They gave us six months. That’s what I heard years later from the long-time residents along our road who watched us renovate the old place from May to November, an apparent folly to them, and the greatest challenge in our home-owner’s lifetime. “They’ll bail after the first winter.” That’s where the money was. This Thanksgiving marked our tenth anniversary here.
I understand their doubts. I had more than a few of my own. But we reckoned that if we were ever going to take on a physical challenge like this and make our home in Floyd County, it should be while we still had the strength of body, determination of will, and a steady income to pull it off.
There were a hundred times early on I feared we’d been impulsive and foolish and that the doubters were right. But we’ve been thankful a thousand times over since then that we didn’t wait to do the work it took to make this place a home for us. And of all the places we could have settled, it was right to sink our roots here.
Thanksgiving, 1999, we faced an uncertain Y2K ahead. But we had indoor plumbing, new windows all around, and a firm new foundation underneath us. Electricity brightened the rooms for the first time, and stacked out back was all the firewood I’d moved from Walnut Knob.
We inherited more quiet here than we’d ever known under a roof, even though the land was bisected by the road. But a mere half dozen cars passed each day. We soon gave up running to the window to see, knowing them by the pitch of their engines or the clatter of their frames when they hit the potholes out by the mailbox.
Since ‘99, this place has weathered hurricanes and drought, blizzard and gale. The metal roofs of house and barn have hung tight through it all. The wood stove beside me is as familiar and predictably needy as a family pet but our mountain land has grudgingly yielded enough wood so that even the cold-natured within these walls is usually warm enough.
The footpaths around the valley are so familiar to us after so many morning and afternoon walks that we could follow them in the dark, and sometimes do. We know their feel and smell in every season. The nuances of this lightly-maintained tortuous state road just beyond my window we know well by now, more often thankful for it’s slow-road beauty than bitter for its challenges in wet, cold weather and wind. On this forested lane, we’re dodging downed hemlock limbs now, soon, their towering dead trunks that are already pitched at angles over the steep road.
Dozens—hundreds over the years, perhaps—once played Sunday softball in our pasture across the road, we’re told, though the ball field was choked with planted-then-neglected white pines when we first saw it. Our downwind neighbors suffered a summer of smoke so we could once again enjoy the cleared pasture where we go each night with the dog, who chases the deer only as far as the edge of the clearing.
We’d not lived here long before the descendants of the builders of the house generously shared with us the history of this place from its very foundations. Built shortly after the Civil War by the sons of Thomas Boone, its interior floors, walls and ceilings were made from heart pine, framing from full dimension oak and it’s siding milled from poplar—all from the hillsides of local ridges.
“My grandmother died in this room” said one visitor of the room where I sit now at my desk. “I remember my daddy riding a horse up that old road with two saddlebags of mail for Simpsons” said an elderly gentleman who stopped by. “We buried his ashes out by the maple tree”—we learned the fate of a former resident many seemed to know. That maple holds up our clothesline now.
And even while it seems to us as if this house has taken some time to become a home, the longer we live on Goose Creek, the more we come to acknowledge we are only the latest to make our lives here, although we are the first (but will not be the last) to enjoy the modern amenities inside these walls.
And so here between two family holidays in 2009, a full decade since our first, we’re thankful for all the ways this place has been home to so many—to those former residents we know, those we’ve heard of, and those who stay behind as the unknown “good ghosts” of memory to give this place its character and identity.
By Fred First [email protected]
