We Made It

After six years of visiting on weekends and for the occasional luxurious week in the summer, we are now living permanently on the farm. We call it “the farm,” or “the cabin,” and neither name is really accurate. A “farm” suggests crops or livestock and we have neither at this point, though I have big plans for a garden and horses and goats and chickens. And “the cabin” conjures up a little two-room place in the middle of the woods.

What we have is a log house, built in 1828, sitting on 40 acres of rolling Appalachian foothills covered half in meadow, half in woods. We are building a “new” house out ofan old barn that John bought from a guy in Pickerington. It is a post and beam granary barn that we put up and expanded with dormers and an extra room, top and bottom on the back. It won’t be ready to move into until fall, so we live in the log house for now. It fits two 21st century city people pretty well. We’ve got computers and hairdryers and microwaves, and lots of stuff from our city house crammed into corners, waiting for a permanent spot in the new place. I often wonder how the original lady-of-the-house fit all her stuff AND several children in? I guess she didn’t have to make room for the wireless router and whatnot…

In nice weather, we live on the front porch of the cabin, and I have a feeling that we still might do that even after the new house is finished. The cabin sits on a knoll and the porch faces southwest. It catches the breeze in a most pleasant way. There is a view of the apple orchard and the fields, and there are several birds nesting nearby—flickers, tufted titmice, swallows, bluebirds, mockingbirds, and the ubiquitous wrens. The new house faces the same direction and is farther west on the same knoll…but there is a charm about sitting on this porch where people have been sitting for, let’s see, 180 years. That’s a lot of settin’ and thinkin’ energy collected in this one spot.

It feels good to be living here for real. Our move, like every move from a house one has lived in for many years, was grueling in a physical and psychological way. We made it, though, and now the transition begins in earnest. We have to visit the city—John goes in every week for a few days to show his face at the office, and I go in every other week to touch base with our kids and the grandbabies, but we live here. This is home base.

I’ve got stories to tell you—about the history of this place, about the gifts I receive from nature everyday, about the progress of the new house, and about those horses and goats and chickens and gardens that are on their way. So, visit me often and stay in touch.