If Wishes Were Horses: The Evolution of a Dream

Sometime after our first baby was born, I started dreaming about houses. We were renting a three bedroom apartment while Adam was a lab manager at our alma mater. It was plenty of space for the three of us. In fact, looking back at that year...we were swimming in it. But I didn't want an apartment. I wanted a house.

The village we called home at that time -Gambier, Ohio- is a beautiful place. The hills roll just enough, and a river runs through it with well worn fishing holes and bridges for jumping. Then there's the Kokosing Gap Trail that runs from Mount Vernon to Danville. I can still smell the earth alongside the paved path, and hear the river crawling along...hidden behind the leaves of ancient trees.

{nostalgia moment}

Gambier was where our story began, and though both Adam and I were in love with that place, it became clear that it we couldn't stay there. So Adam applied for graduate schools, and our time in Gambier came to a close. We still dream about going back there and settling somewhere in those fields. Key word: dream.

We knew more kids were coming along, so we stayed close to family and moved just north into Michigan. When the time came to apartment shop in Ann Arbor, I was on bed rest with our second baby. Adam and his parents trekked up to U of M and made video tours for me...breaking into campus housing so that I could see what we were getting into. We chose one in faith, and packed all our things into a Uhaul truck.

Family housing at the University of Michigan is a very unique place. Very. Unique. For seven years, we lived with neighbors from every corner of the world. Most conversations were in very broken English and ended abruptly with children running away and a tired parent in pursuit. During that time, we learned more about living alongside other people than we ever had in college. We began to understand what it really looks like to love your neighbor, whether you feel like it or not. There was little space (as our family doubled in size), and even less privacy. Shared walls, shared play areas, shared dislike of graduate school and Michigan winters...  It was a lot like coffee: wonderful and terrible all at the same time.

There are some days that I still miss it. A lot.

I brought three babies home to those small rooms.

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I watched my children grow, learning to fail and rise again to keep trying...

There was a whole lot of life lived within those walls.

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One night, about half way through our stay there, Adam and I had a rare evening out and we took a bus ride downtown. We stopped by Borders, grabbed a coffee to share and wandered through the rows and rows of words. I turned a corner to find Adam, sitting on one of those tiny little round stools, fully enraptured in this:

Pause.

Early on in our relationship, I spent a semester in New York City and fell in love with the speed and excitement of city life. After 5 years of living in cornfields for college, we seriously discussed moving to a big city together.  Adam holding a book with a barn on the cover like that wasn't a complete surprise...but it certainly wasn't where we were originally headed.

He handed it to me, splayed open to a page about composting toilets... So. Romantic.

I raised an eyebrow, shrugged, and said that if he was interested, we should buy it and read...
And so we did.

Every page was magical. Well...every page except the one about composting toilets. I would read, turn the pages, read more, ignore the dishes, read more, ignore my children, read more. It was an addiction...very similar, in fact, to the way my children now drool over a Lego magazine. I had never felt anything like this before.

Land lust.

I will share some of my homestead centerfolds with you...

five acres. divided perfectly. so. beautiful. must. look. away...

it's like a utopia. the rows are so straight. and green. and edible. drool.

duck. houses. that is all.

And that was how it began. My dream about a house turned into a dream about a house on five acres with chickens, pigs, a cow, and maybe sheep. A root cellar, an orchard, rotating fields and dirt under our fingernails.

Soon after this obsession began, we came across a movie called Sweet Land. A beautiful story that illustrates perfectly the desire to work hard and make something from the land, and through that work comes the birth of a love that transcends the changing of times and the challenges of pouring your life into that land. 

I can not fully explain how badly we wanted this...to work our own land with our bare hands, to pay our dues in sweat and sore muscles, standing side by side in a field that grew food for our children. Suffice it to say that I'm pretty sure we can credit a baby to that movie night. Desire is transferable.

That was seven years ago.

All of that dreaming began in graduate school, where nothing...nothing...was clear. The future was uncertain, so although the housing market was perfect, we knew we couldn't buy. So we waited. Graduate school ended, and a post doc began, and we watched the market slowly rebound. The future was still uncertain, but I watched for houses anyway, trying not to get attached to anything I saw, or to dream do deeply. 

It was then that we decided, since we couldn't buy our own place yet, we would at least move out of family housing and into an actual house with a yard and a garage. Anything to get closer to our dream, even if it was just a rental, and really a step sideways instead of forward. 

But in some ways it was closer. This house feels like home.  We've filled it with us, and added even more of us to make it extra special full of us-ness. 

The kids have worn in the swing set and run circles into the carpets, and put ample holes in the walls with elbows and heels. They've decorated and redecorated their rooms to fit their monthly obsessions, and turned every corner of this house into fodder for make believe. 

It has certainly become our home.

Yet still, even now...

I wake in the mornings and long to look out of my window and see

-not the back door of a neighbor-

but the ingress of creation and life.

A land, a sweet land, that I can bury my hands in, and pour my soul out upon. 

I don't know when I will wake to that dream. Probably not this year, maybe the next...perhaps even further down the road. I certainly hold out hope. But in the meantime, in the mornings when I open my eyes to see the haloed carpet and holy walls...

I will remind myself that home is what we make of it.