house. home. land.

..

And so now I suppose I shall have to go ahead and tell the story, except that I am still kind of unsure of  sharing it. Not all of the parts were happy, and actually this is really only just a speck of the story.

Sometimes it's easier to just not say anything, and in some ways that's what I've done with this blog over the years. Anything you see and read here is truth and real, but that doesn't mean it's everything.

I want to get this part out of the way so that we can move on to more of the good stuff, and also because I think it will allow me to go further here with more of the story, whether happy and beautiful or not. (Thankfully I know there will be a whole lot of goodness, happiness, and beauty. It's always part of it.)

So like I said, pencil and paper. I wrote this last week. I made brief mention of it here. It's my little way of tricking/forcing myself to get something done. Now I have no choice, so I'll just get on with it…


Home is not necessarily in a house. We have done very well at creating a home for our family within the walls of this house. Especially if you consider some of the difficulties and sadnesses that we have had to go through while being here.

Sometimes we joke that we accidentally bought a house. (And sometimes it is so not funny.)

Always, from the beginning, Jason and I barely past 20 years old, we were going to buy "our land". That is a whole story and dream itself, it is part of who we have always been. (Once we were even going to wait to get married until we were on our own land, and have our babies on our own land. That was about 1998, and lasted until about 1999. It's a really good thing we didn't wait!)

So it really was odd that instead of buying land we bought a house on only a ¼ of an acre in a rural mountain subdivision. Oh my gosh, sometimes it is hard to not feel some regret at not having bought the land right then. But we were faced with a move back to Colorado and somewhat overwhelmed with the need to find a home for us, our children, our pets. It kind of seemed like we needed a house. (For us that feels like such a silly thing to say!) So we would stay in the house for a couple or few years and then buy land.

Hmmm... I think I have shown and shared pretty well of the happinesses that we have had here, and I of course have been grateful about a billion times that we have a home, safe shelter, at all… but oh! has this been a hard seven years!!!
(Yes, here we are now seven years into it, not just a few…)
Good, great, beautiful, wonderful years, but also a lot more than that. Also a great big gigantic struggle.

(Okay, this is the one and only time I am going to mention this here, but the worst of it is that there have been very unkind people in our world since moving into this house. And unkind is not even close to the correct word. Really really really really mean, and that too is not even close to an accurate description. But I have never wanted to bring that ugliness here. It is not what we choose for our life, our world. We just unfortunately got accidentally stuck living right next door to it.)

Yuck. Okay. That's over.

(Also I will say, it's not like I have kept this a secret. Those closest to us know the story well, including some of my dearest blog friends. Melanie, Jules, Lisa, Tonya, Jeanene, thank you for your friendship and sharing and understanding and ability to somehow really know me.)


The good part of the story continues…

The land dream, the land dream, the land dream.
It is still not over, someday we will get our "big land", but for now we finally have our own few acres.
Our own little mountain, our own forest, our own giant fir tree.
It is our home, and we are headed there right now…


(Some peeks from last year at the land here, and here, and here…)


Thank you for letting me share our stories with you!!!



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