Practically a homesteader

It is time to tell you about The House. Am so excited about it that I kind of don't want to say anything. And I also want to tell absolutely everyone. I am super complicated like that.

The year GH and I were married, his grandmother and her siblings finished compiling and publishing a long, detailed history of their parents (GH's great-grandparents). We received a copy of the book as a gift, and on Sunday nights we read portions of it together until we finished the whole thing.

I loved reading that book, and I was especially impressed by the life of GH's great-grandmother. She gave birth to 11 children, 8 of whom lived to adulthood. Their first newborn died during the Spanish Influenza outbreak of 1918. (My PSA: We are so, so lucky to have vaccines. Reading about how common it was to lose babies and young children to disease was heartbreaking. Vaccinate! PSA over.)

We read all about their farmhouse, and how they raised their bazillion kids in it and ran a dairy farm & store, and about her huge vegetable garden, her flowers, and their fruit orchards. She was almost 105 when she died. They had so many descendants that pretty much everyone I meet around here turns out to be GH's cousin somehow.

So now every time we visit GH's family and pass by the old farmhouse I crane my neck to get a better look. One of GH's cousins bought it and put a lot of work into restoring it, but she lives out of state now and has been renting it. When we found out we would be moving back to Logan & started looking for apartments, I don't know which one of us first said, "Hey, wouldn't it be crazy if we lived that house?" We called his cousin, not thinking anything would come of it but figuring we should at least ask if there was any chance it might be available.

Well. We are moving in next month. It's a good thing I did all that physical therapy before because I lose a bit of bladder control every time I think about it.

We are leaving our 800 square feet of 1970s shag carpet basement apartment and moving into a charming, beautiful farmhouse with 4 bedrooms and mature trees with swings hanging from the branches and lilac bushes and wild roses and fruit trees in the backyard and a massive vegetable garden just waiting for me to plant it. At night I lie awake and elbow GH to say things like, "And in the winter I will put those battery operated candles in all the windows and it will be so beautiful!" and, "What do you think about chickens?" (His answers, just in case you are interested: "Oh good, can I please sleep now?" and "NO chickens!")

We are Logan for the Memorial Day holiday, and I took Jenny & her family over to see the place from the outside. Savvy and Ethan raced to the swings, and Hudson kept asking where the chickens were. See? He gets that there should be chickens.