Hazeldene

There's a place up the road from where I am now- a beautiful land called Hazeldene. I'm assuming it's called Hazeldene because there's a cast iron plaque on the ancient-stone-and-masonry wall that holds the gates that allow you onto the property, and that that plaque is on the set of gates that appears to lead to the drive that takes you to the stables behind the Big House. To be honest I'm not sure it there's a Small House, but the one evident house is large enough to be referred to as the Big House all on its' own. It appears to have gigantism. To be more accurate, it appears to have been built expressly for people who are afflicted with gigantism- from the outside, it looks as if it has only two floors but that these floors were each made twenty feet high.

I keep walking by this thing on my way down to the local village. There's a busy county road that runs right next to the sidewalk outside the semi-ancient stone wall, and should you be willing to risk some light jaywalking (even though I moved from Brooklyn NY to Bumblefuck NJ when I was young, I lived in the city long enough to absorb the lesson that any jaywalking that ended without the need of a tourniquet is much closer in spirit to crossing with the school crossing guard, sissy) you can feast your eyes on the horsies that belong to the possibly humongous owners of Hazeldene. They are pretty, pretty ponies indeed, and their blankets for the winter months are much better than the best comforter in my own house. That's fair, given that I couldn't even recoup the traveling expenses of putting myself out to stud, much less the vet's bills, but still it's the principle of the thing. What thing? I have no idea, but I had to see for myself just what it was like inside this grand mansion of the Fens.

 I made a whopping big casserole dish of my sister's crisp recipe to bring to Hazeldene, because I have yet to meet a person who can't be won over with the right amount of brown sugar. There are some apples here that are just wrong, too-close-to-an-industrial-accident kind of wrong, and with strange lumps that almost cry out for a session with a  master phrenologist ("phren" from the Latin meaning "head-bump"; "-ologist" from the Greek meaning "gasbag.") They are lumpy and frightening and the size of medium cabbages, and they're perfect for a delightful crisp. Only you don't want to call it a crisp, because that says to the British listener that you've just made a delightful potato chip and they become confused when asked if they would like a share of it. One can see the British listener's imagination trying to figure out how they are going to receive some of the potato chip- on a plate? As crumbs, served with a tiny broom so that you can just sweep them into your mouth? One can usually see the British listener's polite refusal already well formed in their eyes before one remembers to call the crisp a crumble. Or at least I do, because I can be slow on the uptake.

So I set off for that glorious one-and-a-half acre estate, muttering "Crumble. Crumble. Apple Crumble" to myself and smiling broadly at anyone I saw walking along the way. I swiveled my head sharply to smile broadly at people if I had to (and I don't mind telling you that I got  even broader smiles in return, and widened eyes that burned with something that probably wasn't fear!) I marched up to the massive front door- I'd been tempted to go around the side and look for the service entrance, but I'm An American, so I wouldn't even know what one looked like if I found it, like are the doors round like Hobbit-house doors- which reminded me that I should ask the person who answered something about Hobbits, because all British people love being compared with them, am I right?- but I marched up to that massive front door, and I rang the bell. I made sure to run right over to the window so that I could witness the butler or goblin or Edwardian ghost answer it. It was hard to stand in the elephantine shrubbery and stand on tiptoe and balance my crisp (sorry: crumble!) but I did it, for I was the intrepid explorer, dammit, and if there was genteel freakishness to be witnessed, I was going to witness it, all right.

She must have come up from the other side of the house or wing or flown to the door on her broomstick or something, because I didn't see the lady of the house open the door- I only became aware of someone making gentle retching noises to my left after a period of about three minutes. I looked: she was amazing, standing there in her regular clothes (jeans even!) as if she hadn't been left at the altar decades earlier and been waiting around for her fiance in her decaying wedding dress ever since. There wasn't even a bonnet, which was a disappointment, but I figured there must be more artifacts in the house. "May I help you?" said the Lady.

"Hey, hi, I'm Jennifer and I'm the American from up the road a ways- your house is really enormous. It's just as enormous as it can be on the outside!" I said the last bit with a Louisiana accent, just to drive home the point that I'm American and that makes me cool, because accents are cool. I knew I wasn't going to get closer to any of the inherent fun-ness of this actual British Lady without providing some weirdness of my own: Louisiana Bayou Talk would be my ticket inside! The Lady just stood there in her not-at-all creepy jeans, squinting lightly at me, smiling lightly too. I noticed that she was large but in a regular way. "Are you-all gonna invite me in or do I haf ta stand here lookin' pathetic until even the mosquitoes don't wanna take a sip of me?" I asked.

The Lady blinked a fair amount during the pause that followed. "...mosquitoes?" she said, and I waltzed past her into the foyer, because that was close enough to an invitation for me....the place was huge, but a huge you could get used to: the ceilings were really high, and must have been made that way during WWII so that the patriotic owner could hide a Spitfire attack plane in it, just in case the countryside needed a Spitfire to roar out of the second-story window during a German raid, scaring the pants off The Fuhrer and smashing all the windows and brickwork. "You had a Spitfire in here. Wow." I said, still looking up.  "...Pardon?" the Lady asked. She was being coy, but I wasn't to be put off. I decided to be un-coy (in retrospect, it's been suggested that what I was being was Rude. I didn't care for the suggestion.) I looked for the giant marble staircase that led to the landing that would naturally have as much floor space as my dining room, to better afford the necessary gawping space for the ancient familial crest that would assuredly be in stained glass above it. There was no such window. I took the still damn big mahogany staircase upstairs, turning to hand over the dessert halfway up.

"This here is a crisp! It's just like a crumble, but it's real easy to say because there's only one syllable. Y'all got too many syllables over here, I'll say that. Darlin'." I said this to the Lady as she took the casserole dish. She surprised me by answering: "I concur." She sounded posh ("posh" is British for Real Fancy-Like.)

"See, now you coulda just said Yeah. Or Ayuh, if the New England thang would feel more comfortable comin' out of your mouth." I was having trouble keeping track of which accent was most effective on her...perspective? Mood? I wasn't sure, but I'd found what I was looking for: A bedroom. A wardrobe- no closet for the Lady, and it made me instantly sad to think of rich people not having a closet. Not even the rich people. In America, rich people had closets as big as a small stable. It was pitiful. The wardrobe did contain a fair amount  of clothes that we could use (my very first job was as a costumer's assistant at a small, threadbare theater, and I learned that one can always find a way to make any kind of fabric into a costume: blazers and ballgowns may be desirable, but no piece of clothing could ever be more glorious than when it transforms into a sequined tunic for Mustardseed's only scene in A Midsummer Night's Dream.) I threw a long dress at the Lady, and tied a ribbon around her torso just beneath the bust.

"There. Now you're Eliza Bennett, before she's met her Darcy. Sorry- I mean y'all are Eliza Bennett." I said, and the Lady was smiling oh so gently now.

"That is a funny accent." she said.

"Thanks- yours is funny, too. It's real funny-like." I replied, and she giggled. "Here." The Lady pulled an aviator's helmet and goggles from the back of her wardrobe. A bit of snow fell out with it, and though my brain screamed with the need to burrow into the back of that wardrobe and bring back a satyr, I stopped myself. Next time. In the meanwhile, the Lady had beckoned me downstairs. We went back down the giant staircase and into the huge living room, and the Lady set up chairs, one right behind another.

"You can be the brash, inexperienced Yankee pilot, and I'll be the long-suffering British co-pilot." she said, and pulled up the dress around her knees as she sat down so that she had room for her invisible machine gun. I clapped my hands.

"You are fun! That's a relief- for a second I thought that you'd want to talk about gardening."

"Isn't it 'y'all are fun'?" she asked. There was mischief in her eyes. It was such a welcoming look that I forgot all about my disappointment at the lack of a house ghost.

"Yes ma'am, it sure is: y'all are real fun." I said, and sat down in the seat she's set for me, prepared to take down as many German planes as a fake Southerner and a Lady in Edwardian costuming could manage.