If you live in Northeast Connecticut, you are familiar with hilly driveways. When we lived in Scotland, our home was near the center of town, which means we lived along side of Route 14 in a place where the highway was flat.  Our driveway was flat too. We only needed all season tires to drive through snow that we hadn’t plowed yet or to drive over snow in the driveway that had partially melted and then froze at night. We skittered over that ice to Route 14, because you don’t need much traction at all to move a car over a flat surface. Then we moved to Hampton, where almost all highways are hilly, and if a driveway is flat, it opens onto a hill. Sigh.

The first winter here I tried to go grocery shopping on a day in which we had had no snow or freezing rain. But the driveway was shiny. I couldn’t pull up the driveway. The next day it got warm enough to melt the glare ice, and I was really hungry. Friends in Hampton said, get snow tires or get a four wheel drive car. Instead I called my step-son in Vermont. He said snow tires and four wheel drive mean nothing on an icy hill. We, in mountainous Vermont, know that.  Get studded tires. I did so, and have had no problems driving over icy driveways or icy roads since then.  But most local roads in Hampton and other towns in the northeast have no streetlights (Route 14 had one almost opposite our house in Scotland).  When you haven’t lived in a town for a million years yet, and you go to someone’s home in town for dinner after it’s dark, you might miss their driveway, especially if their home has a driveway and house and garage arrangement that is downhill and similar to their neighbor’s house and garage and driveway layout.  And there is no streetlight. The other night I wound up in front of my friend’s neighbor’s house. Guess what? Studded tires make mud out of wet lawn, and you have no traction in wet mud, even with studs. My friend’s neighbor saved me by getting my car out of his lawn. All of this could have been avoided if we still used horses.

My husband was much older than me, and he was born and raised in rural, southwest Ohio. His next-door neighbors were his great aunt and uncle, Lizzie and Tom. Although my husband’s family had a car, Uncle Tom and Aunt Lizzie refused to get one. Their answer when asked was, you don’t have to tell a horse how to start, and you don’t have to tell him how to stop.

My great-grandfather was a Swedish immigrant, and he had a home business as a confectioner, making ice cream and candy (which my grandfather loved until his death, and I love, but I figure it’s genetic). There was no electricity then, so no refrigeration yet. They used to cut ice from ponds and put the ice in an ice-house and cover it with sawdust. Therefore, when he made the ice cream, you had to eat it right away, because it wouldn’t stay unmelted very long in an ice box.  He had some cows, and he sold the extra milk and cream to local people in Babylon, Long Island, by horse and wagon. Then one customer family moved away, and the new people didn’t want any milk or cream. The horse knew the delivery route by heart. When he tried to go to the home of the former customer, my great-grandfather and my grandfather tried to steer him away from that. But he was stronger than them, being a draft horse. They finally gave up and just went to the former customer’s house, made some noise banging the tall milk cans, and the horse then went on to the next customer’s house.

I tell you this because if I had a horse and wagon, I wouldn’t have gotten stuck in the yard of my friend’s neighbor. The horse doesn’t have studs on his hooves, and he could have pulled my wagon out of that downhill yard. Also, horses are better than modern technology in other ways.  Once, a friend of mine went off horseback-riding on trails in the woods miles away from her house and barn. She fell off and not only broke her leg, but hit her head and became unconscious.  The horse went back to the barn all by itself, and when my friend’s family saw it without a rider, they went out searching for my friend, and upon finding her miles away on a trail, they called for EMTs and an ambulance. Well, today she could wear a medical alert necklace that works on GPS, and if you fall and the necklace hits ground, it alerts EMTs to the emergency and where your body will be found.  If you take a long walk on a woodsy trail and forget to wear the necklace, you’re doomed.  But a horse will never forget where the barn is.  So much for modern technology.

Angela Hawkins Fichter