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After the flop, I learned of another kind of movement that has arisen in response to a yearning, similar to mine, for a socially inviting human habitat. It is called “the new urbanism,” and its leader, a Cuban-born architect named Andres Duany, lives in Florida. Duany has designed numerous neotraditional villages like Seaside on the Gulf Coast, and Kentlands outside Washington, D.C., patterned on nineteenth century American small towns. Small lots are platted, wide front porches mandated, stores and residences mixed together, and cookie-cutter developers outlawed. The idea is to encourage face-to-face relationships among neighbors in a varied and beautiful cityscape where all the conveniences of life are within walking distance. What Duany has achieved is a consummate balance of nature and artifice: a kind of planning matrix in which sundry and vital unplanned interactions can occur. Living in one of Duany’s artfully planned habitats sounded immeasurably easier than starting a community from scratch.

But then I looked at the price tag. These fancy clapboard environments clearly presupposed an income that could only be gotten in one of the high-paying career specialties that had helped bring the demise of the nineteenth-century American town. The developments addressed intimacy of place, but not so much integration of life and work—the frugal practices of self-sustenance, bartering, and manual labor such as we had found among the Minimites. It was silly for us even to think of moving to a Duanian village.

Our favored destination only seemed to look better with time. Housing there, for one thing, cost about one-eighth of that in Seaside.

But I still had to be able to make a living, no matter where I ended up. And Mary would have preferred to have relatives closer by.

One muggy evening I was weaving a fare through a typical late-day traffic snarl, and I quipped, “You know, I’d really rather be a rickshaw driver. That way I could at least work off some of this stress.” (Stress being a drawback of cabbing—one reason why I could imagine it only as a temporary vocation.) Biking home from my cab was an invigorating but rather inefficient compensation for the long hours of confinement in a motor vehicle.

The fare responded, “You can be. I’ve seen them in Charleston, South Carolina.”

“Real rickshaws, like they used in China?”

“These ones are bicycle-powered. More efficient that way.”

I cocked my head and thought a minute.

The final piece of the puzzle fell in place when we learned that a pair of Mary’s siblings had relocated to parts of the Midwest not far from the one that we were thinking of.

After about two years, we had saved up enough money for the move.

I pulled up in a rented Ryder truck, and not long after, Chuck arrived in his Honda. Chuck was (and is) an old friend from Boston who taught at the nearby state university. Up went the sliding door of the moving van, and we got busy.

Hours later, after all Mary’s furniture was in the house, we sat on the lawn sipping beer and enjoying the view. Down below was the village, with its spires and ornate red brick buildings. In the distance was the cupola of the winery, poking through the trees on the facing hillside. “I can’t believe you got this for fifty thousand,” said Chuck.

“Just what houses go for here,” I told him.

Later I got a call from the machine shop. My delivery had arrived, they said. I had it taken there because the crate needed to be set on a loading dock. It was about four feet wide and eight feet long. I headed over and gazed at the enormous container, anxious to view the contents.

“So, what’s in the box?” the machinist asked.

I took a crowbar and pried off the front of the crate. Deep in the shadows could be seen a little red carriage with a black retractable canopy and bicycle pedals. Even in the dark it gleamed.

“Can I please, please, please?”

I look up from the yard and pause. It is one of the neighbor boys again. He is standing