Photo Album > The Gift of An Ordinary Day in Pictures
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My parents' house
We came for a couple of months, and stayed for three years.
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The view we all came to love
What I love about living here is that every dawn is different, the mountains are eternal but always changing.
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My cottage kitchen
Much as I despaired of ever being able to cook in this kitchen, I grew rather fond of it, and felt liberated by its limitations.
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The attached barn
Sometimes, at dusk, this space would fill with bats on their way out for the night. We learned to keep the door shut till after dark.
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Ripping the place apart
"Even our carefully orchestrated salvage operation doesn't prepare me for the experience of watching a house die."
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Tear-down morning
"We have said our good-byes to the house and made our peace with the day's work."
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The back hoe guy is late
". . . And so the boys get a head start on the job, tossing rocks and logs thorugh the remaining windows, thrilled by the sound of glass breaking without blame or consequence."
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The barn is the first part to go
"It is warm in the sun, but I shiver anyway, shaken by the inescapable violence of house razing, the finality of it all."
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Whoosh.
"As the great claw finally swings through the roof, bats shoot up through the gaping hole and spin away into the morning sunshine."
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So fragile . . .
"This house that has managed to withstand the elements for two centuries, it crumples now as easily as a dollhouse made of balsa wood."
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We start again
The timberframe of the new house, on the same footprint as the old.
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The corner of the kitchen
We chose windows over cabinets, a view over practicality -- who cares if you have to walk down the hall for a can of soup?
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An open floor plan
Downstairs, the space all flows--it is, in effect, all one room.
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Master bedroom
Our bedroom is tiny, but with all the windows open, it feels as if we are sleeping in the treetops.
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Harvesting granite
My dad helped us pick up granite from the woods behind his house, to create the fireplace in ours.
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The screened porch
All along, we considered the porch to be the most important room in the house.
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A long process
Our house from below, still about a year from completion.
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Finished
The first floor
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The kitchen garden
We moved in the first week of October; by the next summer the garden looked pretty well established.
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