real beauty

(via)

I'd like to move to the country. Live on a farm. Well, not quite a farm. We wouldn't have any livestock, only produce. Keep a couple chickens. Maybe a rooster for good measure. Have a few choice hounds to protect the henhouse. A cat that comes and goes.

Ideally it would be my grandmother's old house in rural Connecticut. Or some reincarnation of that.

The house served as a colonial inn and tavern during the Revolutionary War and onwards. Since then it's survived a couple of fires and the most basic modifications (modern plumbing, etc).

Out back my grandmother built a barn behind the garage. A big, hollow, red-brown wooden barn. A book barn.

Inside were four walls of floor to ceiling bookshelves. The two levels were delineated by a horseshoe balcony along the three walls facing the door. In the center were a few couches and chairs, a wood-burning stove. There was a desk too, a couple of rocking chairs and a bench or two by the windows on the upper floor, and a toilet room under the staircase.

It might be the most wonderful, ideal home imaginable. Nancy Phelps Blum was a phenomenal woman. She was a tiny woman, but she was mighty. Intelligent. Extraordinarily well-read. In the last few years of her life she researched and wrote her entire family history as well as a book chronicling the life of the Phelps Inn. She took full advantage of the abundant nature she surrounded herself in, fighting against paving the dirt roads of Colebrook, supporting the Nature Conservancy and Historical Society, exploring, truly knowing the teeming forests and brooks at her doorsteps, keeping her garden.

If I reflect any of the charming, dynamic facets of her personality by late in my life, I will be sincerely full and pleased with myself.

(here and here)