Coming Home - Our Move to New Hampshire from Massachusetts

In February of this year, after more than twenty years in Petersham, Massachusetts, Josh and I packed up our lives, our cats Max and Sadie Jane, our dog Dingo Girl, our sun conures Beep and Sebastiana, our house chicken Simon, our giant day gecko Emmy, my beloved blue freshwater shrimp, and every houseplant I could carry, and we moved to New Hampshire.

And for the first time in a very long time, I feel like I am home.

Twenty Years of Waiting

Petersham is a beautiful town in the truest sense of the word. Historic, quiet, safe, tucked into central Massachusetts in a way that makes the rest of the world feel very far away. We raised our kids there for these reasons. Josh threw himself into our old historic home with the kind of love and care that only someone who truly sees a building's bones can manage. He made upgrades that honored the history of the house while making it actually livable, which is no small feat in a home that old.

But if I am being honest, Petersham never felt like mine.

I never made connections there where I felt like me. The yard was filled with European plantings that gave nothing back to the wildlife around us, and Josh and I spent years and a great deal of money replacing them with native plants because I simply could not stand watching bees and butterflies pass through a yard that had nothing to offer them. The space felt small and closed in. I asked Josh, more than once over the years, if we could find somewhere quieter and more private, somewhere surrounded by more of the natural world.

My work is created because I am so deeply in love with nature, with plants and insects and woodland creatures and the small overlooked things that most people walk right past. I needed to be immersed in it. I needed it just outside my window.

The Crab Apple Tree

Right now, as I sit at my laptop in my studio writing this, I can turn to my right and look out the window. There is a crab apple tree just outside, and it is absolutely covered in insects coming and going for drinks. Little grey squirrels scurry up and down it. On the ground below it I noticed a pile of branches this morning, gnawed and nibbled in a very particular way, and I studied them for a while before determining they had been worked over by a porcupine.

A porcupine.

I could not have found that in my yard in Petersham if I had tried.

We are surrounded by trees here. Little ponds for peering into. Groups of deer move through the backyard and when I saw them for the first time I genuinely could not believe it. (I was going pee in my bathroom!) I stood at the window for a long time just watching them, feeling something I can only describe as relief.

The woodpeckers here are extraordinary. All kinds, pecking into trees to eat and make homes, going about their lives and don't care that I talk to them while they do so. Owls call to each other in the evenings. The whole place hums and rustles and taps and calls in a way that fills something up in me that had been a little empty for a long time.

What Home Feels Like

I have thought a lot about what makes a place feel like home, and I think for me it comes down to whether the natural world around me feels alive and reciprocal. Like I am a part of it and nurturing it. Whether there is give and take. Whether the birds and insects and small mammals and plants are all in conversation with each other and you are lucky enough to get to watch.

Petersham had beauty but it never quite had that for me.

New Hampshire has it in abundance.

The whole family seems to feel it too. Max and Sadie Jane have excellent windows to look out of and the room for their human dad to make them a catio. Dingo Girl has trails and peace. Beep, Sebastiana, Simon, and all my little creatures have a household that feels more settled and rooted than it did before. My houseplants are thriving! My shrimp tank is doing beautifully.

And my work, I think, is going to be different here. Better. More rooted in the actual landscape around me. I already have pieces in mind that started with things I have seen just outside this window, the porcupine gnawings, the insects on the crab apple tree, the deer moving quietly through the trees at dusk.

The Striped Cat Metalworks Is Now in New Hampshire

The Striped Cat Metalworks (me! Tamara!) has always been made from scratch, by hand, one piece at a time, by someone who is genuinely obsessed with the natural world. That has not changed. What has changed is the landscape outside the studio window, the excitement and peace I feel inside, and I think you will see that in the work going forward.

If you have been following along for a while, thank you for coming with us on this move. If you are new here, welcome! I make handmade sterling silver nature jewelry for people who stop to look at the small things. I am making it now from the woods of southern New Hampshire, with a crab apple tree full of insects just outside my window and a porcupine somewhere out there in the dark.

I think this is going to be a very good chapter!