Click on images, they should get larger.In a few weeks, we'll be moving from Northampton, where I've lived in a modest little house for about 26 years, to another modest house, a little more modern and a little more spacious, with 2 bathrooms, and a detached studio where S.W.M.B.O. can do her fabric craft. The new house is in a very small town in the hills of Western Massachusetts, close to the Westfield River (a top-class whitewater canoe river surrounded by an extensive forest nature wilderness).
The paved road doesn't quite reach the new house -- but I got the 4-wheel-drive, what do I care? We'll get TV from a satellite dish and Internet over DSL. Because a storm left the area without electricity for a week last winter, we're installing a propane-fueled emergency electric generator that kicks in automatically when the regular power fails, so emergency crews will not find our starved, frozen corpses.
We have a wood stove in the living room and an oil burner. We expect to be quite cozy all winter. It's a pretty energy-efficient house as is, but we expect to be upgrading it with a variety of Al Gore-approved systems and gizmos. We get drinking water from a well with an electric pump, and our poop and pee will go to a septic tank and leach field.
Bears, coyotes, fox, raccoons, squirrels and chipmunks, all sorts of birds of prey, wild turkeys, fisher cats, and as you can see, a very large beaver pond a short walk downhill. Trees up the whizwang, and more room for S.W.M.B.O. to garden. We've already begun by planting New England wildflower seeds over the new leach field. Our cats -- until now, outdoor hunters, but in a very safe, civilized neighborhood -- should be simultaneously very happy and scared out of their wits. S.W.M.B.O. has seen herons in the beaver pond.
That's my reflection in the window of the sunroom.
Through the trees we can see the houses of two, maybe three neighbors. I suspect the night skies should be much clearer than they've been recently in Northampton. Lots of stars, the sub-telescopic planets, nebulæ.
The town's Congregational Church (founded 1764) has found a 21st-century way to serve the townspeople. Its parking lot is the nearest place to our house where we can get cell-phone reception. But the house will have a landline.
