We started out building a toolshed, but that morphed into a cabin and then just kept on growing–with the addition of a storage shed, new wing, and a deck–until finally it became a real house.
After all that, our building funds were depleted. So for a few years we just worked on creating a garden–removing rocks and planting grass and perennials. Meanwhile, Buzz started drawing plans for a real living room and a big front porch.
And then, one day, we realized we had enough in our building fund to accomplish his plans. Once again, the construction process began…
So now we had a real house, but we were still only coming up from New Jersey on weekends and when Buzz had vacation time off from the theatre he’d founded, Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey, and his theatre professorship at Drew University.
That changed in 2004, when–already having resigned from the theatre as artistic director–he left academia and founded a film company with Aaron Wiederspahn called Either/Or Films, which eventually produced a feature film, The Sensation of Sight starring David Strathairn, Ian Somerhalder, and Jane Adams.
But if we were going to be staying there, we needed more room, What else could we do but keep on building?
Of course I took photos, as usual, but during this time we all entered the digital age. My point and shoot film camera became replaced by a digital camera (and, later, by the camera on my iPhone). And now all those photos are stored either on CDs or thumb drives. Or–worse case scenario–I forgot to take them off an old computer. During the last several weeks I’ve been looking for them, but…so far no luck.
Since I can’t show those, I’ll jump right to the end result–our house as it looks today in Spring:
And how it looks in Summer from the garden with some of our day lilies in bloom:
And how it looks in Fall:
And finally how it looks in Winter:
Which brings me to where we are now, in March, just having had one of the biggest snowfalls in the decades since we’ve lived here. But that’s for next time…