MamAnomolie

Here is one of those topics that is so big to me that I don't even know where to begin...

I am a landowner.

This past May, Jonathan and I bought about 27 acres in western North Carolina. I'm sure this will be the first of many posts about "the land." Our intent is to eventually build a house and move there. We don't have a timeline for this plan yet, but regardless of the actual timing, in my head it seems far away. I think it's because the idea of even owning as much land as we do is something I can't quite wrap my head around.

I grew up in the suburbs. The biggest expanse of land that I ever had any claim to was our home from when I was born to age seven. It was about a quarter of an acre, but as a little kid in the suburbs, the backyard seemed huge. Since then I've lived on smaller and smaller parcels. Looking out any window, the most prominent feature has always been another house. In Virginia, where I lived from age ten until college, there were woods near our home with paved paths. My friends and I would go off the trails and try and get lost, but we inevitably would emerge from the woods on a path, surprised that we had actually traversed very little ground and knew exactly where we were. Always pavement and fences and houses.

So the scale of this property is something completely outside of my frame of reference. And when we have a window to look out of, the most prominent feature will not be another house. It will be mountains. Fields, forests, creek, green lushness, and, above it all, mountains.

I am currently reading "The Lacuna," by Barbara Kingsolver. (Her work will surely be the topic of future blogging as I have been devouring it all this summer and fall.) It takes place largely in Mexico, but later in the novel in Asheville, NC, which is about thirty miles from our land. Kingsolver, through her main character Harrison Shepherd, describes western North Carolina this way.

"It is a good place, Carolina, build of mountains and river valleys. Did you receive the postcard? The tall buildings you see in it are full of banks and bakeries, the usual things. But look carefully at the background of the picture: mountains. They stand behind every view, like a mother offering a blanket in which to wrap everyday life and shelter it from useless dreads"

I love that idea, of those mountains like a blanket. Jonathan, Sophie and I paid a visit to our blanketed land this week. We crossed the creek into the five acre field which is currently being tended by a local vegetable farmer. Tomatoes are on most of the field, with eggplants growing on the rest. Eggplants in shapes and colors I never even knew existed. Above the field is forest. So much to explore. So much to know. These photos show only the beginning of what will be a lifelong exploration for all three of us.