and Seth and Gameboy and Courage and Lemonade and all our other beautiful friends over all our beautiful years.

“The horses are out. The cat’s out. The goat’s out. Annie and Miles are out…”

That’s how our neighbor, Steven Putnam, broke the seven minutes of silence from when Annie hung up and he answered his phone.

“It’s gone, buddy. Gone. It’s a 100 percent loss. But everybody’s out. Everybody’s out. That’s the important part.”

I took a stunted, stammering sigh of relief. If it could possibly be called relief. Tears had welled. Then they flowed. One staple, one standby, one stable thing in our ever-unstable lives is gone. And my beautiful, strong, rock-solid wife and my young, impressionable, vulnerable son are the ones staring at charred timber, staring into our broken lives. While I write a newspaper about a hobby of a sport.

“You’re coming home...” Annie said minutes later.

The Stable Tour, about Wesley Ward who dealt with a barn fire this summer, will wait. Joe can write the Oaks preview with the Charlie Appleby quotes I had taken a few hours earlier when life seemed so different, and was so different. Tom Law and Paul Halloran and the cub reporters will cover the Whitney Day card.

My hands shake. Get it together, Sean. Stop crying. Get on the road, get home, where you belong.

It’s been two months and we slowly, tepidly go forward. As a mentor always says when times are testing, “forward progress.” It has been an arduous task trying to move forward when you’ve been sent hurtling backward in a gut punch you never saw coming.

Border, Blue, Kiss and Eagle Poise live in the front field. Apse and Lemonade Thursday live in their third barn since the fire, four if you count their old barn. Eli, the one-horned pygmy goat, lives in an old wooden shed found and delivered by a gracious neighbor. Duchess, the barn cat, lives under the floorboards of the tractor shed, being fitted with emergency stalls.

As for Annie, Miles and me, we had a tough summer. Thanks for asking. Thanks for being there.