Leaving the Neighborhood: Our Journey of Loss and New Beginnings (Part 1)

It's been a long year. I'd be lying if I said I've enjoyed it, though we have had our good moments. And I wish I could share with you the happy fair-tale ending, but I can't. We're still waiting.

But our story is worth telling. It's a story of victories and losses, and God is still writing it at a pace that feels like it's word-by-word rather than chapters at a time.

Let's start at the beginning. Back before last year when we purchased our land and thought life was going to be full of endless joys.

David and I were married nearly 20 years ago, and from the start, we wanted to have land and a homestead. In 2012 we thought that was the direction God was taking us, so we picked up and moved across the state to buy land we though David's grandma would sell. Well, she did sell. To someone else. We were devastated.

We bought a foreclosure house in town, tore it down to the studs, and renovated it as we grew our family from three kids to five. When we outgrew that, we sold it for a small profit and put down money on a beautiful house in one of the more "grown up" neighborhoods in the same town. We determined it would be our "forever home" and started making it our own. Gone were our aspirations of land - surely that was a distant memory.

We poured our hearts and souls into that house as we dreamed of growing old there and having our children grow up & bringing grandchildren to come and visit us. We spent hours of time and thousands upon thousands of dollars painting, redoing the roof, the siding, HVAC, flooring ... we remodeled or refreshed everything but the kitchen. It was lovely.

And then came 2020. Need I say more? We were suddenly faced with the reality that if the world were to shut down - I mean really, truly shut down - we wouldn't survive more than a few weeks, maybe a month. We had some food stores, sure. Even more water on hand than your average joe. But we simply had no access to ongoing supplies. That thought startled us.

I've always enjoyed gardening, and decided to expand my horizons there. I started planting more and learned to preserve what I harvested. Our son researched ways to grow our own protein and started a little rabbit operation in the backyard. Still, with five kids, we just felt like if things really were to go awry, we would need more. We sighed to each other that things would probably never change - after all, we still loved our home and our life in town. We would just stay there and trust God to provide.

But our story was about to change.

We have a horse out at the kids' grandparents' house, and a couple of our daughters decided to show him at the county fair. So we joined 4-H, signed up for the fair, and spent a whole week there in July of 2023. We all loved it. We truly felt like we belonged when we were with all the animals, visiting agricultural exhibits and talking with local farmers. And when we got home & sat down at the table in the air conditioned dining room of our suburban home, the whole family agreed: life would never be the same. We didn't know how, but we all just knew God was moving us out to the country.

We started praying about it. We brainstormed ideas for where to go, met with our financial advisor to start saving for a farm, even talked to friends who had land to see if they would sell (that was a hard "no"). Three months went by as we combed through listings on Zillow and calculated and re-calculated what we could afford. Nothing seemed feasible.

Then one day in late October, our friend Caleb called. He wanted to meet at a little restaurant about 15 miles from our town - it was the middle of nowhere. Caleb & David drove out even further into what felt like the great unknown, to a 6.5 acre piece of untouched, overgrown, tree-filled land. He told David he'd just bought it as well as the land surrounding it, and he wondered if it was the kind of place we'd be interested in.

To say it took some vision I usually don't possess would be an understatement. David was in love ... I was opposed. But he's a dreamer - in a very good way - and he started pitching his dream to me. I could begin to see how this could work, but still, it felt far away from our life we'd loved. I asked if we could go see a few properties I had marked as possibilities, and David obliged. When I saw the flat pieces of land that cost twice as much, my mind began to change. I asked if we could come back and see this place and as we drove up, I saw the name of the street: Windwood Trail. Isn't that beautiful? It seems silly, but that was the point of change in my mind. I wanted that to be my street name!

Back section of land, still untouched today and so beautiful

We began the paperwork right away, and by January 2024, we triumphantly became the owners of a gorgeous piece of real estate! We were so excited to begin building our dream home, and immediately set to work planning the giant house we intended to put on the property.

If you'd asked us at the time, we exuded enthusiasm, yet in our hearts, something just didn't seem right. We plowed ahead for three months, drawing and consulting my architect-family members, preparing to sell our house, visiting the land regularly & dreaming of the future. March came and went. April, May, June ... we were full steam ahead, with no idea that dream was about to come crashing down on us.

Join me for parts two and three to continue following our journey!