A cat would be safer

"One Day I'll Have a Cat and a Lover,'' by Candice Smith Corby, at the Fruitlands  Museum, Harvard, Mass.

Harvard is an affluent rural town in Worcester County  is about 25 miles west-northwest of Boston. It was settled as a  farming community  in 1658 and incorporated in 1732. It has hosted several eccentric communities, such as Harvard Shaker Village and the utopian Transcendentalist center Fruitlands, after which the museum is named.

Harvard's Shaker Village in about 1905.

Harvard's common.