An amazing milestone passed quietly by at the beginning of November.  It marked forty years since my husband Larry and I bought this place we now call Lilac Woods.  What an incredible adventure those years have been! Four decades of shaping a very unique style of life through work, joys and difficulties (including six months without indoor plumbing!) have been accompanied by four decades of being formed internally and spiritually by that same work and joy. And definitely by the challenges!

And yet I cannot imagine my life having been anything different.   After a year in the inner city and only 3 months in suburbia, we were determined to find a property with some space where we could live “our dream,”  what I now know to be our calling,  of animals, large gardens, children;  all of it a life of simplicity and grace.   This old, beat-up property on North Diamond Mill Road seemed to fit the requirements best, with the added bonus that at 22-years-old we could afford it.  One of the few benefits my several years working for GM provided was the down payment funds for our dream place.  Definitely not our parents’ dream place for us, as I was later told my mother wept all the way home after visiting it for the first time.  She had been determined we would instead find a nice Tudor in Oakwood (the then upscale suburban enclave).

We however felt called somewhere different.  We wanted somewhere we could exercise our creativity, somewhere that would give us freedom to take risks and experiment, to learn as we went, to create beauty from that which had basically been discarded.  We received all this in abundance – and more. 

Of course at the time we had no idea it would be decades before all the construction and planting was finished (assuming it is!), but that has also been part of the joy of it for us.    We also had no idea that just as we transformed this property, God would do what God does best – transform us into the people we are meant to be.

The original house on the property can be found on 1850 county maps, one of the first in the area, and likely originally a two-room down, one-room up simple frame cabin like that pictured here.   It sat on at least 40 acres of what was then very swampy, flat beech-maple forest.  Malaria was a constant problem in the area!  Over time the land was drained, the beech trees felled for houses, and more families moved in.  About 1880 a German Baptist family by the name of Lutz built an addition on the side of the house nearest the road, a typical one for this area with three rooms down (gathering area, parlor, master bedroom) with a children’s bedroom on the second floor.  We know several barns, including a tobacco barn, were also constructed, as well as a couple of privies.  There was a cistern, and a well dug out near the road, with a stone horse trough. 

By the 1940s the Lutz family in residence was aging, and with no heirs around made the decision to hire the Shue family to live in as caretakers.  The Shues were here till the 1960s, by which time all but the few acres still remaining had been sold off to neighbors.  For a while our place was then known as the Purple Castle Kennels – but suffice it to say the entire property was in VERY rough shape!

Throughout the last 40 years Larry and I have matured and grown through our work on this property, even as the place itself has been converted by our physical efforts.  Together we have been rebuilt outside in, and inside out.  What lessons we have learned by tearing out plaster walls, rewiring, insulating, replacing windows (twice) and hanging drywall throughout the house! 

We were here for not even six weeks when a blizzard took out the power for four days and all the pipes froze.  Until we could get out to buy a propane heater we survived by tearing ancient paneling off walls and burning it.  But, that necessitated the first rework of the plumbing (and the discovery of a very old crawl space “dump”).  It also made us realize that the old cabin was (literally) falling down as we stood there, and would have to be replaced, eventually leading to the design and construction of  another large house addition.  Noting the snow that had found its way between the wood siding in the upper old bedroom made us realize the need for insulation – LOTS of insulation and 26 tubes of caulk – as well as a windbreak to stop the gusts blustering across a mile of open farmland.  Our land had been stripped bare by previous owners – only five trees remained here when we moved in.

As I have written before, I have an ongoing fascination with trees.  Several hundred planted and nature-donated trees later, I would concede that not only do we have a windbreak, but likely we have sufficient woods on the property now.  It no longer looks, as a friend at the time called it, like “the little house on the prairie.” 

I have much more I will write about how THIS work has been my life’s true vocation, how it has indeed turned me into the person I have become, and led me in the direction I was to go.  I could write much about how this work has allowed me to come to see and to know God in ways I never thought possible. All that is another blog post.  Or fifty.  Suffice it to say that early in our stay as stewards of this place, we read Thoreau’s Walden.   I was then very struck by his comments concerning how one might find some new beauty in the same place every day, if one only knew how to really see, and that learning to truly “see” takes a life time.¹    “Really?” I had thought.  But I have learned that yes, this is indeed true.  There is something in stability, in staying in one place, that encourages a deepening and going within, a discovery of the sacred and divine that in our driven consumer culture can be so difficult to find.  This is very much why monasteries often require that vow of commitment to a particular place and community, too. Learning to “see” is certainly key to my own particular vocation.

Not that any of this is to say that I believe forty years in one place is possible for everyone.  But still, I don’t regret this kind of love affair at all.  In fact, I highly recommend it.  The work, the sweat, the tears, the beautiful sunrises and sunsets, the kid goats and sprouting seeds – this week especially we give thanks for it all.  What amazing blessings saying “yes” to one particular place has brought us.  

^{1 “}The beauty of the earth answers exactly to your demand and appreciation.”  Henry David Thoreau, Journal, 2 November 1858.  “We must look for a long time before we can see.” Henry David Thoreau, Natural History of Massachusetts