Starting Country Life (“Country” 2)

I knew a New England garden should look classy. I could do it … right?

Red-and-white checked tablecloths. Cotton curtains. Classic quilts, carefully mended, to spread over the beds.

And cloth diapers on the baby.

For the first few months, “country life” seemed to have a huge focus on fabric. True, my dad and my teenage brother from Montclair, NJ, helped us move to the mountainside rental house in northern Vermont, and they both dug right into tools and repairs — but they stayed only long enough to see that R and I and our four-month-old had running water, working lights, and some form of bedsprings and mattress in each of the 1850s house bedrooms. Which added up to three or six, depending whether you counted the unheated ones.

But heating season seemed far away from our mid-May arrival. Much more important, I wanted the place ready for Mom’s June visit. Everything needed to look homey and “New England.” Years of thumbing through Yankee Magazine gave me an edge on making the image work.

One of Mom’s “hometowns,” Sanbornton, NH.

And thank goodness for those mandatory “home ec” classes back in Montclair, with sewing machines and zippers and hand stitching. I could hem a curtain in minutes, or patch R’s jeans in neat “rural” ways.