Journal of a Sabbatical

March 20, 1999

rich people's houses

My friend Joan-east loves to look at houses, big houses, new houses, house lots... This is her favorite sport, and she's gotten the whole rest of the walking buddies into it. The answer to where shall we walk today - the big houses.

We walked from Priscilla's house in Lawrence to an "executive" development just over the Andover line. The houses there are selling for around $640,000. Must be junior "executive" houses, 'cause the development we looked at over by Andover Country Club awhile back was full of $1,000,000 houses. Anyway, these big houses were in varying stages of completion. Some finished and inhabited, some finished and for sale, some under construction, and some empty lots for sale.

The for sale signs had little cardboard mailbox type things attached filled with two page brochures about the type of house to be built on that lot and what extras you could order. Sort of like a "you want fries with that?" for executive homes. The two that puzzled us most were "elongated toilet seats" and "Lucent Technologies Homestar System". We could sort of guess what elongated toilet seats might be but not why executives would want them. But none of us could figure out the Homestar system. Does it turn on the heat for you so the house is warm when you get home from work? Is it an alarm system? An Internet connection? Does it do the laundry? Walk the dog? We finally settled on some combination of alarm and closed circuit tv.

A pond in the middle of the development had a for sale sign on it. At first we thought the sign applied to the house next door to it, but closer inspection revealed that the sign was indeed for the pond, and the pond was indeed intended to be a house lot. The high ground next to the road was barely big enough for an outhouse never mind an executive home. Joan-east said the marsh where she used to ice skate as a kid is a housing development now. All the houses were built with sump pumps. Looking at this pond, that would be one busy sump pump. People are so desperate to live in Andover that they would buy a house built in a pond? Maybe the Homestar system is to monitor the water level.