From Grampa Dave AKA 'Grumps'

I went digging through archives. Some of it unreadable 5 ¼ floppies, tapes of various arcane formats & long hard drives long rusted solid.

I think I found a cache of Frog Tales - a few are hieroglyphically encoded – possibly Word Perfect 0.001 or something. Others are text files and seem to be decipherable, although spelling is atrocious and formatting is quite peculiar.

Frogtown Tales

Chapter 1 – In the beginnings

Part 1 getting the land

We had been looking for new house ever since Julie moved in to McMunn, March 1984.

It's a long story about McMunn and pretty boring too. The place sucks and I just keep it fixed up enough so it doesn't fall down. Julie wanted to replace the moldy tattered carpet but I pointed out that it would be a major hassle and we wanted to move to a bigger place any way.

I keep caulking up the cracks to keep the gales to under force 4.

So we started looking. Actually Julie started looking. We looked at a bunch of houses, but mostly I couldn't stand them.

I hate houses that look like houses. The quintessential house. The archetypal house.

I like the Kaufman house (Falling Waters designed by Frank Lloyd Wright)

I'm not sure I'd like to live there. It is one effort to be something besides the same.

I'm not rational on this.

The more I looked at houses, and condos, the more I developed this reaction.

The Sameness. The Conformity. These houses were all trying to look the same. Only more so.

I had been driving the same route into Dearborn - to sell my time (and perhaps my soul) to Ford

Outside of Plymouth, before I had to leave the country roads, and merge with the lemmings on Gerbil Trail, I-96, there was a piece of woods I passed. I observed this land for several months. Like a time lapse movie. I took a frame every morning a mental frame. It started in the fall

First there was a sign in front. "Shady Oaks Condominiums"

Then there were yellow construction vehicles. Like the Vogon Constructor Fleet.

Then there were no trees. Just naked brown land.

It stayed that way for all winter. When there was snow, it helped hide the raw ground. But snow never last long in this area. Mostly it was dirty and nasty.

Then the streets.

Then the building. All identical. They looked much like the ones in the next development.

Then the sod and a few pencil trees.

Then people.

The people merged with the other lemmings.

Something in me keeps screaming "I am NOT a lemming."

as I merge with the others...

Maybe it is the style - lots of odd gables, for no apparent reason seem to be popular. and half brick and half wood siding. But whole massive developments of the same model.

Anyway I just couldn't be satisfied with what we found.

And the property.

Maybe I'm getting to be a hermit. I'd rather not have to see other people when I look out my window.

It had to be physically interesting - 3d geography - like hills.

And trees. And a view. Of something other than ugly lemming houses.

What did Julie want?

A place stuff grows and to grow stuff.

And to be able to go on a walk with out leaving our property.

And privacy.

And close to her client's and work. Not more than 20 minutes drive time

We took a map and drew a circle around the area.

We made lists of what we liked and didn't. Julie said she wanted the property to have "Hansel & Gretel". It took a while to figure out what exactly that meant. Best described as heavy woods - with trees on ether side, covering drive or walk.

As we drove around we identified places with differing degrees of H&G.

We looked and looked. One or two were just ok. We got further and further from the center of our zone. A couple of years went by.

This one was too flat, that one too small, too far, too many neighbors, too expensive...

To be continued….

Grumps