Imagaine…You are retired in your cedar log home on a brown pebbled lane amidst tall green grasses speckled with buttery yellow wildflowers. Sit on your front farmers porch, look through your telescope and watch the field across the road. Wild grouse run across the ridge line, a mother deer and fawn emerge from the tree line. Watch the horizon grow tangerine reflecting the sunset opposite. Drawn from under the covers next morning, sip hot coffee and peek and the sky until you can not bear the brilliance. The sun climbs quickly like a movie in fast motion.

Farmers mow the hay and the aroma takes you back to your childhood. You feed the Canadian geese and their young until four hundred congregate, circle your house and honk good-bye as they head east for the winter.

During the winter, you and your telescope explore the stars in the Milky Way, and you use some fast film to capture the snow glimmering on those Douglas Furs in the moonlight, and those watery icicles sparkling in the morning sun.

Too good to be true? That is what we had…until the spring of 2006. Know those lovely red tomatoes you get at the supermarket from Madison, Maine? Back Yard Beauties. They are grown in a glass house covering more than twenty acres--directly across from our log home. Sit in our dining room, or living room and you might be assaulted by the reflection of a solid wall of mirror like glass; you might be assaulted if we did not keep our shades drawn. Our front farmers porch is quiet and dusty. Our telescope is packed away. No more geese to watch and feed. Picturesque snowy nights? Gone. Now on a snowy night, the house of glass with its roof of continual peaks leaves its curtains open and spill twenty-three acres of florescent light into our atmosphere, to melt the snow. No need for tripod or fast film. It looks like LaGuardia Airport here. Out back, our frosted fur trees stand eerily in the yellowish glow. Put your camera away. Its 3:00 AM. You trudge back to bed but you can’t sleep for the yellow glow filling your bedroom--that was what woke you up after all. Rather than count sheep, you weep.

Buy our house? They can’t afford it, they are about to build two more glass houses adjacent to the one there…and two bio-mass units…and office space…and parking lots…OH, oh, I almost forgot…and the Orkin man. We are besieged by fruit flies and they have hired the Orkin man to figure it out and see if he can help us.

Move? If we could get the price our house was worth before Back Yard Beauties became our front yard nightmare we would move. But if we sell at the market value now, we would have to live in a bread box.