A House Open to the World

The kitchen window makes a perfect frame for this winter scene.

When we go into town or travel to cities around the country, we are struck by how different our daily environment is. The close proximity of other people and houses and streets necessitates different living conditions for city dwellers and even those living in closer rural communities. Obviously different people like different things. Many people would not care to live at the end of the road here on our mountainside, but this is just what we were looking for. I can understand the many reasons why people choose to live in cities, but I’m always glad when we get back here to our homeplace. One of the main reasons is that I love the openness of our house compared to the much more closed nature of many houses and other buildings, shut off from natural world, isolated from the occupants’ surroundings.

Our house has lots of windows. With the exception of cold wintry days or blowing rainstorms the windows are usually open. We have shades on most of our windows, but they are hardly ever pulled down. Living where we do at the end of our driveway at the end of our road, we have no reason to block the outside world. We can only see one other house from our location and we can barely see that when the trees are leafed out. We have no traffic passing by; the rare vehicle that appears is either for a delivery or someone who has taken a wrong turn.

The openness of the windows allows us better to see and experience the natural world in which we live. We are open to the sounds and scents that surround us. We hear the winds blowing over the ridges and through the trees. Dogs and coyotes bark and howl in the distance, cows moo in the pastures, and owls call in the night. The birds, squirrels, raccoons, and other animals come onto our deck or pass through the yard. The deer and turkeys move through the edge of the woods or walk down our drive. The clouds move across the sky and their shadows play across the mountains. We are aware of these things because our windows are uncovered. We delight in these experiences. They bring joy to our daily lives. We are so glad to be here.

Here are a few views from within our home.

Rhododendron in full bloom viewed through our living room window

Some visitors watching another visitor and vice versa.

It’s best to stay indoors to look out at this picnic table on our deck.

Rabbit and chipmunk enjoying lunch on the deck.

Eastern phoebe babies viewed through our porch door. Adult phoebes have used this nest for several years.

We look out at the snow because we can’t open the door.

Even our dear cat enjoys observing the outside world through the door.

One of our skunk friends. Some visitors are best viewed from inside the house.

We look out the window while this deer looks in.

We Can Do It – And We Did

When we first determined to seek out and move to this place at the end of the road, we were committing to a leap into the unknown. We would be moving to a new place where we knew no one, with no jobs or income, with no house or shelter other than two small tents. We intended to build our own house completely by ourselves even though we had never built anything larger than a small wardrobe unit for an early apartment that had very minimal closet space. We had the limited proceeds from the sale of the small house we had sold, planning very optimistically to use those funds for living and building expenses.

Were we crazy? Many of our friends and family definitely thought so. Many people, maybe most, don’t even consider the possibility of doing many tasks for themselves, by themselves. They feel they must rely on an expert, a professional to do almost everything for them. But we have discovered over the years since that time that some friends inwardly envied us, wishing they could break away from where they were in life, from unsatisfying jobs or living conditions, to pursue their own special dreams.

I had always been a bit of a crazy dreamer. One of my favorite activities from elementary school years onward was to be dropped at the public library where I would spend hours randomly browsing the shelves for books that caught my fancy. I read about explorers, inventors, philosophers, poets, architects, artists, and other exciting people. I consumed books about nature, science, construction, Native American culture, boats, foreign lands, and much more. At home I would pick a volume of our old encyclopedias and leaf through, reading whatever article I chanced upon, information tucked away somewhere in my young mind, perhaps to be recalled years later at some relevant moment. So many things were of interest to me and I had found the key to learning about all of them: libraries and all the books they contained.

That early experience of mine set the stage for a lifetime of learning and doing. I knew that information about everything was readily available. I could find details on any subject, study it, absorb it, think about it, and make it a part of me. I came to see that I could learn about anything and to believe that I could learn to do anything I really wanted to do. I didn’t necessarily think I could do everything as well as an expert or professional could do, but I did believe I could do the things I wanted adequately and satisfactorily for my purposes and needs. I also knew that doing things for myself would bring great satisfaction, the joy of seeing the finished project and knowing I had accomplished that.

So we came to this place at the end of the road over 38 years ago now. We struggled, we worked hard (very hard at times), we made mistakes, we changed plans, we re-did what had been done (sometimes more than once), we put projects on hold (sometimes for years) while other more pressing matters (like earning some income to pay for life’s necessities) had to be dealt with, we persevered. We’re still at it. We still rely on the library and books and now the internet for information and inspiration. We still work hard, doing and sometimes undoing and re-doing. And we still have the joy of the process and the satisfaction of seeing the end result. Hopefully this will continue for the rest of our lives which we expect to spend here at the end of this road.

Were we crazy? Yes, absolutely, with crazy wisdom. I highly recommend it.

So Much To See

Our quiet place here at the end of the road first greeted us with a meadow covered in a profusion of daisies, black-eyed Susans, Queen Anne’s Lace, and wild strawberries. But it had not always been that way. Not many years before we came here the land had been cleared and farmed. The son of a nearby neighbor whose family had once owned this land told us of helping his family clear the land and then grow cabbage, a common crop throughout the area even for some years after we arrived. The decaying remnants of split rail fences they had built bordered part of the property and locust posts remained where barbed wire fences had been placed. The woods still covering two-thirds of our homeplace even now contain stumps and moss-covered logs of the chestnut trees killed by blight in the early part of last century. Since chestnut trees made up an estimated one-fourth of all hardwood trees in the Appalachians before the blight, no doubt this mountainside was once covered with chestnuts.

The land continues to change. Obviously our presence here has had a large impact on the land closest around the house and garden, but that is a small part of our homeplace. The woods have retaken naturally part of the meadow that we were not using otherwise. An abandoned project of ours to raise Christmas trees in part of the meadow now gives us a sizable patch of 50-75 foot tall trees, mainly Norway Spruce, loved by deer and birds and who knows which of our other animal friends. Were we to stop maintaining the yard and garden areas, this would all quickly revert to woodland through the natural progression of an Appalachian hardwood forest.

We came here wanting to be in a place in the mountains, surrounded by nature, and we certainly are. To name a few of the things we have found here:

Trees: oaks, maples, cherries, black birches, hickories, elms, beeches, black locusts, tulip poplars, mountain magnolias (cucumber tree), ashes, hemlocks, cedars, white pines, sourwoods, serviceberries, hawthorns

Flowering plants: rhododendrons, flame azaleas, mountain laurels, dog hobbles, daisies, black-eyed Susans, Queen Anne’s Lace, wild strawberries, blueberries

Birds: chickadees, house finches, purple finches, tufted titmice, nuthatches, pileated woodpeckers, downy woodpeckers, hairy woodpeckers, red-bellied woodpeckers, eastern phoebes, evening grosbeaks, rose-breasted grosbeaks, bluejays, crows, barred owls, screech owls, barn owls, starlings, barn swallows, Carolina wrens, red-tailed hawks, sharp-shinned hawks

Mammals: red squirrels, grey squirrels, fox squirrels, flying squirrels, chipmunks, raccoons, skunks, possums, rabbits, grey foxes, red foxes, black bears, coyotes, mice, voles, bats

Reptiles: black snakes, corn snakes, garter snakes, ring-neck snakes

Amphibians: red-spotted newts, black salamanders, spade-foot toads, wood frogs, spring peepers

Grasses, “weeds”, and other small/low-growing plants: too numerous to begin listing

There are so many fascinating things to be observed even in this small patch of the world where we live. I get the feeling that many people never even see some of the most obvious things around them, too busy with the affairs of their everyday lives or perhaps thinking the natural world not important or not interesting enough to merit their attention. Many don’t know the names of the most common birds, trees, or flowers that surround them every day and are amazed when we recognize a wildflower from a distance or identify a bird by its flight pattern or call. So much is there to be seen by merely taking the time to notice. So much delight is there to be missed when we don’t pay attention to our natural surroundings.

A Place To Be

I longed for a place away from the city, away from crowds of people rushing about, away from traffic, away from noise and pollution, just away. It wasn’t that I didn’t like cities and people. I just wanted to be able to interact with them on my own terms, how and when I wanted to be with them. I wanted time apart from them, time to be on my own, time to interact with myself.

I’ve always loved being out in the woods by myself. During my pre-teen years, back in the time when kids were allowed go out and play, finding their own entertainment and activities, I would spend hours wandering in the wooded areas near our home that had not yet been replaced by subdivisions. I could explore and think and observe and create. It was wonderful.

So when we decided to make our big move, to leave the city and jobs and friends and family, we moved to the country, to a place set apart from the things we wanted to leave, to a place with open spaces and woods, a quiet place at the end of a yet-to-be-built road. We listened often to the lyrics of the song sung by Helen Reddy with their special meaning just for us:

What would they say
If we up and ran away
From the roaring crowds
And the worn out city faces
Would they carry on and on
When they found out we were gone
Or would they let us go
Would they tag along
Or would they know to

Leave us alone
We’d live in the country
Leave us alone
We’d make it just fine
Happy in a one room shack
And we’d not look back
Now would we

To some family and friends it was a strange and unexpected move. Their questions reflected their puzzlement. What was there that we were going to? As far as they could see there was not much to draw us to this piece of land seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Why go there? What will you do with 9+ acres of land with nothing on it except fields and woods? Some of them eventually came to understand what we saw here. Some unfortunately never realized why we came. But we knew all along. It was and is a place to live simply but well, a place to learn and grow, a place to be the people we wanted to be.