Introducing Mill Brook House and millbrookhousenews.com!

03/20/2024

Introducing Mill Brook House and millbrookhousenews.com!

Kathe and Steve at home with Rocky, Pepper and over a dozen home-grown pumpkins!

Mill Brook House, vacation spot and part-time rental, is now our permanent home! Nellie Fox, the fierce shiba inu, is no longer with us and neither is lovable Sandy, champion mouser, whom we acquired soon after Nellie’s passing. Rocky, once half of the Sandy-Rocky show, continues to enjoy the great outdoors as does Pepper, our mini-Australian sheepdog. In 2016, they were joined by baby Max, another yellow tabby. (Sadly, Max left us prematurely, and we adopted baby Taz in 2023.)

Mill Brook House, first renovated (2004-2006) to accommodate vacationers, has, more recently, undergone renovations to make our permanent residence possible. We have extended the loft over our attached, two-part garage, built a staircase to the attic and a large new closet on what was once a spacious landing, completed a new guest room with its own closet (a rare commodity in this house), constructed a massive bookcase in the living room where we once tucked a trundle bed, further improved the downstairs bathroom, ditched the 1920's kitchen sink, and turned the downstairs bedroom into a glorified pantry. To the swimming-pool-turned-garden from 2004, we added a second garden when Hurricane Irene made re-landscaping necessary, and in 2015 we built a third garden dedicated to gladioli and vegetables. We have also launched a daylily business (see millbrookhousedaylilies.com).

Millbrookhousenews.com will continue to offer insights and information on Western Massachusetts, occasional film and relevant book reviews, our photographs of the area, including wildlife, landscapes, and landmarks, and personal essays. Recipes have been spun off onto their own blog, millbrookhouserecipes.com. For more of Steve's photographs, see sternbachphoto.com. We hope that you will enjoy all four blogs! You can comment right on the blogs or email us at [email protected].

Mill Brook House, summer 2013

Posted at 10:41 AM in Family | Permalink

Tags: mini-Australian sheepdog, Western Massachusetts

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Morocco 2022

In 2018, a friend from London told me he had purchased a riad (row house) in Marrakech. Enthusiastically, I promised to visit. I had never given a thought to visiting Morocco, to Morocco as a country, or anything about Morocco. Maybe I associated it vaguely with the film Casablanca or the French Foreign Legion, but certainly not with a modern Muslim society. Morocco had not even come up in news about the Arab Spring of 2010, but I wanted to be supportive. So in 1919 Steve and I made plans to visit my friend in Marrakech during his fall vacation the following year. However, by the time our plans had shipwrecked on the shoals of Covid, not once but twice, I began to seriously question my loyalties. Nevertheless, finally, serendipitously, in the spring of 2022, it all came together. The specter of Covid tests still hung over us, but we started out gamely and discovered a world of gracious people, amazing art and architecture, delicious food, and a fascinating history (that I am far from mastering). After visiting my friend and his beautiful riad in Marrakech, we joined a guided tour of Morocco’s “Imperial Cities,” i.e. those that had served as capitols to different rulers and dynasties from Roman times to the present. The following album contains the best of Steve’s photos from the trip.

The Best of Sandy and Rocky

Sandy was a year old when he came to us in 2013 as a scrawny stray with one misshapen eyelid. A few months of hearty eating transformed him into a sandy-haired beauty, extraordinarily gentle and extremely fond of cuddling and schmoozing. About that time we adopted three-month-old Rocky, mischief-maker and comedian-in-chief. Where Sandy never saw a lap he didn’t like, Rocky never passed up a box or a bag if he could possibly get in it. When, in 2015, our permanent move to Mill Brook House enabled the cats to go outside, Sandy proved himself a fearsome hunter while Rocky fell in love with wild turkeys and domestic chickens. Sadly, at the end of his first outdoor summer, Sandy disappeared. Days of calling, searching and alerting neighbors turned up nothing. Devastated at first, Rocky eventually recovered his moxie, and he continues to romance the chickens across the street, play pirates in the claw foot tub, and fall asleep on the hand-hewn beams in the attic. This album commemorates our “cat years.”

Charlemont at 250

This year marks Charlemont's 250th Anniversary (incorporated 1765). See photographs here and read more at: http://www.millbrookhousenews.com/mill-brook-house-news/2015/06/charlemont-at-250.html. For permission to reproduce any of these photographs, please contact Steven Sternbach: [email protected].

Shelburne Falls' Bridge of Flowers

The Shelburne Falls trolley bridge, connecting the villages of Buckland and Shelburne, was built in 1908 to carry freight and passengers on a 7.5 mile line to Colrain. With the advent of the automobile, however, trucks began hauling freight, and in 1927 the company that built the bridge went bankrupt. Turning the abandoned bridge into a flower garden was the brainchild of Antoinette and Walter Burnham, who, with the Shelburne Falls Women’s Club, raised $1000 for loam, fertilizer and plants, and made this unique, historic landmark a reality in 1929. Then, as now, all the labor to start the garden and keep it going was donated. This album is a month by month chronicle of the ever-changing spectacle the bridge presents to tourists and residents every year from April to September.

Mill Brook House News

Essays related to our home in Western, Massachusetts, Mill Brook House

03/20/2024