When I married into this old farming family in 1996, I quickly learned the importance of that pot of coffee on the stove and the implied welcome that the Hardings long knew it held. As much as the miles of stone walls and the cows grazing on these hills, as much as our 300 year-old home and the very kitchen where it brewed, coffee belonged here. It greeted every farmer and farmhand at dawn and it brought them in from milking at their 9am break. Townspeople would show up at will to gather at the harvest table, and Grandma Helen always had a pot going. Sunday coffee lured in politicians and undertakers, aunts, uncles, grandkids, brothers, and sisters. At this New England home, with all its reticent farmers, coffee spoke more words than the people who drank it. The aroma from the white porcelain percolator bubbling on the stove told everyone who entered the Ashlawn Farmhouse “You are Welcome Here.”
- Carol Dahlke