This Old House
Take the scenic route through East Texas and you may stumble on the winding road with a sharp bend that leads to this little blue house. If you make the turn, you’ll find yourself meandering through a tunnel of trees with herds of cattle listlessly ruminate just beyond. After a turn or two bumping along down the unfinished pavement, your car may be chased by a dog or several, and if you look up just in time, you’ll see a baby blue farmhouse perched silently beside a rusty collapsed tin barn. Blink and you’ll miss it.
Everyone has those idyllic places of childhood magic where the world was only as limited as you dream it to be: tree fortresses with rope ladders, a secret place in the park only you and your inner circle knew about, or maybe a little farm in Ben Wheeler. Maybe you spent summers getting lost in the woods out back with your cousins, feeding cows and horses in the morning, or planting carrots in the side garden in the spring. Maybe you had a place that always seemed full to the brim with people until early in the morning when only the smell of frying bacon seemed to reside there. These places represent a time when maybe there was family drama, but you were none the wiser, wrapped up in a handmade quilt in front of the fireplace, waiting for Nana to explain the Christmas craft this year. It was a place far away from the suburbs you called home, where you were guaranteed to encounter more animals than people daily. Where you knew that the barn cats may approach you, but you may only get a few pets in before they decided enough was enough and high-tailed it under the porch. I don’t know what that place was for you, but mine is 12 acres of blackland prairie, and through a twist of fate I find myself living here.
A far cry from the bustling family center it was in its hay-day, both my grandparents have now passed, and the house has become overrun by the trappings of two full lives, as well as their son’s, and now their granddaughter’s. My husband, Caleb and I have decided to take on this place. To pour into it and update where we can, while we’re here. It’s no small feat, that’s for sure. In the beginning, at least, we have signed up for two 40-minute commutes, no internet or central heat, no flooring in some rooms, a leaky roof, collapsed barn, smoke damage from fifty years of indoor chain smoking, and a lifetime of junk mixed with priceless family heirlooms to comb through. For anywhere but this place, this would have been a hard no. But every time I pull around the tree tunnel and see the house, the place my Nana taught me to cook, the place my Pawpaw mended fences and kept his cattle, my heart flutters a little. And the cold never bothered me anyway.
To understand why this house is so important, you need to pull back the soil and appreciate its roots. My Pawpaw was a Master Builder, and my Nana was a dreamer. They started with a double-wide trailer and bit by bit added and upgraded until it was my Nana’s dream home, complete with a staircase (that leads to a small loft) who’s sole purpose was for taking pictures of grandkids. You read that right. She wanted a big living room with vaulted ceilings, she got it. Nana needed a bigger kitchen, she got it. Covered porches? There’s two. Huge fireplace? Check. French doors? Of course. Nana was a lady who knew what she wanted, and she did not take no for an answer.
My Dad and I have talked about how the house feels strangely peaceful, despite my Pawpaw breathing his last earthly breath here, in the very room we sleep in. You would think the nights would be filled with creaky floorboards and whispering ghosts (many were, in fact, childhood legends here.) But when our move-in date loomed closer, I had a think about this. Whether or not I believe in such things as haunting spirits, (and I’m not so convinced I do) the thing that makes them scary is the prospect of them attacking us or crawling up the walls to induce terror. But the only person who could possibly haunt this place is my Pawpaw. Why would I be afraid to hear his voice again? At the risk of sounding like a complete crazy train, I would actually welcome it. As far as my Nana, she told me once when I was little that seeing a cardinal means you’re being visited by the spirit of someone you love. And would you believe that my first morning here, as I walked out to my car, a whole family of beautiful red cardinals sat perched in the tree by the driveway? The flew away when I shut the door, and I could almost see her winking at me.
So, do I feel afraid here? Maybe a little of the packs of coyotes howling outside my bedroom window at night. But of the fabled spirits? Not in the slightest.
As a disclaimer, my husband and I are not professionals. But my dad is, and we will be consulting him along the way for guidance in how to manage the more technical aspects of this project. But I wanted to document our progress in hopes that maybe less people will be afraid of fixer uppers and go for it. I’ve dreamed of a farm my whole life. I used to declare it to anyone who would listen. I was going to be a cowgirl. I was never destined for a life surrounded by concrete and noise.
As a test of I don’t know…gumption? My dad used to give me tasks around the farm to make me feel like I was helping, in the way that small children like to “help.” I would ride around in the bucket of the tractor, (very safe) help feed this animal or that, but one day my dad had a real doosie for me: a calf had died and needed to be buried. Ever ready to “cowgirl up” I’m told I volunteered to help pull the cow into its final resting place, around the barn. I don’t know how old I was, and honestly, I don’t have any memory of this, but the story has been told to me too many times for it not to be true. The way my Nana told it, I picked up the calf’s back legs and pulled. I pulled and pulled and inch by inch, I somehow got that calf to the grave. Vomiting all the way.
No other location I regularly visit has beheld so much of my personal and family history, and maybe that is why I have fixated on this life for so long. Maybe it was Nana’s stories of picking cotton or watching jars of crimson red tomatoes go carefully into their water bath, who knows. But here I am. Twenty-seven years on this earth and I’m still dreaming of green pastures and the smell of manure and dewy mornings.
In the upcoming year, we will be tackling many projects and documenting their progress here for you! If we can do it, so can you. We have a roof to fix, gardens to build, shiplap and tin to mount, a barn to raise, chicken coop to be built, and many many more projects along the way. I am dedicating this project to the suburbanites dreaming of dewy fields and crowing roosters, to my family, and specifically, my Nana & Pawpaw.
