Robert Frost had not met Irmgard Clasen, or her late husband, Reinhard, when he wrote that line as part of "The Death of the Hired Man."

But the foster children who have lived in the old farmhouse on Highland Road needed a home, and the Clasens felt a duty to take them in. All 18 of them.Irmgard Clasen, now 76, doesn't feel poetic or seem especially noble as she sits at her kitchen table covered with oil cloth. A few feet away is the portable toilet for Tim, her first foster child. Now 34, Tim is trying to overcome the effects of seizures and hospitalization that left 92 pounds strung over 6 feet.

She always put in a full day on the farm and she still does, feeding the calves, ducks and geese, tending a large garden, "and when John's in the barn, I'm in the barn with him." John is her son.

"Most of the time, I'm outside until dark and then I'm tired. And I have dishes to wash."

Behind her rests a small television set. A yellow cat quietly lands on the sill of an open window. In front, a dog settles behind a gate blocking the way to a stranger willing to scratch an ear.

The 12-room farmhouse is old; it belonged to Reinhard's father and probably his grandfather, Irmgard Clasen guesses, and she never has lived any place else since her marriage in 1944. Outside, there is dust and lazy flies and farm equipment and old sheds.

Inside, 52 years of living, including a link to a wilder time - an electric guitar she played in a dance band led by her father on trumpet and featuring two sisters and a brother. But she isn't pining about not playing her guitar since a golden wedding anniversary party for an uncle and aunt 20 years ago. Other demands just kept getting in the way.

How's she holding up, what with farm work and parenting 18 foster children and three of their own?

"I don't know if it wears me out," she says. "Depends on what people think who look at you. The steps do come a little slower."

But, she says, smiling from across the table, "I'm still here and I still work and bake my eight loaves of bread a week.

"Looking back, some of the foster children I had I might not have been so willing to take in," she says. "But they came on an emergency basis. And then stayed."

Tim, soon to be coming home after a day at a center for adults with special needs in Grafton, was their first foster child. He came to them 32 years ago, autistic, unable to chew food, just starting to walk at 2, and destined, social workers told her, to a short life in a crib playing with keys and rattles.

He's still here, playing Scrabble or Uno in the evenings, going to the center during the day.

Seventeen other foster children have come into and out of the home since Tim was brought in.

The 18 have shared the house with three Clasen children. John, now 50 and their first child, still lives at home. Born profoundly deaf, John handles much of the work on the 60-acre dairy farm, including milking the 20 Holsteins.

Across the street is an upscale, neatly packaged subdivision, built on 40 Clasen acres willed to two of Reinhard's brothers who had no interest in farming.

But on this side of Highland, corn, hay and oats grow and cows gather for milking on a hill a dozen or so yards from the ramp built years ago to help get a foster child and her wheelchair into the house.

Irmgard is no help with the cows. She is allergic to milk.

"Good farm wife," she laughs. "Can't eat cheese. No milk. No ice cream. All those goody things."

But the premier goody thing on this farm - and this former Sunday School teacher won't feel comfortable about this statement - is Irmgard Clasen.

The Clasen children - including a fourth who died at seven weeks - were born in the late '40s and early '50s. Then, in 1964, the family took in Tim, "three days before my grandmother's birthday," she remembers.

The family became foster parents at the suggestion of John's teacher, who said the Clasens were good with children.

"We thought we would be taking in babies, but the Children's Service Society said there was a lot of kids who were not babies who needed help."

Two years after becoming Tim's parents, they were told of a foster child who needed to change families. The Clasens said yes and Melvin was brought in.

Irmgard couldn't believe what she saw.

"We knew him," she said. "He would come over and play with the kids. I didn't know he was a foster child."

Melvin, then a teenager, had no problem becoming part of the family. Years later, he and Mary Lou Clasen, the family's second child, married.

Through the years, children left and more children arrived.

The shortest stay? An 8-year-old, unable to feed herself, was taken back by her parents after three months. Still, Clasen says proudly, there was enough time to help the girl learn to hold a cup and drink from it.

With Tim and the farm work, Clasen has little time to philosophize about parenthood and her impact on the children she mothered. Instead, like any other parent, she worries about whether she has done a good enough job.

"They keep in contact with me," she says. "That's the biggest compliment they can give me, that they remember me."

*****

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Fostering love

- "Oftentimes, the child is that way because the parents are that way."

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- "You've got to have feelings for other people. After all, the child didn't choose to come here."

- "If they come from a dysfunctional family, they can come with lots of problems."

- "A happy home life is the biggest help you can give foster kids, because that's the kind of life they don't know."

- "Sometimes you have to learn to talk teenage lingo a little bit."

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