Pleun Clara Bouricius, Plainfield, MA

I came to Plainfield 15 years ago for temporary quiet to finish my dissertation. Taking the air on a stone wall in front my apartment (a converted chicken house) that same evening, I was caught forever by a sea of fireflies over the field. I became drunk picking blueberries in the rain that very September, and lyrical following tracks in the very first snow of what would turn out to be a winter never to be forgotten: blue diamond snow, the cracking of tree limbs at -25F, frozen pipes from January to late April.

Only years and years later did I realize that my convenient "seat" on the stone wall in my theater-of-the-field did not get there by accident -- that our "nature" is literally imprinted with well over two hundred years of human activity. And now the great adventure is discovery of the patterns of history and nature intertwined: cellar holes with daylillies, bricks from chimneys mixed in piles of field stones brought up by plow and frost, marks at the bottom of giant pines that testify to logging done some 50 or 100 years ago.

In Plainfield, we started numbering our houses when we got 911 -- right around 1995. But the first settlers did not have the convenience of numbers along a road: the parcel of land that is now # 8 began as "starting at a large Beech Tree on the County Road leading to Cummington," changed to "a Stone Wall in the South line of George Vining's home farm" and then to "along a Stone Wall on land formerly known as ..."

I did not have my land surveyed when I bought it. I could, after all, see for myself that it was there: bounded by a road, a brook, and stone walls. I thus own approximately 12 acres of forested land on Upper Liberty Street in Plainfield, bounding Northerly on land "of Marshall Stetson." Stetson died on February 12, 1926.

I also own a cellar hole, ancient orchard, maple-lined abandoned road, brook that sports a rare salamander, skunkweed, moss, giant white pines, and piles of stones to attest to the difficulties of farming in the Hilltowns. "Own" is perhaps too strong a word. I pay taxes on time warp, a veritable Harry Potter entrance to a former world. Who needs a house?

Pleun Clara Bouricius