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Home
for Nora Roberts for the past 30 years has been on the top of a hill in
western Maryland. When she
arrived there with her children, she knew she’d found the perfect
home. “I realized I was
home,” she explains. “Sometimes
you just recognize it.” Over the years her career has taken her all
over the world, but she always returns to that hilltop to renew her
spirit and create her magical stories.
While
there have been many changes to the house, the heart of it is a home
that has seen a family grow. The
framed photos of Nora, her husband Bruce and her sons, Jason and Dan,
which are placed everywhere, chart the years. Early in her career Nora
wrote in notebooks and then on a portable typewriter in a corner of her
kitchen so she could keep an eye on her two small sons.
After her career started taking off, she hired a local carpenter
to build some shelves in her bedroom.
In the manner of all good stories, the carpenter, Bruce Wilder,
later married Nora. “He
came and just never left,” she jokes.
Little
did either of them know that the home projects had only just started.
Bruce built Nora’s third floor office and a tower closet off
the bedroom. Later a pool
house was attached to the first floor, the kitchen was built out and a
library was added on for the perfect nook in which to curl up and read a
book. To bring their lives
full circle, Nora recently realized the only thing left to add was some
more bookshelves.
When
she’s not writing, Nora tends to her gardens.
She recovers from her annual spring book tour by ruthlessly
weeding, planting and mulching, and enlisting her family to help out.
Her constant battles with marauding deer have made it into her
books and entertained her fans over the years. There’s an herb garden
off the kitchen, a hillside of tiger lilies and hundreds of annuals
throughout the property, giving Nora ample opportunity to still play in
the dirt.
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