The Dream

“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.”

--Henry David Thoreau

From the beginning, Greg talked about building a house... When I say "building a house", I don't mean hiring contractors to build your house, I mean designing and building from the ground up. Back then he had dozens of sketch books full of house designs, it was his dream, a dream compatible with mine.

My dream was to live in a house off-the-grid. In more ambitious, confident moments of my life before I let door slamming teachers tell me that I was only smart enough to be a homemaker or dance instructor, I wanted to work in the field of renewable energy. Nature is capable of giving us all the energy we need, we just do what everyone else does. The oil companies are the door slammers for other forms of energy. It amazes me how many people question the possibility of living off-the- grid in a comfortable manner, when I know people who do. It is possible. It is happening. It is only practical, but people are scared to open that door, and think that people who want to are crazy.

We had the dream. Just not the means to make it happen. An artist and a homemaker with pockets full of optimism, hope, and lots and lots of love.

When we first married, 1994, we bought a trailer house in Mendon for $1500. The place should have been condemned. It still makes me sick to think a family of five lived there. We hauled away numerous load of garbage, gutted the structure, put a new roof on, replaced the rotted floors, put in Sheetrock and salvaged stuff from others' remodels to put it back together. We put in a lot of time, but at most $2000. We lived there for 18 months for less than $150/month for lot rent and utilities. We then sold the trailer house for $9000 which we used for a down payment on the little white house in Logan, which we bought from my mother's mother. The joy of having a yard, garden, and more than ten feet between you and your nocturnal neighbors.

Then we got stuck. I was happy being a homemaker; Greg was not happy being a pressman, the job paid the bills.... but wasn't getting him closer to his dream.

In the early years of our marriage, with small children, we spent weekends driving around looking for the perfect piece of land. We wanted something rocky with a South facing slope, a stream, and a low low price. We just weren't finding it.

Like most things in life, what we ended up buying (2002) was a compromise, something that we could afford. A flat, rockless, waterless one and a half acre fenced lot with a well, an orchard, and a few outbuildings. We refinanced our house to pay for it and Greg started making plans for his dad to spend the next summer there helping build a house. We moved a 1937 Catalina camp trailer to the site to stay in on weekends.


Spring of 2003, Greg's dad unexpectedly died. Greg and his dad were close. The dream of building a house was a shared one. The summer that was to be spent building, was spent mourning. But at least we had a getaway in the country.


(Later, while hauling rocks to our land, the neighbors told us that the previous owners had hauled every single rock off the piece of land. They found it hilarious that we were now hauling them back.)