Living Here

“Have you settled in now?” one of our new neighbors asked me the other day.  And it occurred to me that yes, we have settled in.  It has not yet been three weeks, but it already feels like home.  Going into the kitchen in the morning, making coffee, carrying a cup out onto the front porch to listen to the morning birds.  Having lunch at the bistro table out there, too, the one made from the Lazy Susan we bought in that little shop in Duck under the live oak trees, with the tablecloth from France. 

All of the furniture and art that we loved the most found a home here and seemed to magically fit.  Even the cupboard in the kitchen, with some minor woodworking modifications, fit in the space between the two storage closets.  And you might have thought that the three Oriental rugs were specifically chosen for the spaces they filled.  Even the piano, that my Dad used for piano lessons in Florida and that I have enjoyed playing partly for that reason, was maneuvered into the back bedroom that I call my own, where my desk and reading chair are set up.  I still have more than a dozen boxes of books to sort through, most of which will be donated, but that will be enjoyable. 

It is the same with us.  We fit perfectly here, on the quiet end of a Highlands that has changed over the years, that has become a place where the very wealthy can be seen shopping and dining on Main Street.  “All of the botoxed women with blank faces and two-hundred-dollar hats pushing posh dogs in baby carriages are at the other end of Town, where the shops are,” I explained to one of our neighbors.  “At this end of Town, we see healthy, athletic people out walking their dogs, running, or on their way up to Sunset or the Nature Center.”  We are surrounded by Highlands Biological Station and Land Trust property to the south and the east, an expanse of green lawn to the North, and a piece of property to the west that will never develop.  Two houses west is the old Hutchinson house, named after one of the two founders of the Town, in which Martha’s maternal grandmother was born.  We are in fact on property once owned by her ancestors.  It feels, especially for her, as if we have come home.

On Wednesday, Martha’s cousin and her husband, who live in Arden, came to visit, and we hiked up Sunset Mountain and then through the Nature Center and gardens – leaving and returning right from out front door.  Our back yard!  And on Friday night, we invited Martha’s brother Scott for dinner.  Scott helped us move much of the heavier pieces of furniture here, and he was overwhelmed by the transformation since he had last seen it.

That was finally what made it feel like home.  Not just the art we have hung on the walls (most of it, anyway), the final touches of decorating, and the sound of a piano playing, but inviting friends and family to the table.  This week was actually the first time we have dined in the dining room; the rest of our lunches and dinners have been at the bistro table. 

You can finally call a place home when you can extend the gift of hospitality.

Our New Home

“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful,” designer William Morris famously said.   

Over the years, we had accumulated a lot of things that we thought were both.  But as I have said, there was not enough space for all of them in our new home.  Do I really need a pizza stone for baking bread? (no).  Do I really need a pasta machine? (yes).  We made a lot of choices over a short period of time, and sometimes we realized that we had been too hasty or ruthless about giving away or selling things.  I missed my tools most of all, because although I had retained some hand tools and a cordless drill, I sold all the rest, which made installing drapery rods and towel bars and the like more challenging.  I found myself one afternoon using the railing of our back porch as a workbench for hacksawing a towel bar and missed my old workbench, vise, and power tools.

We were fortunate to have a good contractor to help us, a young man who had installed a shower stall in our other house who had actually lived in our neighborhood at one time.  (He remembered me once giving him a ride to school, which I had no memory of at all.)  Whatever we asked Josh, the answer was always “Yes.”  (Can we have another electrical outlet here, and here?  No problem.)  The first change we made was to remove the wall between the kitchen and dining area, which a previous owner had for some reason thought was a good idea.  That's where the breakfast bar we salvaged would go. 

The second biggest project Josh tackled was enlarging a storage closet by the back door into the rear bedroom and installing a stacked washer and dryer.  Those appliances ended up moving from here to there, always in the way, until the installation was finally completed after an electrical sub-panel had been added and plumbing lines run under the floor.
 

We had already arranged for new carpet in the bedrooms by a company we had used in our other house.  The owner's dad had actually installed carpet there 43 years ago and he remembered tagging along with him when he was a child.  It is good to have reliable professionals to call on, and as someone who has done much of the work on our own house, I appreciate skilled workers.

But even before all of this work had been done, we did some work of our own, the first steps in calling this new place “home.”  We hung stained glass windows that had hung high above the balcony of our other home in the front room.  Things we believed to be beautiful.

And Martha put some planters on the back porch and a small patio tomato plant, and planted a clematis by the front door.  We moved our St. Francis and stone lantern to the small area on our side of the sidewalk, our new “garden.”

Day after day, we carried boxes of books back and forth, moved furniture, hung drapes and curtains.  It was rewarding work, but physically exhausting, and my running dropped to as little as one mile during one hectic week.  But I knew that when we had finally settled in, running and walking and hiking would be right outside the front door.  We could hike up Sunset Mountain anytime we liked, walk to Town, walk to the Saturday market where my fellow runners still meet on Saturday mornings.  

 It will be nice to finally be up here.  In Highlands.