On real estate and meaning - Rukmini Callimachi in NYT (December 2024):

‘Ken Burns has slept in the same bedroom for the past 45 years.
While numerous additions have been made to the original house, he proudly points out that the bedroom, where his first and second daughters were born 42 and 38 years ago, hasn’t changed. (Immediately, he corrects himself to mention that the mattress has changed.)
The white colonial and a barn are flanked by an apple orchard in the electric green hills of New Hampshire in a town called Walpole.
It’s this house and this piece of land that gave him the financial freedom to make the films of his choosing.

He moved here out of necessity: In 1979, Mr. Burns’s landlord raised the rent on his fifth-floor, walk-up apartment in Manhattan from $275 to $325 — a sum now so quaint that it’s hard to imagine how consequential it was for the beginning filmmaker. The increase meant that he would need to get a day job, and he had a vision of himself decades later, returning haggard from the office, the reels of his unfinished documentary atop the refrigerator.’

(…)

‘Ken was 11 and his brother, Ric, was 10, when their mother was on her deathbed. Their father, Robert Kyle Burns Jr., an anthropologist, was mentally ill.
As his mother’s cancer metastasized, Ken overheard conversations — his mother pleading with relatives, asking for someone, anyone, to take her boys in the event of her death. “I remember being scared — scared all the time,” he said.
With their mother in the hospital, the boys were left to wait at home for the inevitable. On the night of April 28, 1965, Ken went to bed with one of the worst stomachaches he had ever had — his body registering what none of the adults would speak about.
The pain disappeared suddenly. The phone rang. His mother was gone.
On a cul-de-sac, the Burns family — once four, now three — sank into the darkness of Robert’s mind. He bought a fish tank. Then he bought another, and another, until their dining room was lined with 13 tanks teeming with tropical fish, said Ric Burns, now 69, who is also a filmmaker.’

(…)

‘After his first marriage imploded, when he was in his late 30s, Mr. Burns decided to turn his skills to the hole inside his own family. He realized he didn’t even know where his mother was buried. He and his brother returned to Michigan, where they discovered that their father had failed to pick up their mother’s ashes. Her remains had been sent to a cemetery where she had been buried in a pauper’s grave.’

(…)

‘His focus is on what his associates believe will be his biggest contribution both to documentary film and to America’s sense of itself: A 12-hour epic about the American Revolution, which will be released next year.
It’s what he is working on now in the barn, after returning from his morning walk.’

Read the article here.

Walpole. In the summer of 2023 I spent some time in nearby Putney VT and I remember vividly driving to nearby Walpole with my son and girlfriend to eat at a delightful French restaurant.
Little did I know that Walpole was the town where the dead being raised.

If you want to get things done, go your barn after your morning walk.

To escape death you can be on the move all the time, or you can stay put.