Stalking the Burrow: How it all began

"It has kind of a potty-training color scheme," I said to Nate, as the car crawled up the dead end street, eying the yellow vinyl siding and brown metal trim.

It was Autumn of 2007, and we'd bundled up, jumped in the car, and begun a series of stalky drive-bys. We were casing the Burrow. It had been on the market for quite some time, described as a "bungalow". Now, I have always loved the Craftsman style bungalows, with their open floor plans, built in shelving units, deep eaves, and exposed rafters. This was no bungalow.

"You can paint that." Nate said. "And I'd put wood siding on it. I hate vinyl siding."

"What about that fence?" I asked. It was a rusted, wire farmhouse fence, held up by rusting metal posts. "That's pretty ugly."

"Well, you can change the fence." I craned my neck backward as we passed what had to be the world's widest driveway and continued to the top of the street.

We'd been married for four years; I'd been graduated from college for three. We were ready to change things up, try out our wings. We talked about packing a U-Haul and driving cross-country to California. We made several trips to Portland, Maine, looking at houses there. We were pretty serious about getting out of the Valley. And then my brother was killed in Iraq.

Suddenly life was too short, and there wasn't enough time to be around the people you loved. I realized that the only place I wanted to be right then was near my parents and my sisters, Nate's family, which had become my own, and around the friends who had stuck by and supported us.

We parked at the top of the dead end street and crunched across the gravel to the trail head.

"You gotta admit, it's a pretty killer location," Nate grinned, as we stepped into the woods. And it was. The Burrow sits at the bottom of a small mountain, most of which is protected state park. This offers all kinds of advantages, including the fact that the quiet dead end road will never become a through way.

Almost immediately after stepping through the wall of leaves and onto forest path, we came to a trickling stream spanned a little wooden footbridge. It was the first of the many hidden charms we found on the path that day. It winds along the barb-wired edge of a cow pasture. Occasionally, the views open up so that you can see the Valley rippling away into the hills. We smiled at each other. It was the Mountain that sold us on the Burrow.

"What's that thing in the yard?" I asked, as the car inched back by the house.

"I have NO idea." Nate said. We shamelessly stopped in front of the yard. (Let me just say here that since we moved in, a couple of other houses on the street have gone up for sale. We now know exactly how creepy we looked during this period of repeated drive-bys.)

At this time of year, the yard was brown. And right in the middle of the brown yard, there was this...thing. I assumed it was some kind of plant. It looked more like an anemone made of sticks, only nine feet tall. The thing was enormous, and it's stick-like fingers flexed and pointed in the breeze. "It's like an Ent." I said.

"The first thing I'm gonna do if we move in here is rip that thing out." Nate said. He eased onto the gas, and we turned out of C street and headed back home. As we drove away, I squinted back at the property. "Geez, there sure are a lot of sheds."