it always starts with a story

I remember at the age of eight, driving in our station wagon from the East Coast to the West Coast to visit National Parks, from Sequoia and Yosemite to the Grand Canyon and Petrified Forest. I measured myself against a Sequoia and grabbed hold of it, and remember wondering if I could live there, in the forest, while the four members of my family drove off to the next park adventure. I left with them, reluctantly.

Decades later, when hosting an open house for my townhouse rental, a prospective tenant scrunched her face disapprovingly and asked what I was going to do with all the trees around the house. The townhouse was an end unit bordering a protected wetland with several acres of woods. Over the years, I had been delighted by thousands of birds landing in the trees in waves during their migration. I had a close-up free seat to the changing colors of all four seasons. “I could never live here,” she said, followed by, “don’t you get scared with all these woods?” I looked into the dark green full of trunks, limbs and leaves, and told her I preferred it.

Then in my late forties, a feeling was gnawing at me. It was so strong I began living, in my head, in an old house, with antique furniture (Victorian and Empire, for those who think the 50’s is when old began), lots of green space, and no other house or humans in sight. It was wild, both my imagination and the new place I was living in my head.

That led me to packing up. I started packing up my house as if I was moving. Started looking at old houses for sale from the Eastern Shore of Maryland to Virginia to West Virginia. Started studying what was needed to raise organic crops, and how I could survive Winter without heat or an emergency without city water. I learned how to make stream water potable, what slope was best for creating a garden and growing fruit trees, and could name the style and era of houses by their architectural details.

Three years later, I was an amateur expert at old houses, farm land and outbuildings, farm equipment, design elements, and what to look for when evaluating an old house for purchase. I found my house three years after I started packing, outside of the areas I had been looking, in a County I avoided, in a style I was less interested in, bigger than the cozy I imagined, with the creek, acreage, good soil, and eager seller that made it all so sweet. I had to sell the house I lived in for less than I owed, cash in my savings, and leave the suburbs to make it work. But I had never been so sure.

It was the first time I made such an intentional huge decision so contrary to the life I was living. It started with a step and faith, and a lot of work and patience. It did not end up as I imagined it. It was, and has been, so much better. As has been the husband I also picked up on this late-life journey, who appreciates — as a feeling and an action — the landscape just as much as I do. It remains my most vivid personal example of how taking the first step in the direction of a dream is the only way to get down the gravel road to it.

I am sure that’s why I enjoy so much walking with other people trying to take a step toward change in their lives and organizations; trying to think radically different to get different results; trying to grow or fix something to land on the other side of it.