My own little Eden

I spent the first eleven years of my life in Westborough, Massachusetts, a relatively small town in the middle of the state, between Worcester and Boston.  I'll insert a satellite view here at some point, but I'd prefer to focus on the story for the moment.

A few years before I was born, my dad had a brand-new modern house, called a deck house, constructed on the lot next door to the very old farmhouse my family lived in at the time.  The main motivation for this was to provide our allergy-ridden family with a nice, clean, allergen-free home. I'm not sure how effective it was but it seems like quite a heartfelt gesture to me.

So the "new" house was what I came home from the hospital to and where I remained living until my parents divorced and I started to spend time with my mom in Boston on weekends and during the summer.  At that point (1982?), my three sisters, Melanie, Jenny and Sarah, and my brother Pete were all out of the house and at college and beyond.  So unfortunately, I was stuck with my dad, who had changed from how we all remembered him in the past, and his new wife, Jocelyn, who was quite mentally unstable and basically blamed me for everything from her parrot not talking to her to my father's unhappiness.  Not the healthiest home environment!

Here's a rare picture of both the old and new houses:



We owned about eleven acres of land behind our house, but that number was irrelevant to me as a child because other than lots of stone walls, there was nothing stopping me an my friends from exploring further.

One of our favorite places to go was the "ghost town," which in reality was a long ago abandoned chicken farm, I think (siblings feel free to chime in within the comments section).  It was sufficiently creepy, though.  Eventually, a pleasant hippy couple purchased the property and built an underground house next to the ghost town. The front, southern-exposed side of the house was all glass, everything else was truly underground. The owners were nice enough to us but clearly preferred their privacy, so we did our best to bypass the area from then on.

Perhaps my favorite section was definitely within our property lines.  Cross Hill was a beautiful grassy hill with trees along the edge and a long stone wall bordering the property line.  It was called cross hill because my sister Jenny used to hold religious services there and had erected a simple cross using leftover stockade fence from the property.  The was a row of pine trees close together which served as a wall around a huge bed of soft green moss; an excellent napping spot.  One curious feature about this area is that it was pockmarked with rather large holes, maybe ten feet around and five feet deep.  These turned out to be spots where my dad had taken a tractor and transplanted some trees to our front yard at the "new" house.  Due to our family connection with Frederick Law Olmsted, I think my dad considered himself an amateur landscape architect.

Heading further from our homes, we would arrive at the railroad tracks, which was kind of our own unofficial border. We rarely went beyond the tracks.  Working our way back home inevitably required some muddy walks through Cedar Swamp.  Always a good source for interesting plants and the occasional animal carcass.  One day in the swamp I found a completely sun-bleached carcass of an animal with huge sharp teeth built around a small body.  I still have no idea what that was.

Venturing into another section of the swamp that still had living trees in it, we often found small fur traps, which were extremely dangerous.  So naturally, we would un-spring the traps with a solid stick, rinse them off and bring them home to play with (sorry mom).

Another favorite pastime was stalking hunters who were not allowed on our property and then scaring them off.  Those and high schoolers in four wheelers who were under the false impression that they could come on our land and mess it up.  One day, we saw a group in a Bronco leave the road and drive over a barbed wire fence, knocking over a fence post in the process.  As they sped into the woods, we repaired the fence and post to the best of our ability, but we couldn't get the post to stay straight and it pointed inward at a 45 degree angle. Eventually the Bronco came back.  What happened next, no one saw coming.  They drove the Bronco right into the same post they had knocked over earlier. Due to the angle we left it at, the post got wedged up in their engine bay and actually lifted the truck off the ground, hopefully rupturing their oil pan or something equally inconvenient.

All we could do was stand there and cheer in celebration of our great achievement.  Then I think we ran before they beat us up.  That was a good day!