That seemed to settle things — for a while. The family renovated the houses and found tenants for the smallest one on the edge of the harbor. They fell in love with Stonington and the views over Crotch Island to Isle au Haut in the distance. Then Jimmy and her daughter-in-law, Lee, went out for a walk and ran into a local Realtor.

“ ‘One fine day,’ I said to him, ‘we’re going to retire from jobs in the automobile industry and we’ll want to find our dream of a place in Maine. It will have to be on deep water because it’s something we’ve always wanted. And it will have to have fields because my husband thinks he’s got to run tractors in fields all the time. And it’s going to have to have woods because my son has got to go find owls in woods. And it’s got to have rocks with lichens on it because that’s what I like.’ ” Then the Realtor uttered the words Jimmy still calls dangerous: “It just so happens...”

In 1985 the McWilliamses closed on Harbor Farm, a fifty-six- acre parcel (soon to grow to seventy-seven acres) on Little Deer’s Chickadee Cove that included a nineteenth-century Cape, several outbuildings, a family cemetery, and a lushly planted 150-foot-long arbor leading down from the house to the water. The property is hidden from the road, invisible from the causeway that winds over to Deer Isle, and thoroughly, deliciously private.

“We did something here that still scares the heck out of me,” admits Dick McWilliams, younger son of Jimmy and Bruce. “We decided that if my parents were going to live in this house with me and my wife, Lee, and our son and our daughter and our dog, we’d have to design our home by committee. And that is a terrible idea.”

Normally, he admits, such a process becomes “a real circus.” But here “for some reason” it worked out extremely well. Dick’s older brother, Brook, a celebrated architect living in Australia at the time, created drawings of the existing Cape and mailed them to his parents and siblings. Then the generations in Maine took out their pencils and got to work.

EACH family member took a stab at the blueprints. Brook insisted that a house on the coast of Maine needed a mudroom, so a spacious mudroom was drawn in. Bruce sug-gested that a large house required powder rooms at both ends, so those were added. Then came ideas for east and west staircases, a sunroom that had to have a woodstove, a utility room with in-floor drain for maximum efficiency, bedrooms and baths for at least nine family members, a room to hold the family’s piano, and a plea to save space for a beloved foosball table. By the time everyone had tweaked the drawings and offered their own contributions, floorplans for the modest 1810 Cape had grown into a substantial book of blueprints.

“What we drew out and eventually built is a super functional house that is very comfortable for us,” Dick McWilliams says. The original Cape at its core accommodates a living room, small library, and a wet bar. New construction on either side includes a music room, dining room, kitchen, and side porch, as well as an ample garage, garden shed, and workshop. Upstairs there are six bedrooms with baths (an arrangement Jimmy calls “the epitome of grace”), an office, laundry room, and a library for Bruce’s extensive collection of automobile books and memorabilia. The overall effect is warm and informal. Antique decoys and avian prints are displayed through-out the house, the family has a wonderful collection of Oriental rugs, and every room is bright and generously proportioned.

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