Welcome to this house I have always loved.

I didn't grow up here but my mother spent her summers here. And my sister was born upstairs. Nearly every Sunday all spring and fall, my family and I came for tea and occasionally lunch.

Popsy is what I think mother called Grandpa. They were very close. So she would go out there a lot and bring us all out there, so we got to know Stonehurst very well.

Great grandpa set up a foundation of trusts that owned Stonehurst. RTP, my grandpa, rented Stonehurst from the trust. He didn't own it. He rented it.

On Sundays...I dressed up in something clean and pretty and wore my shiny black Mary Jane shoes.

As my mother and I went through the Great Hall to the parlor, she always took my hand as the floors were polished to such a high gloss that I often slipped and fell

I took my shoes off and went sliding around, from the dining room to the main hall. We went sliding through the whole thing. That was all true; we would do it all the time. It was something to do.

As we passed into the parlor, there was always a huge vase of flowers on the stand by the door. They were all freshly cut from the gardens or the greenhouse & beautifully arranged by Clara or Lillian

My step grandmother, for whom I was named, always sat in a dark green cut velvet chair to the left of the fireplace and by the huge, ornate mahogany table in the middle of the room.

My step-grandmother always wore long strands of pearls.... I often sat on her lap but once-mother told me-I pulled them & they broke all over the floor. I was never invited to sit on her lap again.

When I was a little older, there were toys and games in the cupboard to the side of the fireplace

games such as Lotto or Jackstraws [or puzzles] that even my mother may have played with.

But my favorite was the marble fireplace. The fireplace had a pair of huge brass andirons with two prancing horses each at their base.

When there was no fire I could sit on the marble seats within. The Paine men were tall and tradition had it that they hadn't reached manhood until they could no longer stand under the mantelpiece.

The furniture was heavy and massive and had elegant carvings of strong men for legs holding up the table top

and a goat-like god with horns on the back of another.

These were all things to fascinate a young girl who was supposed to stay quiet while the adults talked and had their tea.

I was prim and proper enough to know that you're not wanted upstairs.... It's just off limits.

Besides tea, we occasionally had Sunday lunches and always Thanksgiving.

The table was set with the formal silverware I found almost too large to handle, and huge, monogrammed linen napkins. There were wine glasses of crystal

and before dessert, finger bowls with florets of viola or sweet peas.

It was the desert I looked forward to...always a huge platter of ice cream, covered with dollops of whipped cream.

We used to go blueberry picking with a bucket...and we'd come back in and made blueberry ice cream and this sort of thing. I loved that.

There was a greenhouse. One end was roses and the other end was other things, and here's the little fire thing where we used to go and have our picnics

There was a big arbor supporting the grapes that they grew...down by the garage and greenhouses. These survived outside and we made grape jelly every year.

I got to know grandpa. He had made me memorize the Gettysburg Address.... I was leaning against the barn door and he was out near the grape arbor and I had to bellow it out. Took about five hours.

Here's the entrance to the barn...and the place where you put carriages and so forth...and there's the paddock and the tack room.... There was a stone wall and a kind of pit where all the manure went.

There's that path as you go up the hill, around the barn, by the rhubarb.... I think that's where the henhouses were too.

They had some chicken coops for Theodore's chickens and Lydia's chickens.

Dotsy and I still laugh about when we saw this big big deer in the woods and we looked at eachother, we yelled and we flew back to the house. No thought of standing there and watching. Tragic.