Over the 21 years we lived there, I prowled over just about every square inch of the place, and knew it intimately: stone walls built with boulders the size of wheelbarrows; the trace of a long-ago logging road; a secretive muskrat’s nest beside the brook; the grave of our old white cat, Cato, who fell afoul of a fisher one dark night. I regretted, however, that with so much else to do, I never could manage the land as I wished to, for firewood, or trails, or a really good pond in the swamp.

Another fly in the ointment of the old place was that the relatively unbroken woods just out back, where the dog and I could roam for hours and miles on either side of the old Appalachian Trail, were subdivided and sold for new houses. The development removed from the experience all traces of romance, adventure, and solitude, and we quit going there.

It was a relief to hear that Mother was thinking, as I was, of downsizing – but for different reasons. I wanted less land to care for in my declining years; she wanted lower property taxes. It didn’t matter. The result would be the same. I was at the time hors de combat with an infected prosthesis, and not really with it. So imagine my bemusement when I discovered we’d downsized to a forested lot two acres larger. On top of that, the forest was almost all softwood, and the swamp was uphill from the house site, instead of down.

From time to time, taking breaks from working around the new house, I walked the property to begin to get to know it. First the boundaries. I found all the corner markers, but discovered at the same time that the boundary at the upper end couldn’t be walked in the summer without rubber knee boots and in the winter without snowshoes. A couple of recently abandoned roads behind the house led to the remains of a really lousy logging job. I doubted I could ever clean it up.

The wild animals who’d preceded us here reacted variously. The deer retreated for a while from the new clearing, but now use the thick patch of spruce between us and the neighbors as their path from the swamp down to the field across the road. During the winter darkness, they use the driveway. When I finally get the motion-detecting outside lights up, this place is going to flash on and off like Times Square whenever they pass in the night. The red squirrels tested us, found us resolute and resourceful, and have stayed outside ever since. But the robins have found us to be saps for motherhood. One robin this year has laid five eggs in a nest perched on the top of a half-open bedroom casement window sash that we now can’t close till the chicks are fledged. Another has laid three more on the header just inside a door of the half-finished garage. How I’m going to get the rafters up and the roof on with her raising a family five feet away, I’m not quite sure.

Just as in the old place, a brook runs below the house. But the old one drained open fields, and was given to flooding and drought. This one drains a large area of swampy land, and runs pretty steadily all year long. It makes a lovely sound at night when the windows are open, or when we sit on the porch at dusk. We’ve got too many white pine behemoths around us. At the moment they’re making love, and showering everything with fine yellow dust. I had a nurseryman plant a bunch of moisture-loving tamaracks last summer. I love their light green in the spring, the way they wave in the wind like modern dancers, and their copper brown in the fall.

Down at the foot of what may someday be a lawn is a bit of a shrine. It’s marked by a large sculpture made by a dear friend many years ago during his welded-steel phase. His yard was once full of them, but his rustic neighbors delighted in pinging away at them at night with rifles, so he dispersed his collection, and I have this piece on permanent loan.

At the foot of the sculpture is a grave site. We’ve been here just two years now, but our beloved old dog lasted only a year before she had to leave us. So she’s down there in a beautiful clear pine box, with her friend Maggie’s ashes in an urn between her front paws. They’ve got their bowls with them, and the toys with which they often teased each other.

When the dog and I used to take our walks on the Appalachian Trail in Etna, she was always intrigued by a patch of myrtle beside the trail. If it was blooming, she sniffed thoughtfully at it, like a kid with a balsam pillow. So on one of her forays back to Etna, Mother dug up and brought back a couple of bucketfuls. The myrtle’s blooming at the moment on the dogs’ grave. Mindful that it’s an alien and invasive species, we’ve enclosed it with an oval fence. It’s in a way symbolic of our own residence here: We’re a bit of an alien and invasive species ourselves.