Published: 28 Mar 2019

That was wonderful news, but they had more news to share; each one of them had been approached by the two partners of a rather large eye treatment center located just 7 miles from us. Each one would work with each partner treating diseases of the eye, correcting vision problems, and working with patients who had any type of corrective surgery. It was a very busy practice located in a newer professional office building in So. Hadley, my hometown and the next town to us here in Granby. Another bit of news was that they asked if possibly they could pay to have the guest house made into two large apartments. With both couples currently living there, it just made sense as the two couples were each getting married and each couple would need some privacy. I told him that was something we could discuss soon, but I thought I had a better idea, just give me some time to work out my idea and we could readdress that situation, in a few days.

After the boys came in from greeting their ponies they asked if they could change and ride in the corral, as there was only a dusting of snow there and Riley and I joined them for their ride. Yes, it was cold out, but the equines seemed to like the exercise as the boys rode their friends around the big oval shaped corral and they certainly liked the grooming they received after the ride was over, about an hour and a half later. While the boys assisted with the grooming, Riley and I continued our conversation about a wedding present for Ted and Ryan, finally deciding on a prefab house to be installed just down the lane from the guest house. We would deed them the land, probably an acre or two, and grant them road access for their lifetimes, as well as title to the completed home and the garage. We admired the way they had stuck with us for the last two years and how they had handled the leasing of the fields and orchards for us and actually had shown a modest profit for the property, the first time since the former caretakers had taken over the management of the place some twenty years before.

When we all trooped up to the house the boys went to play some of their new video games and I showed Riley the prefab home website and we picked out a home we thought they would like, and that would look good on the lane. We printed out a picture of the house and the floor plans and showed these to Ted and Ryan when we all gathered for dinner a few hours later. They were speechless, happy, and thankful, all at once. Ryan said he never would have thought they’d be in their own home so early in their careers, and neither one of them was ready to move away from where they had committed themselves to each other, and where they had learned what true love meant to each to each other and what they saw every day just being around us. They thanked us profusely and we turned to David and Jeff and told them that one day, maybe in the next few weeks, they too could pick out a house and floor plan with us and we’d have their home installed as well, on the lane by Ted and Ryan’s, thus freeing up our guest house. David and Jeff looked at the specs for Ted and Ryan’s house and asked if they could have the same home, just reversed, and we, of course, agreed to their request, David offering to pay for the house with the half of the proceeds from the sale of his family home up in Vermont, but we told him that we wanted to do this for them, to save his money, they’d need it to furnish their home. Riley and I talked about our two couples and we agreed that with David and Jeff taking over for Ted and Ryan, we were justified in spending some money on both couples, they deserved the helping hand and we were proud to be able to help them.

I made all the arrangements for the work on the houses to be started and contracted with a local builder the prefab house company recommended to begin the site preparations. There would need to be septic systems put in and well water to be determined, but the guesthouse had both and I hoped, rightfully, that the perc tests and the other necessary tests all came out favorably. My feelings about these were confirmed a week later when the contractor told me that all required tests on both parcels came through with flying colors and he now had the building permits in hand. Both houses would be in move-in condition by the middle of March, and I told him that was great, now if the weather held until the foundations were dug and the basements poured we’d be in good shape even if the basements had to be covered if a heavy snowfall occurred before the units for the houses arrived.

With all the arrangements for the new houses being made I was also at work on a new adult novel and by the end of January Mark was in touch again about arranging for us to travel to Hollywood as a family for the release of the new YA movie, the one originally based on our boy’s fictitious adventures (before Evan had joined us). The new book I had written in the fall and early winter included an Evan character, and even David and Jeff characters and that manuscript was already at the publishers going through the editing process. I had spent the first two weeks of January adding another episode to include the Morris children in an adventure in Key West and had sent that in to be added to the book, that way HEM and Yvonne’s boys, Tom, Wayne, Nick, Bruce and Scott all got included and we hoped it would be a big surprise for them when the book finally came out around Memorial Day.

I was once again setting an alarm clock to remind me to finish up what I was writing and get my butt ready for when the boys arrived home from school. It was kind of fun hearing them walk to the house from the end of the drive, they obviously didn’t know I was usually pouring them a mug of hot chocolate and was usually right by the stove where the vent fan exhausted out near the walk they took to the kitchen door. Never had I heard anything to be concerned about, but they did talk freely about their school, homework, their teachers, and sometimes about the other kids in their grades or on the bus. It just gave me a bit of extra information, as I said, nothing worrying, but as they walked under the high placed kitchen window, I noticed something, I hadn’t expected for some time yet, Carter and Evan were holding hands, and as the younger boys raced to the back door, Evan gave Carter a small hug and a brief kiss, on the lips. They too came in as Darryl and Allen were getting their welcome home hugs from me and Carter had a huge smile on his face as I stood up straight from the little ones’ hugs and Evan had the look of the cat that ate the canary on his. I doled out the mugs of hot chocolate and a plate of biscuits and asked if there was any important homework to be done and when I received 4 “No’s” I told them to change and we’d go for a ride as there still wasn’t enough snow to bother the ponies, yet, there was supposed to be quite a big storm coming in time for the weekend and I knew the contractor was planning on covering the excavation areas because of the impending snow.

The ride just about over, David and Jeff came out to the barn to help with the grooming and we asked them to come up to the house for a cup of hot chocolate and maybe a swim. Since it was now the second semester they were full of talk about the practical side of the education they were getting, now about 30% classroom and 70% hands-on in the workshops, conducted like a shop class where they learned wiring and sheet metal work for fitting heating and air conditioning vents and ductwork. They both loved what they were doing and they told me that when they completed their courses they were thinking about opening their own HVAC company after completing their one-year apprenticeship with an established company. They would be married by then and they were planning to use the money David had received from the sale of his family home. I called Evan over to us and I told Evan and David that they had each received a package from the Vermont State Coroner’s office today and that I was sure each package contained their mother’s ashes. I told them that Riley and I were willing to have them interred at the memorial wall at the local cemetery by our church and we’d have a plaque placed on their niche, but I wanted them to know that whatever they wanted to do we’d make it happen for both of them.

David said he thought that would be good for him, as he planned on staying here in our area, and then he’d always have a place to visit her. Evan was a bit upset, but as I hugged him he said that would be a good thing to do, as he knew she wouldn’t want to be with his father, wherever the state had buried him, and he’d like to have a place to go and talk to her sometimes too. When Carter saw him upset he came over and hugged him from behind, wrapping his arms around him and the two left shortly for their rooms. About 20 minutes later I started to worry about Evan and I asked David and Jeff to watch the two younger boys for me and I dashed into the house to make sure he was alright and I heard voices coming from Carter’s room. It was Carter soothing a now less upset Evan, soothing him and reassuring him he had made the right decision, that they’d both be able to visit her there any time they wanted. I backed away from the room, not wanting to embarrass the guys, pleased that they were there for each other.

This is what Riley and I talked about after all the boys had gone up to bed and we had done our tuck-in routine. We discussed if they were too young for such a close relationship and we decided that although young, both young teens were smart and responsible young guys. What we came up with was sitting them down and offering to answer any questions they might have, either by our own knowledge or by showing them places on the internet where they could find honest and correct information. We also settled on what we had talked earlier about the ashes of David and Evan’s mothers and we agreed that I’d call the memorial wall administrator and secure two spots in the wall for the urns to be interred in, and a plaque to be made for each, the plaque acting to seal the urn into the niche in the wall.

I placed our order for the plaques over the internet and also confirmed the order with a follow-up phone call when two niches near each other were reserved and I paid for it all with my credit card. The next step for me today was checking the weather service for a forecast concerning the conditions predicted for the Easter weekend. We were expecting at least Ted and Ryan to marry that weekend, out in the garden, as David and Jeff had said they wanted a small church wedding the same weekend. The two couples, now roommates in the guesthouse, had fast become friends, and wanted the same things; they just had different ways of achieving the same goals. With the weather probably not co-operating we had to have a back-up plan for Ted and Ryan’s wedding, and I thought that the barn might just work, with some extra cleaning, and maybe by removing the trellis arch from the garden and placing it at the end of the barn for the young couple to exchange their vows under, it just might work.

Riley agreed with me after I explained what I had come up with as an alternate plan for Ted and Ryan’s plans, so the next day I contacted an industrial cleaning service and explained what I wanted done and when and they agreed to come out the Thursday before Easter, as long as I called to verify that we still needed the service done, depending on the weather, two days before. We left it at that and I thanked them before I hung up. We had a plan B in case the weather was bad the Saturday morning before Easter Sunday, the church had been booked for an early afternoon wedding for David and Jeff the same day, a couple of months away.

We did have what could have been called a blizzard that weekend, but thankfully we didn’t lose power and by late Sunday afternoon we were all plowed out and the walks were shoveled, thanks to the four young men who lived in the guesthouse. We had planned ahead and we had plenty of groceries stocked in the house and the boys had gone out in the frozen mess and made snow forts and snow creatures in the afternoon, There was a snow dog, a large snow cat, and a big old snow bear out on the patio near the pool house. The four boys had some help; Riley and I went out with hot chocolate and helped stack some of the bigger snowballs to be shaped by the boys into the creatures they were building. We took lots of pictures and promised they could send them attached to emails to their friends the Morris boys, and to their grandparents.

It took until Wednesday afternoon for the ground to be solid enough for another outdoor pony ride for the boys and for the pool to be back to a comfortable temperature to enable us all to swim inside the now toasty enclosure. There was the threat of another snowfall for the weekend, but certainly not forecasted to be as much as the nine inches we had just received. It was great having the solar panels to heat the pool and the enclosure, but there were times when for an extended period of time the overcast sky didn’t provide enough power to maintain the higher temperatures we liked in the pool, it could take two or three days to come back up to the desired temperatures, but it was still a lot cheaper than electricity and we thought we might increase the storage battery count before the next winter.

January and February had their share of dropping snow by the ton on us, and then March arrived and the first weekend was miserable but then there were days that it seemed someone like me had turned up the thermostat and the days were actually quite pleasant. By the middle of April we only had a week before the double weddings and all looked well for the first wedding on the Saturday morning before Easter Sunday, then Ted and Ryan would stay in their suits and be ushers for David and Jeff’s ceremony at the church, just as David and Jeff were acting as their ushers at the garden civil service, Riley and I were performing the duties of proud best men for both couples. After both ceremonies, the two couples were holding a combined reception which was something we convinced them to do, and we were giving this to the couples as part of their wedding gifts. There was a popular restaurant near the schools that the boys went to and we rented it for four hours and had their whole appetizer menu set up as a buffet for the 80 invited guests of both ceremonies. There was a beer and wine bar for the guests and a DJ to play music for a few hours.

The fun came when the other ushers, the boys, went out with the two couples to dance after the first song was played. Carter and Evan danced well together, but Darryl and Allen wanted Riley and me to dance with them. Our heights made the boys look younger than their seven years but it just endeared them to us even more, they were growing up so fast, but when it came to doing something totally new to them, they still wanted their Dads with them.

The very next day, in between eating, the new married couples spent their time moving their accumulated belongings into their new homes, furniture having been delivered a few days before. They were foregoing honeymoons as we had invited the couples to attend the new movie premiere in Hollywood with us over Memorial Day weekend at the end of May. The great part about the trip was that the newest book was being promoted alongside the latest movie, and we had a surprise for our boys, we had asked the Morris family to fly out with us, and they’d be staying on the same floor as we were in the hotel and be attending the premiere of the first YA movie with us.

Their reunion was sweet to watch as they hadn’t seen each other since Christmas. When we were cleared to enter the plane the boys rushed to greet the friendly steward from previous flights and he urged the boys to enter the main cabin and pick a seat so we could take off. The boys rushed in and there were their vacation buddies, all five of them along with HEM and Yvonne. Tom, Wayne Nick, Bruce, and Scott were in on everything and they yelled ‘Surprise” as we all entered and then we did have to insist the boys all get buckled in so we could take off. The steward was great about setting up two gaming stations so the two different age groups could play separately and catch up with each other, although we did know they emailed each other at least once a week, that just gave us adults time to catch up as well.

Now that their two youngest were in school all day Yvonne was getting restless. HEM was also, as he hadn’t settled on a hobby or another activity to occupy his time. It was apparent they had received an abundant inheritance and jumped at the chance to retire from their teaching positions, but after over six years of being stay at home parents, they were bored. We asked what they wanted to do; did they want to work together? Or did one of them have an idea the other wasn’t too keen on? HEM seemed to want a more rural life for his boys, and after hearing about our farm and hearing how happy the boys were with their ponies, well, he said he wanted that kind of life for his boys too. Yvonne said she wanted to open a bed and breakfast. She said that when they traveled they often stayed in them, all around the country. She knew she wasn’t the type to be changing bed sheets and scrubbing bathrooms, but she said they could afford help to do those chores, what she wanted to do was the breakfasts, she loved to cook and she would enjoy running a B&B. She said she wasn’t afraid of work, she could run a vacuum cleaner with the best of them, but it made her squeamish to handle other people’s dirty laundry, her own family excluded.

Down the road from us, almost to Beth and Ben’s was an old estate house that sat on forty-five acres. The property had been lived in by a large family until about fifty years ago when war, longevity, divorce and early death and illnesses had virtually wiped out all family members. The remaining grandchildren had scattered to other towns and states and the property had been for sale for the last three years. Beth knew the current caretaker from church and she said that there was modern plumbing and electric service, but the place needed a huge makeover. Riley pulled up the listing for the place on his laptop and showed it to HEM and Yvonne, also using Google Earth to show them just how close we were and some idea of what our property looked like. When they saw the listing price they were amazed. They told us that in rural Connecticut, where they had been looking, the property would have been in the millions. This property, with ten declared bedrooms and five full and 3-3/4 bathrooms, was listed for just under four hundred thousand.

For a lot of our time in California, the two discussed the possibilities open to them; about the only time they didn’t, was when the studio representative arrived the afternoon before the premiere and went over the procedures for the next evening. The whole group of us would arrive in the same stretch limo that had been put at our disposal for our stay, and we’d be escorted by the studio rep through the red carpet and into the theater.

Our honeymoon couples were included in the briefing and would walk the red carpet with us, but the only big excursion they went with us on was the trip to Disney World in Anaheim. That was a whole days’ worth of fun, and the studio had arranged VIP passes for our whole group.

The Morris family was still talking about the Granby property the next day and by the time we had all changed into suits for the premiere, HEM and Yolanda had arranged to stop off at our local airport and stay in the area for a few days to tour the big old place and see if it was a project they really wanted to take on.

The fun part was going to be when they found out that the reservations they had made at a local B&B were canceled, as we had a perfectly good guest house available for their use, as both the young couples were now in their own houses just down the lane.

The evening at the premier went really well and when interviewers stopped me I introduced Riley and our children and all our friends to several, making sure everyone got a chance to be caught on camera at least once or ten times. For some reason, more people wanted to interview me, and all of us, as we traveled the carpet, and when we went to the lobby there was the reason why. Posters and cutouts were all over the place, promoting the new book and there were copies of the new YA adventure being handed out and a promotion for the new movie, not even in production yet. The reporters kept asking if the group of boys and the young couples were the new cast of the yet to be filmed movie, and I had to tell the truth, that these guys were all my inspiration for the characters in the YA books.

The boys all loved the movie and clapped at the scenes when their characters outwitted the bad guys or showed a bigot what a real family dynamic looked like. After the movie had played we were all invited backstage to meet the actors from the movie, and the boys delighted in meeting their Hollywood counterparts as much as the young actors delighted in meeting the real-life boys they had portrayed in the movie. All in all, it was a fantastic evening for everyone and when we went back to the hotel instead of to an “after party” all the boys were ready for bed. It had been an exciting and exhausting trip for them all.

The next day was spent lounging around the hotel’s pool, relaxing and chilling and occasionally catching sight of ourselves on a TV entertainment show or the interviews shown on the local and cable news shows. The following morning we had an early departure for a local airport to catch our chartered flight back home. Once in flight, we told the Morris family that we had taken it upon ourselves to cancel their reservations at the B&B they had expected to be staying at, as we had a perfectly good house for them to use for as long as they needed. There were plenty of cheers from the boys, but Yvonne and HEM needed some persuading, but everyone was happy with our decision by the time we landed at Barnes Airport.

HEM and Yvonne picked up their rental van and they followed us to Granby where we led them first to the lane our guesthouse was located on. We dropped them off and continued down the lane to the two new houses let our two newly married couples off to get themselves settled, and then we drove around to our own house and began our own unloading and getting everything and everyone settled in before we allowed the boys to go to the barn and greet their equine friends. Bill and Max along with their father Ben had been taking care of them for us while we were all away and from the looks of things they had done an admirable job.

Two days later HEM and Yvonne went to view the property for sale down the road from us. They returned two hours later and showed us the hundreds of pictures they had snapped on their cell phones. It truly was a magnificent property and most of what was needed was updating the bathrooms and the kitchen areas, as well as freshening up the painted surfaces throughout the house. The property itself needed attention, the flower beds needed a lot of attention and the several outbuildings needed attention as well, but none of this had dampened their spirits. The following day they had another viewing scheduled with the Realtor and they had arranged for our local contractor to go with them to give them an estimate on the work they wanted to have done.

The day after the second viewing they received the estimate from the contractor and a time frame for the work needed to make the home livable. The work on the entire property would take four months, and the schedule began with the work in the main house which would take most of the summer to finish before the structure was inhabitable by the family. It only took them an hour to decide on what they would offer for the place and once that was done the excited couple drove to their Realtor’s office and made out their formal offer. The boys were with us and we took them all for a walk down one of our trails and back. The boys loved the country and when we arrived back at the barn they all took turns riding the ponies in the corral.

David and Jeff were there to assist Riley and me and it wasn’t long before we were all up on the bigger horses and wondering if we needed another barn and another dozen horses and ponies so everyone could ride at the same time. Including Max and Bill, we had all eleven boys out there riding and having a great time. Maybe because we (Riley and I) were still in our twenties, maybe because we were knee-jerk reacting to a temporary situation. We had kids that wanted to ride, but they had to take turns because of the number of ponies we had.

We sat with Jeff and David after our rides were over and the barn chores had been completed and we were all sitting on the pool deck and watching over the boys in the pool. We seriously discussed the addition of another barn and additional ponies, and some more horses as well. Riley was all for adding to the equine population and he suggested that we look around for a barn for sale rather than build one from scratch on the flat stretch of land behind the existing barn. His reasoning was that it would be very expensive to build one with as much character as our barn has and neither of us wanted a plain looking building behind our well-crafted unique barn.

When I mentioned this barn search to Yvonne and HEM they invited us over to see the property they were purchasing, as their offer had been accepted. There were a couple of barns on the back property that were, and would be, unused. One even had two small outbuildings or sheds to go with it, and with plenty of paint it could be made to blend in with our buildings and had been used primarily as a horse barn originally. They offered us either of the big structures, all we’d have to pay for was the site prep and the repainting and inside refit, once it was moved. We choose the red one with the true barn shape.

Now was the fun part, having the old building moved to our property. The contractor told us he had moved many buildings for his brothers in law and since it was less than two miles he thought it could be done, in fact he thought that the farm lanes connected on the other side of the wooded growth to the left of the barn and we might luck out if a path could be opened up between the property in between the Morris property and ours and we wouldn’t have to move the structure via the town roads and have to move the overhead lines at the roadside.

That property was a 100-acre farm made up from the selloff of original land from our property in the 1940’s when a son had been given the land as a wedding present from the owners of the original property. There was an older small house on the land and the fields had been leased out since the son and his wife had passed in the 1980’s. The owner of the property was an out of towner and we had our local lawyer contact him, and when we showed an interest in moving a barn across his land, utilizing his farm road that had once joined ours, he countered with a price to purchase the whole darn place.

The way the lawyer talked this was a knockdown price as the owner had lost his tenant and was now without someone to oversee the rentals of his land or to live in the old house and tend the house or the property. We discussed this thoroughly and did our own research and decided “why the hell not?” Our lawyer made the counter offer and once that had been accepted we had a deed to the property even before the barn had been made movable and the receiving site had been completed.

We held a ‘moving the barn watch party’ once everything had been prepared and the section of the farm road had been repaired between the two properties and on the chosen day in mid-July the barn was moved across the fields to its new resting place in the flat section of land behind our existing barn. All the boys were there for the move and they were amazed by the huge structure moving across the fields and then across our lane where the guesthouse was and then on across to its new site, ready to be moved by hydraulics and huge rollers off onto its new foundation the next day. We now had dozens of more acres for David and Jeff to try and rent out but we also had a much larger area to create a huge corral that was entered from inside the huge barn as well as from gates at each end. The inside work was completed in another two weeks and by the beginning of August, we had our current stable load of horses and ponies living in the new barn with the new additions, six more ponies, and six more horses.

The “new” barn had a huge tack room and tons of storage area in the big loft that comprised most of the second level. We were lucky that the more dilapidated of the two sheds had enough good lumber on it to make all the necessary repairs needed to the “new” barn before the painting crew had painted the barn to match the other buildings at the homestead, the second shed now was being used up behind the pool house. It contained some gardening equipment so Riley and I didn’t have to go all the way to the barn for a trowel or pruning shears when we puttered around in the planting beds.

On the weekends, when both of our newlywed couples were home from school and work, they spent a good part of it maintaining our riding trails and marking off and preparing more of them through the new property, always leaving the open fields untouched, as David and Jeff had farmers coming to look at them, getting their bids in on acres they wanted for next Spring.

The Morris’ were doing well, all settled into their new house as the landscapers toiled to get the grounds back to showcase quality. New planting beds around the circular front drive, new foundation plantings all around the brick foundation, huge planter pots on the front steps, and judicious pruning of the trees surrounding the property. The place looked magnificent, and HEM photographed the features and began a website for the new business, the B&B Yvonne wanted. All in all, they had spent less in the purchase and renovation then they had received for their Connecticut property.

They even had a spa put in in one of the previously unused barns and inside it looked like one you’d see in a Manhattan day spa, just no attitude. The new pool and pool house was completed just two weeks before their first bookings were to arrive, a group of parents dropping off their college freshmen at the nearby university in Amherst. We took in the Morris boys for their first weekend opening, just so the parents and their staff of three could run the guesthouse without worrying about the boys being underfoot. They had leased out the spa to a local, who had successfully run her own day spa before, and all the reports for the weekend were glowing, they had a success on their hands.

We, on the other hand, had their five boys for the weekend, and gluttons for punishment that we were, we invited Max and Bill to spend the weekend with all the boys, camping out in the now empty barn, Riley and I making use of the now empty loft so we could keep a discreet eye on them. In the morning, after everyone had a chance to use the bathrooms and we had egg sandwiches, we decided to take one of the new trails that went into the new property, so with all the boys mounted up and Dave and Jeff along for the ride, Riley and I led our posse into previously unridden territory, where no man in current times had ridden before.

Our Authors deserve to know if their works are being read. Let Art know you are reading. Email him at: ArtWest at CastleRoland dot Net