The house in Thaliad--

Lakelands, the model for the home 

that the wandering children choose as home in Thaliad.

It is especially lovely on a summer's day when the front door

is open and one can glimpse the lake and sky through

the rear door of the center hall.

Lakelands, set on Otsego Lake, originally the home
of Congressman John Myer Bowers and Margaretta Wilson Bowers
and their eight children, built circa 1804.

Here's a little snip from Thaliad (Phoenicia Publishing, 2012)--a passage from the labors of Emma the Bard, who was charged with the high work of telling the epic adventure of a group of children trying to rebuild their world--here they choose a home. It's a lull in a tumultuous tale, full of action and event. 

The most striking Classical reference is, of course, in the book’s name. Using the titular suffix ‘-iad’ would have been an act of pure hubris in the hands of less able writers, and initially I was sceptical, expecting Thaliad to be open to accusations of self-aggrandising pomposity and stylistic misappropriation; after all, calling your book ‘Thaliad’ and hence inviting comparison with Homer could be mistaken as a very cocky move indeed.  Happily, there’s a fantastic inter-textual rationale behind this book’s title and its neo-classical form.  The narrator (and supposed writer) of Thaliad, Emma, is speaking 60 years after the events she describes, and learnt her trade as a poet-historian by salvaging what books she could (presumably the Classics) from the ruined world’s libraries.  SoThaliad, then, fictionalises the story of its own creation; the book itself is supposedly a piece of history, written as a record of the first years following ‘The Fire’. --http://tomcatintheredroom.com/2013/01/26/thaliad-marly-youmans/

But what persuaded Thalia was not
A porch or craggy trees or flowered lawn:
The wide-flung door through which she saw the lake, 
As if the house were sited in two worlds,
The one more commonplace, though tainted now, 
The other stirring with odd glisterings,
A sea-gray, restless, moody atmosphere—
The door of glimmering suggested peace
And joys that wake beyond apocalypse
To hopeful Thalia, a happy end
As sometimes in a half-forgotten play
Unearthed and acted on a village green,
Where actors in a troop join hands to sing
And scenes of tragedy rehearse their close
In measures that turn tragi-comedy.
The breezes from the lake came murmuring 
Through open windows in that night of calm, 
And children slept, their bodies drifting free 
Of journey’s toil, anxiety, and fear
As if they floated in the water’s depths,
Made weightless in a buoyant, chasmal jade.
At dawn they awoke with a dreamy sense
Of something set loose from the bounds of land, 
The house a spacious boat that sat between
The earth and sky, the water and the town,
A wanderer that yet might sail away
To other worlds and navigate by stars
Unseen by human eyes until an hour
When six remaining children glimpse a sky
Where unfamiliar constellations rule
A dazzling zodiac—the Nine-tailed Cat,
The Throne of Fire, the Fount of Anguishing, 
Un-mercy’s Seat. I might go cruelly on,
But I have brooded for too long on fall
And desolation, hidden history
Of world’s end, thing unwritten in the books, 
Its causes and its powers scribed on air
And seen out of a corner of the eye
Or not at all. Better to dream and say
That sparkling zodiac shows sympathy
For trial and weariness, presenting Hope
In Silver Feathers, Gabriel in Light,
The Mother’s Arms, the Father’s Sailing Boat, 
The Seven Triumphant Against the Waste. 

Site long known as The Indian Mound, in park
lands across the street from Lakelands.
Although I did not think of it while writing, I suppose
the mound may have suggested Tumulus Ran-Samuel
built by the house in Thaliad.

Lakelands visible behind Indian mound

Lakelands from behind the left side of the Iroquois mound 

Park across from the house on Main St.

Park across the street from the house