We’re “Home”


Amanda and I are living at the farm now. It feels wonderful.


For more than two years, we have traveled between Longleaf Breeze and our house in the Birmingham suburbs. As Longleaf Breeze has seemed less and less like a wilderness outpost and more and more like a place where we could live, we have transferred more of our belongings here and have developed more of the comforts of home. But we still made that 240-mile round trip at least once per week, sometimes more. And as Amanda has pointed out, we have spent nearly four hours of each week traveling back and forth, more if you count the time packing and unpacking at each end.

There’s just no substitute for being where you are. We start a task at 3:00 in the afternoon. If we don’t finish that day, it’s okay; we can continue tomorrow. If someone wants to come see us, it’s good to be able to tell them we’re here most days.

So now we’re farmers. We travel to town (Tallassee) more or less daily now, but we fully expect there will be 2-3 days per week in the future when we travel nowhere. Nowhere. Staying at the farm all day. Now how’s that for a concept?

As we discussed on this week’s podcast, leaving our suburban home of 26 years and moving to a 600 square foot apartment in our pole barn has prompted us to re-examine the whole concept of “home.” What is home, and where is it? Is it where the heart is, where the US Postal Service says it is, or something else even more delicate?

Each day we see our little apartment becoming more habitable. Today Amanda took her first hot indoor shower (I’m an outdoor shower man myself), we finished installing the threshold strips that transition the tile of the bathroom and the wood stove areas to the wood floor of the rest of the apartment, and we got the deep freeze unpacked and operating. Tomorrow is a rainy day, so look for knobs on the kitchen cabinets and drawers. Who knows, we may even get the Internet working reliably too by the end of the day!

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