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The word “Home” has often been a bit fraught for our family. We spent years jumping from rental to rental, no sooner beginning to settle into one place before we were pulling up our roots once again, for various reasons. Each time, we would try to pretend we could make a transient home into something more permanent. Taylor built sandboxes and compost bins and chicken coops, all of which had to be pulled apart again at the end of a year or two. We dug, tilled and planted 4 different gardens, each one sadly abandoned to weeds within a year. Sometimes I felt like I myself was one of those bare-root trees you can buy at a nursery, with my attempts at homebuilding exposed to air and weather, waiting to be welcomed into the fertile soil of continuity that seemed always just out of reach.
In the fall of 2021, we painfully took leave of a land co-op in Vermont, which we had called home for longer than any other place. We were forced us to move out so that our landlord could cash in on the inflated real estate market. We had planted gardens and berry bushes; milked our own cows and witnessed two calves be born; butchered pigs and smoked bacon; raised poultry from chicks, ducklings and goslings; connected with neighbors; and deepened our roots in a new and profound way. Pulling those roots up was all the more hurtful. We sold our cows, gave our flocks of poultry away to friends, found someone to care for our kitties, and put our homegrown potatoes in a neighbor’s basement for safekeeping.
One of our last evenings there, we shared a farewell ritual around our fire pit, wrapping yarn about our wrists to remind us of our love for the place we were leaving and our faith that we would find other homes. We left Vermont to embark on a new adventure of full-time travel, but the word “home” seemed to hold the pain of all our goodbyes and felt loaded with emotion. When were were staying at an airbnb later that fall, I recall saying casually, “when we get home…” and having half of our children yell in anger and tears, “We don’t have a home!” This became a common refrain whenever Taylor or I would use the expression without thinking.
Finally I began to respond, “Home is where we are all together.” It felt a bit false when I first said it, but perhaps that’s because I needed to hear it as much as the children did. I kept repeating it whenever someone pointed out that we had no home, and gradually I heard the children start to say it to each other as they grew accustomed to the new reality of full-time travel. Shortly after New Year’s that year, we gathered after dark on the beach in north Florida to light sparklers and kindle a fire with various paperwork from our former rental. It was an exorcism of sorts, a purging of the pain and negativity from the previous year, and a way to joyfully welcome the possibility of the next. We also cut off the yarn from our wrists and dropped it in the fire, ready to move forward into our next season.
Our new way of defining “home” as togetherness freed us up to take on a different rhythm wherever we happened to land. On Amelia Island, it was settled lessons alternated with long walks through the live oak-lined Greenway, trips to the beach and my own regular visits to a beloved local yoga studio. We also reconnected with relatives, who enriched and expanded our children’s sense of family. As we camped our way further south in Florida, our days were focused on exploration and learning, both about the local flora and fauna and about the indigenous and more recent history of a place so markedly different from our home state.
In inland South Carolina, we spent weeks helping our friends finish the interior of their barn-turned-home, and in the evenings I found some of the rhythms of homemaking once again by baking sourdough and cooking meals in a kitchen rather than over the open fire of a campsite. We shared those meals with the friends whose home we were occupying and enjoyed the fellowship of hard work followed by laughter and good cheer. In the mountains of North Carolina, we lived in a tipi while WWOOFing on a family farm, and our days were spent homeschooling around the table with our new friends there, milking their family cows, learning to make cheese, helping to build an outhouse and plant the first spring vegetables; we also offered our own gifts of time as we baked bread or cakes for a crowd and taught them all how to weave baskets.
In the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, we focused on hiking and exploring, while in Williamsburg we lived a full week of colonial and Revolutionary War history. We still didn’t have a settled home, but we were finding a way to create home wherever we happened to be, and it was a rich experience to make friends and leave little seedlings planted in each place we visited, even though it was so different than putting down deep roots in one location.
The following year, we wandered across the Atlantic to explore Europe. As we called one Airbnb or another “home” for 4 weeks or 5 days, no one objected to the word anymore. It was true: we were able to make a home where we were together, continuing to read aloud, to share meals together (and particularly good ones while in Italy), to cuddle at bedtime, and to laugh at the interactions we had with locals in broken Italian. Whether in Vermont or Florida, Italy or Romania, we all loved to wander through bookstores or down cobbled streets lined with beautiful old buildings, to marvel at stunning views and glowing sunsets, and to gather around a table laden with delicious food. (You can read more about our months in Europe at our other Substack, Un Bel Viaggio.)
In spite of the excitement of travel and the discovery that we were able to find home in every place, we all continued to long for One Place, where we could put down deep roots rather than scatter a few seeds before moving on. We wanted to literally plant things that take years to grow—orchards and asparagus crowns, nut trees and perennial beds. We also wanted to paint walls, build bookshelves, hang pictures—and then burn all our moving boxes in a grand cathartic purging of our years of rootlessness.
Our longing for Home intensified when we returned from Europe and were once more faced with the unfriendly real estate market that had been our enemy since 2020. We spent a dispiriting 4 months looking at houses we couldn’t afford and land that was barely accessible. We visited a forested and mildewed yurt next door to a shooting range, a cramped house smack-dab on a state highway, and a plot of land that was essentially a steep wooded hillside with a brook running between it and the class 4 road. Then we fell in love with a sweet old cape in our former town and within days were outbid on it, and we began to lose hope. Miraculously, just when we were ready to give up, we found 100 acres for sale in the very town where we wanted to be, near to established friends and community. It was off-grid, with no driveway or well — but, scattered among the saplings of new forest growth were fairy stumps, covered with thick moss; and down a gradual slope from the road was a beaver pond and wetland, with a shining stream snaking through its subtly color-changing grasses.
Within a month, the 100 acre wood was in our name, and we were pitching our tents while we planned a small cabin to house our family. Once again we were crafting a new rhythm, this time shaped by off-grid camping, the community homeschool life that we took back up again after 2 years of absence, and Taylor’s tireless work in the forest felling trees, hewing logs into beams, and planning out the timber frame of a future cabin. After months and months of travel and finding home where we could, we finally put ourselves on our own land; and yet the work was only just beginning.
Between his own labor, the help of a handful of friends, and the purchase of beams from a local sawyer, Taylor had a stack of beams with their joinery cut by the early winter. One day in mid December, many old friends and new acquaintances gathered to raise the cabin frame, and we served out soup, stew, bread, and cheese that we and other friends had made with love to nourish the community that had come to assemble the skeleton of our new home.
As the winter has worn on, Taylor has continued to work on his own to salvage windows, restore a beautiful door, and plane boards for the roof; and other friends have come to help assemble rafters and install the roof. Our little cabin is still just a frame, but the dream home becomes closer and more real each day. As I bake sourdough in the propane oven of our little rental, I envision pulling fragrant loaves from the beautiful wood cookstove we have bought; I see the walls plastered by our own hands and our books lining shelves that we have built; and I see a table laid for a meal with friends, hear laughter and conversation fill our beautiful home and feel joy fill my heart.
Our travels showed us what it means to create a home under the strangest of circumstances and to cultivate relationships wherever we are. Building our cabin has shown us how powerful community can be and how we don’t do anything alone. We found our land, but the home we are making on it is not something that comes easily or quickly, or something that we can make on our own. Perhaps Home is not something we find, but something we craft, whether it’s by hand-hewing logs or forging friendships, milking a friend’s cow weekly, or simmering a stew on the back of the stove to pair with home-baked bread and friends around the table. In any case, however gradually, we’re headed there.