houses.

when i was a kid, we'd go skiing several weekends a year in nh, vt, or maine - but usually nh. my dad is kind of a ski nut, and my mom is a house nut. there was a period of about 5 years during which she dragged us to open houses for various ski chalets on every ski trip we took. it was excruciating, after a hard days' skiing, feet still cramped from a day of exercise in a plastic case, and fingers still damp and chilly from the last run on the hill. to have to go look at houses with my family.

now, i feel quite differently. i love looking at houses, imagining who lives there, thinking up a story for each one.

the past two nights, when i've walked rudy (the dog) around our windy piedmont neighborhood, i've been doing just that. the houses in this neighborhood look like they're meant to resemble something. like, a fairytale house. or various european chateaus. you have the english tudos, the french chateaus, the german castles, the swiss chalets, the italian villas, and the spanish....whatever a spanish castle is. but it's not the kind of showy ostentation you see in darien, ct, or weston, ma. not the huge, cavernous houses with yards so spacious that you could call them "grounds" and hallways so large they echo. these houses are pretty small by those standards. they almost look like mini- villas, chateaux, manors, castles, etc. and then it hit me....this is like epcot center - you know, when you can go around the place and see 20 countries in 20 minutes - each with replicas of their native architecture?

it also kind of reminds me of "the village" from the old "prisioner" tv show. with the windy streets, and the strange, underlying "sameness" of the landscape, even though the buildings are different in basic style.