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Crooked Brook Art farm includes almost a hundred wooded acres. I had just bought the second and larger piece of this hundred-acre wood in 1998 when in my elation I wrote these paragraphs. -EHC My wood feels just about the right size. I can see how this feeling might be temporary, only a pause for digestion, but I hope not. There are several features to the rightness of the property that suggest it might be just right. First, there is its twoness, there now being a piece to sell off to protect the other in terrible times, and also a piece for each son should I ever happen to die. Second, this new piece always seemed to be a stone in the throat of the old piece which is a gerrymandered shape, something like a dog's bone or the lips of an open mouth. Together they make a comfortable trapezoid, the southwestern corner of the town of Essex. Most important, and the biggest surprise, together they embrace a center which feels secret. They encompass a complexity sufficient to create privacy without insistence. It is this fact as much as their extraordinary beauty which makes my heart leap even when I am somewhere else. My wood howls for my touch, aches to be combed. When I begin to cut brush I am sometimes overcome by the years of brush to cut and I work more and more fiercely. When I remember to stop, it makes me afraid to realize how hard I am breathing, all alone out here. My wood grows ferociously, advancing every second, even in winter, with confidence in its many virtues, unafraid of dying because it is always dying. I am delighted beyond the power of words to express to be the inhabitant, companion and owner of so extraordinary a being. My ownership is a commission in a large, disorderly and frumpy army, an army in which my wood and I are only a squad. My ownership therefore bestows on me a responsibility to serve and protect. Because of who I am, my acceptance of this commission is my contribution to our partnership. Things being how they are, my wood needs me as much as I need it. And I am more than ever filled with gratitude at my good fortune to be a free person in a society which grants me and my wood the quiet enjoyment of each other.
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