A Moving Post: Part One

Eric and I decided that after three plus years of living in close quarters with other families, this last year being the thickest, it was time for some quiet.  So we started to look for a new place in the country.  Our order was steep: It had to be perfect AND in our budget.

The first place we looked at was on over two acres of hill country.  The views were breath taking, the land stunning.  The, er, house, and I use that word with a lot of generosity, resembled something like the lean-to shanties I recall reading about in Little House on the Prairie.

My Dad is a home builder, so we had him out to take a look.  He saw the desperation in our eyes and tried his hardest to be positive about the possibilities.  “Welp, the uh, the land is nice.  And that front porch?  Nice porch.  Real nice porch.  And, if you buy it, it’s actually five acres, you say?”

Later that night our phone rang.  Clearly, Dad couldn’t sleep right knowing we might actually move his grandkids into this “house”.

“In six months time, you will fall through the floor.  There is water damage throughout and I have a sneaking suspicion that the Board of Health would demolish it as a health hazard if it was within city limits.”

And so the search continued.

The next place we looked at was a farmhouse on over two hundred acres.  It had been built in 1928 and was painted a beautiful lemon yellow color.  The bedrooms were HUGE and there was even room for a school room.  The yard was, well, there was a yard.  Right beside the house was a giant red barn that saw its last horse around 1960-something.  My money says that last horse ran out as the first beam dropped.

Besides the barn, there were four other falling down shacks that I suppose were used by the farm hands who left on that horse.  These shacks were loaded with all kinds of antique goodies, beer cans, broken farm equipment, and oddly, a Barbie’s charred head.  Mom swore up and down that she saw a noose under one of the trees.

This became our entire search.  Right house, wrong land.  Wrong house, right land.  We kept getting close to what we wanted, but never just right.  Something in me kept saying, “Don’t settle”.

One night I came home from one of our all day searches and got out my trusty spiral notebook.  I wrote out what the perfect place would look like and then I asked God if He wouldn’t mind giving me a dream that would settle for me whether He had that place available or if we should just move into yet another apartment and choose renting amenities over owning isolation.

That night I had a dream.