{"id":1402,"date":"2021-08-04T05:50:49","date_gmt":"2021-08-04T13:50:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/?p=1402"},"modified":"2021-08-03T14:51:03","modified_gmt":"2021-08-03T22:51:03","slug":"raised-in-a-barn-a-war-on-the-front-forty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/2021\/08\/04\/raised-in-a-barn-a-war-on-the-front-forty\/","title":{"rendered":"Raised in a Barn: A War on the Front Forty"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Note that even my father’s dog Nellie got a new outfit for the occasion.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

My father was born to be a king. Or at least lord of the manor. He had the eccentric manor and the acreage.\u00a0 And when some friends of mine from the Society for Creative Anachronism came to visit, with the express purpose of deciding whether the front lawn would be a good place for a war, Dad was all in.<\/p>\n

By the front lawn, I mean the approximately 20 acres of pasture across the road from the Barn, proper.\u00a0 When my parents bought the barn, 180 acres of land came with it: the front 20 (often referred to as the front forty, perhaps because of the alliteration) separated from the Barn and the rest of the mountain by a county road, and the 160 acres around and behind the barn, most of which was hilly, forested, and not much in the way of farmable.\u00a0 The front 20 was rather rolling, and ran down about a quarter of a mile to the Housatonic River, storied and sung in my youth for its horrid pollution. My brother and I had never stuck a toe in it for fear of having it dissolve.<\/p>\n

My SCA friends returned to their barony and pitched the idea of a battlefield event, and the War of the Roses was born. I was kept apprised of the planning (since I was more or less the intermediary between my parents and the machineries of war), and some basic ground-rules were set: the war was across the road from the Barn, but people were permitted to come up and draw water from the hose spigot outside the studio door. Digging a hole in which to roast an ox (my father\u2019s face was incandescent at the thought) was okay, and smaller fires likewise, so long as they were rigorously tended. This<\/em>\u00a0area for parking. This<\/em>\u00a0area, marked out with pennons, for the battle, and That<\/em>\u00a0area\u2014essentially the rest of the field\u2014for setting up temporary residences.<\/p>\n

Of course I made my parents suitable garb. My mother didn\u2019t want anything particularly fancy\u2014”your basic medieval schmatta<\/em>,” as she put it. But my father\u2026 I told him to find a painting from any period from 1000-1600 and I would do my best to make the clothing depicted for him. Of course he went for Henry VIII. My father, barrel chested with knotty, muscular calves that would have made the Tudor court swoon, was made for this. \u00a0I made him the outfit, and he wore it for the weekend and\u2026did I saw born to be a king? Yeah, like that.<\/p>\n

My recollection of the whole weekend is rather kaleidoscopic: I bounced back and forth between the camp and the Barn (and slept in my own bed). The fire over which the ox (well, the half-cow) was to be roasted wasn\u2019t lit early enough, which meant that the meat wasn’t actually cooked until half past 10 that evening. The battle itself was spectacular\u2014a series of individual fights first, followed by a melee, all framed against a sky full of gray clouds. Despite the overcast of the day it was warm, bordering on hot, and after the war was over, some of the combatants took themselves down to the river to skinny dip. Apparently the river had been cleaned up a lot while I was living elsewhere: no one dissolved or emerged from the water writhing in agony (and at the following year\u2019s war skinny dipping was a feature, not a bug: the day was hotter and sunnier, and immediately after the battle the banks of the Housatonic were teeming with naked warriors).<\/p>\n

Possibly my father\u2019s favorite moment of the weekend came on Saturday evening. People camped pretty much where they wanted, and one young woman had pitched her tent three quarters of the way down the field, just before the river bank. And she started having belly pain. Among other things, my father was a member of the volunteer ambulance squad, and a qualified EMT. Someone found me and reported a woman in pain, and I charged up to the Barn, where my father had retired for the evening was wearing his civvies. Within a minute of my outlining the problem Dad had his kit in the car, slapped the green flasher on the roof, and tore down the hill to the campsite. \u201cHot appy!\u201d he announced, and judged this was not the time to wait for the ambulance. He loaded her into his car and took her off to the local hospital, where her appendix was removed just in the nick of time.<\/p>\n

The next day the Baron and Baroness of the presiding Barony made a presentation to my parents, and they were roundly huzzahed. I think my mother enjoyed it, in an \u201cI\u2019m just here to watch the young folks being crazy\u201d sort of way. But Dad was in his element: how often do you get to be the Lord of the Manor, Rescue the Maiden (from the fearsome Appendix!) and dress like a king?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My father was born to be a king. Or at least lord of the manor. He had the eccentric manor and the acreage.\u00a0 And when some friends of mine from the Society for Creative Anachronism came to visit, with the express purpose of deciding whether the front lawn would be a good place for a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[116],"class_list":["post-1402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-memoir","tag-raised-in-a-barn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1402"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1402\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1406,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1402\/revisions\/1406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}