I am working on a new house in Duxbury and working with an excavator approaching retirement age who has lived and worked in town all his life. His name is F. He has been telling me stories of Duxbury before it became Yuppyville. He used to plow the field where we are building the house back in the fifties before there were any houses here. His grandfather was George Loring who had an ice business where he used to deliver ice to all the surrounding towns by horse drawn cart until the invention of the refrigerator put him out of business. Loring also used to bring his oxen over the Powder Point bridge and out to Saquish and walk them across to Clark’s Island at low tide where they would spend the summer. F told me he built the house the Hogans have just moved out of at the bottom of Tremont street when he was in his twenties, and he told me a lot of other stories about builders and developers around town. The field where we are now working ended up belonging to Bud Goodrich as compensation for unpaid bills to his feed and grain store, (Goodrich Lumber), Bud gave it to his daughter Nina and Nina sold it to the present owners.

It seems to me that it is better to live working outside, and with your muscles and your brains in a smalltown society rather than to work in an anonymous commuter-computer, bedroom community. Think of the advantages: You work with your body, physically, everyday, you work in the elements and close to nature and you work where you live. I think we have lost so much that was a part of the New England experience for 3 centuries. Now commuters want to re-create a fantasy of rural life but without the essential elements. Frank is moving to Maine when he retires and I think he is moving closer to home than farther away. He has 7 children of his own and his wife has four from a previous marriage. He went through a bad divorce in the seventies and ended up losing all he owned and owing thousands but he has managed to put himself financially on a high road for retirement, mostly because of the land he has owned for thirty years, now worth over a million dollars