Going Natural
The third time our Brooklyn garden apartment was robbed, my wife Claudia and I decided to move to the suburbs, even though we didn’t have any children yet. Unsure of whether we’d actually survive the transplantation, we chose to rent for a while rather than buy. We found a small house in Rockland County, New York, not too long a commute to our jobs in the city.
Just behind the house, at the edge of our backyard and those of our neighbors, was an old stone wall. On one side were mostly well-tended lawns. On the other side was what looked like completely wild forest. The woman who lived with her husband and three children in the next house up the street had told us that it was a nature preserve of over a hundred acres, a former estate. On the first nice spring day after we’d
