Cape Ann Camp Site

Ahhh. Friday evening, and we have landed ourselves at Cape Ann Camp Site, not one mile from Wingaersheek Beach in West Gloucester, MA!

When Mary and I first met in 1988, I was living in Gloucester in the home of my great-aunt, the well-known artist and writer, Theresa Bernstein Meyerowitz. At the time, Mary was living in the Washington, DC area, soon to move to Woodburn Hill Farm, a communal intentional community in Southern Maryland, founded in 1975 and still thriving to this day.

We lived on Woodburn Hill Farm together for 4 or 5 months, celebrating an outdoor hippie wedding on the farm on July 2nd, 1989. After our honeymoon, I spirited Mary and Rene away to New England, where we lived with Theresa and several of her assistants for a series of summers. During the chilly seaside winters, we served as caretakers of Theresa's drafty and haunted house when Theresa was back in her studio on the Upper West Side of New York City.

We spent three full years in Gloucester, enjoying life by the ocean, living in semi-poverty most of the time while Mary pursued her undergraduate education at Lesley College in Cambridge (now known as Lesley University, the site of Rene's recently completed baccalaureate education). Medicaid, foodstamps, fuel assistance and the local food pantry kept us in good stead along with Theresa's largesse and our hard work cleaning the houses of the rich and not so famous of Cape Ann.

In 1992, we finally extricated ourselves and settled in Amherst, our home for the last 17 years. Actually, we moved to Western MA in search of intentional community, originally intent on life in Oregon or Northern California. However, we only got as far as the hills of the Pioneer Valley due to our attraction to the Sirius Community, a relationship that never blossomed into us becoming active members, however we remain friends of the community and hold their vision of sustainability and spiritual growth in our hearts. We are now actualizing that vision for our lives through more simple living, embarking on our tour of the United States in search of an intentional community to call home.

So, here we are, full circle, back on Cape Ann in our new biodiesel rig, Scottie LaBlanca, within reach of the ocean, the chilly sea air blowing in our open screen door, with a sunny weekend stretched before us. Local friends---including my lovely goddaughters---will visit us at our campsite, and we will bike and walk (and maybe even borrow a car), tooling around the seaside over the next 36 hours. We will be sure to take some photos and post them here, including you, dear Readers, in the action and adventure.

Thanks for stopping by, for indulging my walk down Memory Lane, and for supporting our full-time RV journey by paying us a call. Please leave a comment so we know that you were here, and our blessings to you from the shores of the New England seashore.

---Keith