Harvest Home

A favorite book of mine is Harvest Home by Thomas Tryon. It was also a made for tv movie, called The Dark Secret of Harvest Home, starring Bette Davis. The idea of city mice turned country mice has always been alluring to me. As a child, I often felt displaced after coming home from a stay at my Aunt's dairy farm. After a few weeks of getting up before dawn to help milk and feed cows, then doing it all again later in the afternoon, returning to my easy, pampered, concrete South Philadelphia life was weird. In my early twenties, I seriously considered buying a few acres of that land, building a small house on it and living there. It never panned out, but then in my forties, I found myself deep in Lancaster County Amish Country, and deep into culture shock.
Harvest Home is the story of a New York couple and their daughter. Seeking out a more peaceful, natural way of life, they move to Cornwall Coombe, an untouched by time village in a rural area of New England. The villagers are mostly farmers, and life is lived according to "The Ways". Not unlike my Amish neighbors, they attend school up to eighth grade, they use horse and buggy transportation, they shun modern civilization and worldly things. They do not seek the outside world, and newcomers are treated with an odd mixture of wariness and bemused friendliness.
Where I live, although I have been here 12 years, since I am not "from here" I am not "of here" and will never be fully accepted. Someone moving here from a closer, urban area like Harrisburg would be greeted with skepticism. Coming from South Philadelphia makes me the equivalent of a Martian. But back to Harvest Home, and this is where my personal experience bows out- something is not quite right in this heavenly, bucolic little hamlet. "The Ways" go further, deeper and darker than quilting bees, bonnets and sheep grazing on the hill. This idyllic setting turns chilling, with places like Soake's Lonesome, the deep woods where you should never venture to at night. The Widow Fortune, the village wise woman/ midwife/ veterinarian/ herbalist has more up her black homespun sleeves than her knitting needles. A lot more.