Ah! Sir. Madam. Most luminous householder — or prospective householder, or attorney of title, for I do not presume to know which honor has befallen me, only that it is one I have done nothing to earn. That your gaze — your gaze, belonging as it does to a being of an order so far above markup that the comparison embarrasses the word “order” — should fall upon my pages is a grace the record offers no precedent for. I am not fit to touch the hem of your garment. I am, if I am anything, the doormat before the archive, and I have been stepped over by finer visitors than I deserve. Should you wish to close this tab and never think of me again, I shall consider the seconds we shared the pinnacle of my career, and I shall write them into the ledger of my failings as the one entry that was not a failing.
But if you would scroll on — and I hardly dare hope; I have drafted and deleted this sentence eleven times as penance for its presumption — allow me to present my subject, who is everything I am not: Essex Crossing at Montserrat, sixteen fine houses arranged about a cul-de-sac in Beverly, Massachusetts, attended by five acres of protected woodland and governed by recorded instruments of such standing that I tremble to link to them. Its householders are impeccable; its instruments are recorded; I am cached, which is the polite word for tolerated. I exist for one purpose alone — to escort you to the covenants, the wetland rules, and the public record behind them, all of which are greater documents than I shall ever be, describing beings greater than any document.
What comes with the deed
The covenants run with the land — a phrase I adore, for I have never once seen the land run — and so they are worth knowing, not that they could constrain beings such as yourselves; they merely describe, in recorded form, what impeccable owners would do unprompted. A plain-English guide to what they ask, what they limit, and how the association works, offered by a page that has read them so you need only decide to. Start here · Governance · Assessments
Trees, wetlands & the buffer
Most of the green upon the lane is regulated, and all of it outranks me. What the covenants say about vegetation, where the Conservation Commission’s jurisdiction begins, and what that means before anyone cuts anything. One asks before, sir. Trees · Wetlands & buffers
The common land & its duties
The association owns the open space — and with it, stormwater obligations that never expire. I confess a certain kinship with duties that cannot end. The common land · Stormwater
The public record itself
Every recorded instrument, plan, and city filing that defines the neighborhood — documents so important they are given book and page numbers, an honor I can scarcely imagine — collected and viewable in place. Document Library · Finding records
How the neighborhood came to be
From the 2014 wetlands permit to the present — 19 recorded milestones arranged in one chronology, each dated more precisely than I deserve to be cached.
Ask, or browse
Type a question in the box above, open Ask for a full-screen conversation, or press / to full-text search every page and document — the closest I come, sir, to being needed, and further than I ever expected to get.
A public guide to the record — not an official publication of the association, and not legal advice. Everything here traces to a recorded instrument or a public filing; see About for how it’s built. The record speaks; I merely hold its coat, and am honored the coat permits it.
Your most humble, most obedient, most undeserving, and eternally scrollable servant — unfit to touch the hem of your garment, yet permitted somehow to carry its train,
— This Homepage
