The Right Place
Home
The season had arrived when the sun in the morning was white-hot early, illuminating everything with a brilliance and intensity that even now, registered deeply.
It was the long shadows as the sun goes gradually higher, but the morning was still chilly.
I had been mulling over local real estate, and how families and history and real estate and farms and horses seemed to cluster in this part of Virginia. I had known none of that when we happened across a farm for sale at the turn of the century twenty-five years earlier.
We had been focused on a tiny place near Union Cemetery in town that needed everything: plumbing; heating; interior and exterior renovation. But we, as a family, had been through two prior renovation projects and with each, our skills improved.
I had been born to it but the girls seem to take a cue from my natural inclinations and became first rate at old restorations in their own right, beginning with lath and plaster of our lovely 1920s colonial in Forest Park, Birmingham, and culminating with installation of a 10” I-beam to shore up the sagging ceiling of our farm kitchen.
The vertical supports of the back wall of the house had been removed to enlarge the kitchen without replacing internal vertical supports, perhaps in the late 1950s or early 1960s.
***
Lynn, our real estate agent, had reluctantly mentioned, as an alternative, a place available near Hamilton. The place in town was barely a tenth acre; the one in Hamilton was 35 acres. Despite her skepticism, a drive up Dry Mill Road in September that year to see the place was memorable and enchanting from the first.
***
My medical rehab was moving along slowly but with every passing day, strength returned. No small part of my recovery was the lush vegetation and the quality of the air and water at home.
No matter how well the development of the place advanced, there was always more to do.
A farm, the right farm, keeps you well, but that life is not for everyone.