KNOX — Mary Browne, a spiritual healer, has a view as wide as the world. At 75, she has a personal relationship with the farm where she lives on Pleasant Valley Road in Knox.

Painted replicas of quilts she has made have recently been posted on her barn. “I did it because it’s quite a canvas; that barn is huge,” she said. “I did it to honor our children and those who have made this farm what it is. I love this place.”

One of the barn quilts is for Amy Atkins. “Amy is one of my extra children...She’s an incredible potter,” said Browne.

“I’m here a lot…I like all of the people who come through. I like the land. I like being able to work. It’s home,” said Atkins, who is 27.

The age difference between herself and Browne doesn’t seem important to her. “Age isn’t so much about the number as about attitude.” Atkins says of Browne, “She’s got attitude.”

Of the quilt she designed, she says, “It’s who I am in pictures. It’s the stuff I love.” She discovered the central figure by looking through Browne’s quilting books. “It’s a compass rose…with a heart painted in and out for each direction….It’s a nice metaphor, hearts pointed inward and outward, giving and receiving of love.”

The compass is “surrounded by flowers and bees and mountains and trees.” The tree is for a birch — “a beautiful one out back.”

“They usually die young,” said Atkins, “and branch into multiple trunks, leaning.” This birch, though, with a single trunk, stands straight and strong.

Atkins walks to the birch she loves, her bare feet sure of the way. She crosses a newly built bridge over a woodland stream near the bowl of space where Browne’s daughter was married, and where mourners came to share their love after her son, Bart, and later her husband, Stephen, died.

As if on a pilgrimage, Atkins leads the way through the dappled light of a woodland path that winds some distance before suddenly opening to the bright light of a green pasture. And, there, on the horizon stands the birch tree, solitary in its splendor.

She hugs the tree and tells its story.

“When Mary and Steve first moved here, Steve wanted to cut it. Mary said, ‘No, you leave that tree.’”

 

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When asked about the story, Browne says that the birch then — over a half-century ago — was just a sapling. She recalls she told her husband, “Touch it and you die.”

Browne went on, “The birch is the queen of the forest as the oak is the king, in the Celtic way. We’ve all been everything.”

Browne’s life and quilts pull threads from different traditions to make a whole cloth.

Her feet are covered with intricate tattoos based on a design from Morocco. One represents male, the other female. “They are identical — it doesn’t matter,” she says of the lesson her feet represent.

“If we can get beyond gender bias, we’ll be a long way toward recovering our soul,” says Browne.

The tattoos were applied by “a biker on Lark Street,” she says. “I hate shoes; I loathe them,” she goes on. “My feet are remarkably ugly so I had them disguised.”

She has recently traveled to France and now is on a sojourn to Scotland. In France, she studied Catharism, a movement in southern Europe in the 12th Century. “They were a group of people with religious beliefs that embrace kindness, compassion, and generosity,” she said. Cathars were denounced by the Catholic Church as Satanists.

Browne went to Montségur, one of the last strongholds of the Cathars where, in 1243, those who would not renounce their faith were burned.

“I went to Montségur where that debacle occurred...I went part way up and sat under a tree,” said Browne. “I did a meditation and was just gone. When I came back to myself, I could see where they had died below me. They didn’t try to escape.”

She describes the meaning behind the quilts on her barn.

“On the side facing the pond is a quilt I made for Steve and me — Life 101. It has hearts and thistles,” says Browne, explaining their meaning: “You can’t know complete joy if you haven’t had pain along the way.” She has known more than her share of pain. Her son Erik was born with disabilities including blindness. Her son Bart took his own life. Her husband died in 2012 when his tractor overturned, killing him. He was 73.

And yet, Browne sounds joyful as she describes the quilts made in their honor.

Describing the quilt for her husband, she says, “The quilt on the big side of the barn facing the pond, I designed in less than 10 minutes — a modern bear and a Navajo bear with stylized tracks. In between that is a traditional flying geese pattern and in the corners are cattails.” These reflect her husband’s work with big game; with the state’s goose project; and protecting endangered land like swamps.

“Bart’s quilt faces the road,” she goes on. “He spent time in Australia. It’s a songline; it represents a snake — he didn’t mind snakes. He was a kid who walked about.”

A songline, she explained, is what native Aboriginals follow, paths across the land to mark the route of a creator being like a snake or rabbit; traditional songs keep the paths alive and ever present.

Browne says of her son’s death, “I have no pain around it — I never did. He was the most beautiful child I could imagine. I loved him with everything I had. He did some terrible things. He did some stupid things. He did some remarkable things.”

“The next quilt is a child’s quilt. It looks Amish — a heart with flowers. I used stencil paint on it,” says Browne.

“Next is a traditional antique Irish harp. Erik is blind. Many of the traditional harpists in Ireland were blind. He loves Irish music.” His brilliant green quilt faces Pleasant Valley Road.

The inspiration for her daughter’s quilt came from Black Mountain in Australia. “It’s an important Aboriginal ground. It has an area like Thacher Park with cliffs, and paintings that are thousands of years old,” said Browne. This inspired her to portray a kangaroo — with a joey in its pouch. “My daughter, Heidi, is a midwife,” she explained.

 

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An Amish quilt honors Howard Coughtry, the New Scotland carpenter who helped restore their house.

The canvas isn’t finished yet. Browne has a design in mind for her friend, Kate Laity, who teaches medieval literature and new media at The College of Saint Rose. “Kate’s is coming next,” said Browne; it will be a book opening to the stars, with a quill pen.

The paintings went up after the barn was re-sided, a massive undertaking.

A year and a half ago, Browne found a list of projects her husband wanted yet to do on the farm. “Everything is done now,” said Browne. The list included some major projects: re-siding the massive barn, replacing the house’s cellar, and redoing the bee house.

“The Amish boys re-sided the barn and totally redid this,” Browne said of the bee house, which has two of its own quilt paintings — small to fit the scale of the building. “Steve made the shutters and I wouldn’t trade them for anything.” Inside is both the functional and artistic. “That’s who I am,” said Browne.

 

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She told the history of the post-and-beam barn that she learned from neighbor Charlie Roney who heard it from his uncle, Johnny Schoonmaker: In the 1800s, Browne said, the barn timbers were laid out by Merriman Nasholts who lived in Knox and built the first bicycle.

“He laid it out with hammer handles…He stood on the ridge pole and pointed to what was needed next,” she said.

“Mike Vincent’s grandparents owned this farm,” said Browne. “When they left, Michael never came back until I started work on the barn. He showed up in his Model A Ford.”

Farm lessons

Michael Vincent, in his own way, loves the farm as much as Browne. While his time on Pleasant Valley Road was much shorter — he lived there with his grandparents from the age of 11 to 17, when they sold it in 1964 — it was during his formative years and shaped his life.

His father, Gerald Vincent, worked for Central Markets and, when the company expanded in 1959, his family — his three sisters and his brother with their mother, Delia — moved to Pittsfield, Massachusetts for his father’s job.

Michael Vincent didn’t like it there. “I’m a farm boy, a country boy,” he said. So, at age 11, he moved to the farm on Pleasant Valley Road to live with his grandparents. They were in their 60s then and welcomed the help, he said.

“They always worked until they couldn’t work anymore,” he said.

 

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Some of the lessons he learned as a boy on the farm were practical. He was told to chop wood as a punishment but loved the task. The farmhouse was heated with wood, so there was much chopping to do.

He shared a trick his grandfather taught him. “When you had a piece of oak or maple that was extremely hard to split, Grandpa taught me to set these aside until it got really cold. When it was 10 below, you put motor oil on each side of a sharp ax and chop into it and it would be like cutting butter.”

Some of the lessons were harder to learn.

He often walked the farm with his collie, Lassie. When Vincent was 14, a neighboring farmer came by and said the collie had been at his sheep. “Grandpa said, ‘Go get her.’”

He brought Lassie to his grandfather who opened her mouth and they could see wool on her molars.

“I knew what I had to do,” he said. He shot his dog.

Despite the hard work and hard lessons, Vincent felt lucky. He remembers having newspaper stuffed in the toes of his boots, waiting for his feet to grow to fill them. Once, when he was making fence stakes, an ax went through his boot but did not harm his foot. The boot was repaired by Helen Becker in Altamont.

 

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“All straight and all tight”

Vincent was pleased to see Browne re-side the barn. “I’ve always been interested in structures,” said Vincent who worked doing carpentry and caring for state parks, including Thacher.

He points to two boards he has made with carefully beveled edges to display pictures of the barn from his childhood and under reconstruction a year ago.

Pointing to a picture that shows the exposed cathedral-like structure of the big barn, Vincent said, “This is the original wood and it’s all straight and it’s all tight.”

“I marveled at it back then and I still do,” he said.

Vincent also likes the quilt boards that Browne has put on the barn. They were painted by John Elberfeld as part of an ongoing project to make a Helderberg Quilt Barn Trail, part of a national grassroots folk art movement.

“John Elberfeld has been just fantastic,” said Browne.

“I want to do one myself,” Vincent said. “Every one of them means something to someone,” he said.

Vincent’s Aunt Muriel painted a hex sign as a present for him and his bride when they married in 1967.

Centerpiece

The everyday rhythms of farm life on Pleasant Valley Road ebbed and flowed from the barn.

When Vincent lived on the farm, the massive barn was home to 15 dairy cows with four calves and four or five heifers, and close to 200 chickens as well as an occasional horse.

“We got up at 5:30 in the morning to start milking at 6,” he said.

He described the process, beginning with putting a five-gallon pail on a coil to wash the udders. The two milking machines were put together, strainers were placed on top of the big milk cans, and the air compressor was started. The milk cans were cooled with water until a milkman arrived, every other day, to pick them up.

“We ground our own corn, wheat, and oats” to feed the cows. The grinding was done in the barn, which had “a great big tub with a grinding mill” that was belt-driven and ran off of an Oliver tractor.

The chickens would be fed every morning. They roosted in the top of the barn’s smaller addition.

In the spring, summer, and fall, the cows would be let out to pasture.

Breakfast was prepared by his grandmother.  A hearty meal, it included half-inch thick bacon, made from pigs raised on the farm, and fried in a big iron skillet. The eggs were fresh, too, collected in yellow wire baskets from the barn.

The Vincents had white leghorns because, he said, “They’re the best laying hens.”

They carefully washed all the eggs and then candled them, holding them to the light to see if there were double yolks or blood spots. “Those, you don’t sell,” said Vincent.

On Saturday morning, Vincent and his grandfather would take their eggs and vegetables they had grown to a huge farmers’ market in Albany. “We had a huge garden where Mary has flowers. We hoed the potatoes and hilled them up,” he said. “We’d pick dandelion greens and sell them, too.”

“We’d put heads of slaughtered calves on the corners of our table,” said Vincent. “The Italians and the Poles boil them and make head cheese…I’d pat the tongue and it was really rough.”

Vincent said it didn’t bother him to eat the animals he had helped raise.

“You’ve got to eat,” he said.

Loving the work

While the milking of the cows and the feeding of the chickens was constant, other work on the farm varied with the season.

“Right now,” Vincent said of the fall, “there’d be a second cutting of hay…I love to rake hay.” He likes operating equipment, he said. “The wind is in your face; you’re hair is blowing away.”

He sounded not unlike Browne as he described his love of working the farm.

“Since Steve died, so many people have helped,” said Browne. “All have different skills…I haven’t had a day here by myself since he died. They do whatever needs to be done.”

“She’s modest,” Atkins insisted later. “She does a ton of the work herself. She’s incredible.” She mows the grounds entirely herself, for example, which takes 11 hours, said Atkins.

Browne says she does the mowing because “it’s beautiful.” She goes on, “It’s my time for meditation and reflection. The wind will be blowing like it is now and one leaf will be moving — it’s magic.”

 

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Self-sufficiency

The farm, Vincent estimated, counting up the acreage of each field, had 100 acres of tillable land and wood lots besides.

“You better be in the house by noon or you didn’t get lunch,” said Vincent. His grandmother was a good cook.  A bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich — all from the farm — was a favorite meal for lunch.

“Grandma baked her own bread and made her own butter. The only thing you had to buy for the BLT was the mayonnaise.”

A favorite drink on the farm was ice tea, made by setting jars with tea bags in the sun.

“You set down to supper at 7:15. You always had baked or mashed potatoes from the garden. I never had French fries till I was 20.” Meals also included beans and squash, ham and beef steak — all from the farm.

Some of the food was found in the woods — puffball fungus to fry or blueberries and huckleberries picked from their plants.

The kitchen pantry was stocked with canned goods his grandmother put up. His left-handed grandmother hooked rugs from worn clothes for the farmhouse. “She did everything,” he said. “You had to be self-sustaining.”

Vincent also hunted on the land, much of which they ate. He hunted woodchucks, too, for safety on the farm. “You don’t want woodchuck holes in the field,” he explained. “It could blow a tractor tire or break your leg if you step in it.”

He was proud of the woodchucks he shot. “We hanged them on the fence stakes to show off,” said Vincent.

One day, a regular visitor to the Helderbergs stopped and offered him 25 cents for every woodchuck he shot and cleaned.

One of his favorite places on the farm was “a little indentation in the field, where the stones came out; there used to be maple and ash there,” said Vincent. “It was shady and cool and I liked to sit and look down at the farm…What a beautiful place….My grandparents wanted me to have the farm.”

“We all had responsibility,” he said of life on the farm. “I knew every acre of that farm, from tilling it or hunting it.”

“It’s an oasis,” said Browne’s friend, Laity, describing the farm. She met Browne when friends of hers attended a retreat there.

“I always refer to it as Brigadoon,” said Laity, alluding to a mythical Scottish village that materializes for just one day every century. “Some mornings, the fog is so heavy, it’s like being in another world — so peaceful. Land that was worked for many years, now works in another way.”