Announcing Our New Home
As a boy, as a teen, and right up until I was an unsettled and aimless dreamer in my twenties, I tossed pennies into wishing wells and fountains. I always prayed for the same result: an interesting life.
I have always believed in intuition, instincts, and yes, chasing dreams. My father hated that about me, and it’s what kept us from talking for years on end.
While I have never been financially wealthy, I have experienced an interesting life, met engaging, lovely, and even hateful people, and have changed lives and some towns through this humble existence.
When Atticus and I hiked our first 4,000-footer one September, I could feel the earth shift beneath our souls. At the time, I was publishing the Undertoad in Newburyport. Every two weeks, we impacted our corner of the world by inches and sometimes by miles.
That December, Atticus and I took a lover and her dog to a Stowe, Vermont, country inn. On the way home, we stopped for a dog bathroom break in Franconia Notch. Snow and wind whipped around us, we shivered, and rushed back into the car as the howling storm chased us.
I could not imagine being one of those rare folks who hiked the White Mountains in winter. Yet a year to the day, Atticus and I set out on the first of many hikes to become only the second dog and fourteenth human to reach all 48 of New Hampshire’s 4,000-foot peaks in a single calendar winter.
Within two years, I sold the Undertoad and Atti and I left Newburyport, the first place I’d ever lived that felt like home.
Funny how life sweeps up on you, isn’t it?
