The Neighbours

This is a very religious area. There are the orthodox catholic ones if I may say. They belong to what I would call a sect. They are totally against contraception. So on RR 8 the average family has more than 10 kids. This is quite a change for a guy who's been having its shares of feminist talks and lessons thoughout his life! I neither condemn nor condoned such an approach and I am not ready to say that this is their choice. I happen to think that they have not been exposed to alternatives so they are not in to make a choice. My own father comes from a family of 14 kids, two of which died in early in their lives. Not everybody around here is in this category There is this woman up my house who is alone and has been so for the last 25 years in a house she bought then. The area has changed quite dramatically over the years. There use to be a school in here. I mean we are in the bush! I met two men so far who have been attending the school. They both were born here. One is 73 and living in the suburb of Montreal and the other, 63, has retired from teaching art at a high school in Montreal. He is also a town councillor The town has 780 people. City Hall at this time is said to be extreme right. One reason for saying so is that as soon as they discovered someone was HIV positive they wanted to get rid of him (maybe through an order in council, which would have been quite stupid). Anyhow this city councillor I met is rather leftist which is quite something around here. We are not that many around here who could pretend to be more leftists than rightists. I might be the least religious person around here but that does not mean I am an atheist. I just don't go for any dogma and analyse whatever I am being told. I have my own grid and it ain't fitting much with many people around here although I am ready to confront them anytime But it is useless with dogmatic people. It's a waste of time. They don't even see their own contradictions... And as would say George Dubya: Those who are against us are evil. So the dialogue is limited.

Home is now more like it!

I made the big move a bit more than two months ago. It took me years in achieving this one. I used to be easy to move from one place to another. This time it seems I would never make it

I would call it not short of a miracle , for I struggled so much to be able to get this house. It was on sale and could not afford the price tag or any price tag for that matter. I negociated a deal with the owners. I am renting the house for one year and then I am buying it. We have a sort of binding contract funelling my options towards that end

It is BIG: around 3500 sq feet or 350 m². Located at 1700 feet (510 m) on a mountain slope at 2½ miles from the Maine/New Hampshire border it is quite peculiar. Such a house in Metropolis would cost around 10 times more than the money I have to come up with to pay for it. It is remote. It is even insane to come and stay here in a sense. It has to be a sort of self-running venture for nothing else around here will make this place an attraction, except maybe for Mount Megantic which has an observatory and the border trails just down the road here. There are 110 km (70 miles) of border trails for hiking right on the U.S./Canada border

Yet I deeply needed to get out of the city I could not handle the noise and the stress anymore and since I was working from home I considered this time was the best time to try to make the move. This house is by far the best thing I could have found considering my situation It has plenty of room, the equivalent of 17 rooms altogether, 7 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, big balconies overlooking the mountains, a living room big like a Metropolis apartment It still has room the size of an apartment that need to be exploited. It is on pillars right now

The summer are rather on the cool side which make me think the winter are going to be deep-freezing! I don't mind that as long as I can fix the heating system. One of the pleasure of being here for me is exactly that: fixing things. The last owner even built an elevator for the three floors! He probably spent quite a bit of money on that endeavour and in the end abandoned the idea. The cage is still there with a door for each floors. On each floor the elevator space look more like a wardrobe area than an elevator. I will thus use this as the central air heating system I have to conceive the whole thing from scratch. So far I talk to an engineer about my plan and he is quite positive about its working.

This place is a perfect setting for small meetings of all sorts: spiritual, literary, work related, political, etc. It can shelter 5 couples nicely. I would like it to become also an art gallery and other attractions linked to cultural activities. I am an eternal dreamer...