Embrace the Sour

The idea for this blog started over Christmas of 2022. I was sitting on the side of our very long driveway recording my husband saw the limbs off of a very sturdy tree that had blown over in the snowstorm.

We were both bundled up to the extreme and a little nervous. This was the first real test of ‘homestead’ living. Our driveway was completely blocked by this tree, and we had just moved into our little town. We knew no one, not even the neighbors. There was no one to ask for help - but if I’m being honest, neither of us would have wanted to. We were determined in our bones to really buckle down and do this ourselves.

We had always grown up in the suburbs. I was from a large pastor’s family that was always moving to different neighborhoods, and he grew up in a stable military family that settled down in a really safe part of the South. We had been living in an apartment near my parents for our first two years of marriage, and felt really disillusioned and uncomfortable.
’Why is everyone on top of each other? We can’t breathe.’
’My mental health is struggling, I find it hard to stay motivated to exercise.’
I really was wanting to WANT again. I wanted to be excited to get up and breathe every morning, to find the purpose in the little things each day. We had a small community (honestly it was all me, I’m more of the needy socialite in our marriage), but my husband was missing his family and my parents weren’t sure what they wanted long term.
I’d always talked about wanting a farm or a cabin in the woods. Something more remote with possibly a creek for our kids to splash in. We weren’t sure about kids, but our dream babies always had more than an apartment or a maze of houses that all looked the same.
I remembered visiting a family when I was a kid - a homeschooled family we knew from church that had 5 kids and no television. I stayed with them for a week when my parents went on vacation one year, and I never forgot the hours of fun we ended up having outside and how the tv was brought down from the attic on special occasions to watch an occasional cartoon.
How could we bring this lifestyle to ourselves when we didn’t even know how to start? We certainly weren’t farmers. I honestly had trouble keeping outside plants alive - but my pothos inside were thriving. Maybe that was a glimmer into a future full of plants and life and goats?…
His parents ended up bringing up the idea of a ‘commune’ when we expressed unhappiness, and we were overeager.
They wanted a slower pace and neighbors a little further out, and we wanted to feel good about the work we did with our hands.

We were game, and so the work to find the property began.

….During a pandemic.

….In an extremely competitive real estate market.

Multiple times our dream properties were snatched from our hands until we decided to take a leap and look into relocating to a smaller town.

And we found her -

A homestead on endless acreage up a gorgeous mountain with a view like you can only dream of.

The problem?

….the driveway.

It was long, curvy, ditchy, and was now stopped up by a pine tree that had been completely frozen inside.

Our first Christmas at the homestead, and we were snowed in with no power, no heat, and a tree down. This was honestly the first test. A bunch of my friends seemed surprised by the move, since we seemed like city people in our circles. …but honestly, how do you seem like farming people? Wear overalls everywhere? Grow tomatoes on the back deck? Talk about cross-pollinating corn? Now it was our time to prove them wrong -

By sawing off these limbs by hand.

I honestly have no idea why the universe decided to send a large tree to fall in our driveway that Christmas. Maybe it was giving us the chance to turn around and run back to civilization. Maybe it was teaching us what we were really made of.
I personally believe that it was teaching me to make some lemonade out of the giant lemon blocking me from visiting family on my favorite holiday.

As my husband finished up the sawing (and realized with the last snap of the branch that he had broken our tiny hand-saw), we worked on rolling the limb into the ditch of the driveway. This would work until we had more hands and a better saw.

This was when I decided to start documenting our life. To talk about what it takes to start a little hobby farm and to live far away from family and friends and to start over. To write about the failures and successes. The good and the bad. The sour and the sweet.

And in those moments when the sweet moments seem too far away, I’m hoping that we will be able to really look at each other and make the daily decision to fully embrace the sour.

XOXO,

WINDHAM