Dear Marion,

Thank you for your letter with all its peacock-provocative
questions.

The hedge, about which you asked was originally planted to
define the perimeter of the yard and to provide some privacy when,
now 58 years ago, the house was a small castle looming over
fields of grass, wheat and corn. In its infancy one could
easily look over the hedge into the valley and onto White Top
and Mount Rogers on the horizon. To remain viable, a hemlock
hedge needs a modicum of new growth each year, and the height
of the hedge will unavoidably increase. First it was trimmed
from the ground, then from a step ladder, then from an eight
foot ladder. When I could no longer reach the top with a
twelve foot ladder, I gave up. The growth of the hedge 
reminds me of the children's song: Und eine Hecke riesengross
wuchs um das Schloss. That of course was eine Dornenhecke,
a hedge of thorns, but I can vouch for the fact that a 
hemlock hedge feels thorny enough when you fall into it
from a 12 foot ladder. If it isn't trimmed, the hedge will
grow and grow. Its shadows will mask the winter sun and
the rising moon, and the snow capped mountains behind it
will become only a memory. Even less desirable, as the
limited flow of sap is diverted into the upper branches,
the lower limbs will drop their needles and die;
the lower reaches of the hedge will become transparent
and then the retired CIA officer who has built a little
prefabricated house in the field below, will be able to
see me sitting on the porch, spinning my fantasies into
the computer; he will read my thoughts and report them
to his former superiors in Washington, and before you know
it my address will be Guantanamo.  

On to your next question. Two reasons for deferring the
pouring of the cement floor: When a house is built, first
the bureaucrats want to inspect the excavation, then they
want to inspect the footings, then they want to inspect the
foundation walls. Such inspections aren't feasible after
the floor has been poured. More important, however, that
at least until the first floor deck is covered, rain will
pour into a basement, and the rain water must drain into
the ground. If you pour concrete into an open basement,
you get a swimming pool and you have to hire a life guard,
an unnecessary expense.

How did I build the house? When I put up the big Belmont
addition, I employed a very eccentric but highly talented 
framer named Timothy LeBlanc, with whose idiosyncracies
I had been trained to cope in Medical School. He works
by himself, very fast and very neatly. His framing is
always admired for its precision. Tim thought that framing
a house on Nantucket would be a lark. After I had won my
case againt the Historic District Commission, had my home-
drawn construction plans approved by Mr. Bartlett, the
building inspector who then issued me a building permit,
had my land surveys endorsed by a surveyor from the
mainland, had the well dug, the basement excavated,
and the foundation walls poured, Tim drew up a materials
list which I placed with Shepley's. The day that the
material was delivered, Tim and I appeared on the Island
with our vans. A portable electric generator supplied
power for tools during the day, a marine storage battery
provided some light at night. There was even a portapotty.
Tim brought his camping gear. We slept each in his own van,
and we build the house.  Tim wouldn't let me help him much.
I was 75 he was 45 years old, but I did the grocery shopping 
and I was the dsignated driver. As soon as he finished with
the days' framing, at about 3:30 p.m., Tim hit the bottle.
A quart of Seagram 7 every two or three days. By 7 p.m.
Tim would be ready to start fixing supper. He was a superb
cook, and when he wasn't angry at me, he would invite me
to supper. He always let me clean up what dishes there were.

The house went up very fast. We started in mid-July. By October
the roof, the windows and the cedar shingles were in place.
Since the adhesive on the asphalt roof shingles hadn't had
the benfit of the summer sun to cure, a hurricane early
in November blew them off. Tim offered to install new shingles,
of course for a fee, but because he didn't have and didn't
want me to rent staging, he also wanted to remove a substantial
number of the white cedar shingles I had just paid him $5000
to nail in place. Replacing them after the roof was reinstalled
would cost at minimum another thousand dollars, I balked. I
thought I could find a roofer who would install them more
economically; and I was right. Tim was furious. He thought
I had betrayed him. I had paid him very generously. The forty-three
thousand dollars he had earned on Nantucket were equivalent to
twice his wages on the mainland; but he still felt exploited
because I had managed to put up the house at somewhere between
one fourth and one eighth of the cost that island contractors
would have charged. As of today, I've spent $75/square foot
for a 2500 sq ft structure, as opposed to $400 to $800 which
I would have had to pay for conventional construction. So much
for the peacock and his nest.

On to your next question: My father said he liked to ride horseback.
I don't know where he learned. The picture does show him on the
way to a house call. It was also a photo-op for the promotion of
the Mission. I can't remember his ever having made a second house
call on horseback. But I can remember many times his car got
stuck in mud.

The birds are robins that have fallen from the nest. Since I can't
remember any burials, I infer that they survived, flourished, and
were duly released to join their flock.

It was indeed I, who is standing with my father at the Marion 
railroad station, enroute to or from Cambridge.

The picture of Margrit standing between the two adult men was taken
when I was not in Konnarock. The picture has always puzzled me,
and now it's too late to ask her who the men were.

As for #193, the smiles are probably in response to a snide comment
from myself who was taking the picture. Noteworthy: my parents
urban European attire even after 14 years in the US, Mutz hiding 
behind my mother's leg, Margaret's separation from my parents.
Obviously we had been walking separately, in two pairs. When I
peeled away to take the picture, Margaret was left stranded,
but still managed to smile at my humor.

The last picture shows Leah riding not a swan, but mother Duck,
a sculpture in the Boston Public Garden after Robert McCloskey's
1941 best seller childrens' book "Make Way for Ducklings."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_Way_for_Ducklings

Cynthia Berman is a retired Wittenberg College history professor,
whom I may have mentioned before, who played with me, or rather
who refused to play with me that summer in 1939 when you were on
your way, and I was exiled to Canaan NY for the summer.
http://home.earthlink.net/~ernstmeyer/notes/Flanders.html
Below are extracts from a letter I wrote to her this morning
which I thought you might like to read.

Jochen

===============================
To Cynthia Berman 02-24-2010

Thank you for your letter with its questions. I'm up early
this morning, - for once I'm on your schedule - , at 6:28 a.m.,
having awoken half an hour ago with the thought that last night
I didn't set the garbage out on the sidewalk. The embarrassment
banished sleep; the black 32 gallon barrel is now on the curb;
and I'm taking the opportunity to attend to my correspondence
before I fall asleep again, whether in the chair or on the
bed remains to be seen.

What troubles me about the Memorial Meeting, - answering now
your first question, - and about all religious ceremony,
is the confusion of public and private, of outward and inward,
of objective and subjective, the presumption that it was the
same Margrit with whom all of us mourners were familiar; while
just the opposite obtained. The other participants were there
exulting in memories of a person who had been so generous to
them with her time, with her affection and with her wealth;
whereas I was there to remember and to mourn a sister, the last
remaining member of my childhood family who had given away to
others the affection, the care, and indeed the wealth which I
thought she owed to me. Of course I would have known that I was
wrong: that she was not in fact my debtor, that families are by
nature centrifugal, that she had every right to a life of her own,
and that I was resentful of my inability to keep her imprisoned
in the confines of a childhood which I have admittedly never
outgrown. But the humiliation of being surrounded by all the
adversaries who had triumphed over me would have hurt nonetheless.

Your second question: the resort to the first person singular
in referring to the travels ahead was mere stylistic license
or sloppiness. Margaret and I will go together. I wouldn't want
to leave her and she wouldn't want to be left. More echoes of
childhood.

As for your third topic: I again checked the docket sheet on the
Internet just now; as I mentioned, it's accessible also by you:
http://www.ma-appellatecourts.org/search_number.php?dno=2009-P-1613&get=Search
and found no change. The case is in lawyer's lingo: "under advisement".
That's a good sign, so far as they seem at least to be thinking about
it; a bad sign, insofar as it's ominous that they evidently need to
deliberate about what's obvious. That need to deliberate makes 
obvious to me that it's all a sham: Nantucket lied and keeps on lying,
The august Board of State Examiners of Plumbers and Gasfitters lied
and keeps on lying, the Attorney General who has the power to ruin
any of us with an indictment, justified or otherwise, is a clown who
attests the truth of fraudulent documents, and His Honor, the Superior
Court judge, who is by logic incapable of lying because he has the 
authority to define the truth, His Honor, as one says in polite legalese,
"failed to notice" his records. So what's the Appeals Court supposed to
do? They're supposed to make me the scapegoat on whom they pin the blame
for everything else, in order to make everything else appear pure and holy.
I've made it difficult for them to blame me. If you want to see how,
look at:
http://home.earthlink.net/~jochenmeyer/litigation/litig_index.html

So they won't punish me outright.  They'll punish me by sending the case
back to the lower court, and the lower court will punish me by sending
the case back to the Board of State Examiners of Plumbers and Gasfitters,
and that Board will punish me by directing William Ciarmataro the plumbing
inspector to inspect my plumbing, of which I never said that it was ready
for inspection, and Mr. Ciarmataro will find that the plumbing which wasn't
ready for inspection doesn't pass inspection, and the Plumbing Board will
say We told you so, and the Superior Court judge will say, I was right
after all, and the Appeals Court will say you have no case, you shouldn't
have bothered us. More years will have gone by, the house won't be
finished. I'll be dead, or too crazy to function. Klemens won't be
able to finish it himself and will sell it to someone who is on the
best of terms with the Board of Selectmen and will buy it for a song.

So that's the story; enough for one day; a story that gets told perhaps
only when I forget to put out the garbage: here it is.