You know, I've poured over the photographs that I've taken of this home in the four months we have been getting to know it, and I've pondered so many words and thoughts that I've had about our journey to it...and yet I still find myself struggling to easily tell you our Story of Home. I think it would be better told if we could gather round a table for some tea...or wine (you choose). Or better yet - gathered around a bonfire in the field beside the barn - where we very soon hope to gather and give thanks with friends and family who have been so helpful and loving to us in this journey. Yes, that would be the best way to tell you this story of Home - for you, too, are a part of this story, and we are full of gratitude for that too.
I suppose it best, then, that I keep this as 'simple and true' as can be. Finding our way to Home has been a very long and windy road for our family - many, many years in the dreaming, working and hoping...many years in the searching, wishing and trying, and even more months still on the completely up-and-down-on-and-off-and-on-again roller coaster that was the final stretch of this house. It has, no exaggeration, and until the very last hour, been Epic.
But last week, that journey finally did reach an end in a flash as quick as a key being placed in our hands. Leaving the bank, we picked up our babes and an apple pie from home, and drove as fast as we could to this place - this place we are beginning to call Home. There, we arrived just after dark, popped that pie into a new (to us) oven and ran around the great big (to us) rambling farmhouse we had been hoping for all this time. There was laughter, and dancing, and (happy) crying as we ate together that night. When we were done, we meandered out into the dark and listened to the new and lovely sounds - peepers, and a loon from a nearby lake..and we looked up at a clear crisp and beautiful sky...from this place we now call Home.
Home is a two hundred year old farmhouse with great wide wooden floors and lots of good bones and history. Home is a barn that will comfortably keep all the animals we hope will join us. Home is a place with room for all of us and all that we love. Home is in the 'country' but close enough to the shore and our community of Portland that we treasure so much. Home is acres and acres of woods and pasture waiting to be used, sustained, and explored. Home is just what we dreamed it would be...and just what we've been waiting for.
Home is a place we think is ready to be filled with energy and vibrant life and lots of color and sounds. And on that very note, there is much for us to do there in the weeks and months (and years!) to come. The immediate future is one full of much work (and dust) and huge transition. We are traveling between our two homes at the moment, sleeping on sleeping bags on the floor (Ouch! today, I MUST get a mattress!), and truly getting to see the insides of this very old house as we make renovations and repairs - all with the amazing, blessed help of so many dear friends who keep showing up with paint brushes, hammers and food to feed us (we love them!). Sheetrock, wiring, spackle, pasture fencing and surprises like "you need a new well!" - these are words and conversations of our days at the moment. (Along with lots of "This is our house!" with all the appropriate jumping up and down to accompany such a declaration, of course.)
We are...loving every dusty, messy minute of it, so enormously full of gratitude at finally being here, and so excited about all the adventures to come. There is so much to live and see and do in this new home of ours. I'm looking forward to doing just that...and to sharing it here with you!
