Noah and Claire
Abby grew up in Southeastern Pennsylvania in a town called Chadds Ford, and Geoff grew up in Connecticut, spending time in both Newtown and New Haven. We both have memories of playing in and roaming through the fields and woods around our homes, and it is important to us that our children will also be able to have similar memories in their new home.
We both had ties to Maine during our childhoods as well. Geoff spent his summers traveling to his father’s family place on Deer Isle, and his mother’s family place in Lubec. Abby traveled with her parents to many different locations while she was growing up, but always in (or just outside of) Maine. When it came time to choose a college, Abby set her sites on going to school in Maine, and attended Colby College in Waterville, and told her parents when they crossed over the bridge into Kittery that she was never leaving. Geoff attended Wesleyan University in CT, and then went to California where he went to graduate school, and then became involved with the San Francisco Zen Center, eventually living in Green Gulch, where he was a co-manager of their farm. Looking for a change, and wanting to learn about working with horses, he took a job at Horsepower Farm as a Journey Person. Abby came there a few months later as an apprentice, and we have been together since then.
After leaving the farm, we moved around for a while, and Abby went to graduate school for a teaching degree, but we finally ended up in Thorndike, and then in Unity where we found a wonderful old farm at the end of a dirt road. We enthusiastically jumped into a major renovation project, and have learned a lot. In fact, we have ended up starting a business where we take on different properties to renovate and then rent or sell. It is fun to bring a house back to life and make it many times more energy efficient than when we found it. This work is exciting and gives us both a very flexible schedule, and times when we are extremely busy trying to complete a project.
We have two wonderful children; Noah who is three, and Claire who is one. They keep us very busy and very entertained. While we are really excited about all of the opportunities that cohousing offers all of us, we are looking very forward to having our children grow up in a close and safe community where they can play freely with their friends, yet under the watchful eyes and guidance of so many people.
We love our place, and our neighborhood, but we have been considering moving into Belfast off and on for the last few years. We want to be closer to town, and the amenities it offers, but still want to be able to have a large garden and raise farm animals. Now that we are involved with cohousing, we are so excited by the opportunity of being a part of this community, in our new "village" only a couple miles from Belfast. While we will be sad to leave our house that we have spent the last few years renovating and the community that we have in Unity, we are excited by the prospect of our new home and the cohousing community that already exists.
