from “Adorning the Dark” by Andrew Peterson
During our first ten years in Nashville our family lived in four different houses. We liked the adventure of a new place. But after Jayber Crow I was done with transience. I was stirred by a longing to care for the land under my feet, to work in partnership with the earth instead of in opposition to it, to learn the names of the birds and the flora and fauna as well as the names of my neighbors, and to shepherd some corner of this planet for the sake of the kingdom. As far as it was in my limited power to do so, I wanted to mend the world—even if it was just a few acres of it.
As nice as it was to live in a little Nashville subdivision, pushing a stroller through the neighborhood in the evening and being close enough to Percy Priest Lake to take our little Sunfish sailboat out at a moment’s notice, Jamie and I both knew it wasn’t the house we wanted to die in. Our neighborhood, like so many subdivisions, practically embodied the word transitory. Neighbors came and went. New streets were always being carved out of the tree line. Every other day, it seemed, a “For Sale” sign showed up in someone’s yard. It wasn’t the kind of place we could imagine our grandchildren getting excited to visit.
By then, several of our friends had moved to East Nashville, where at the time you could still buy a pretty bungalow and renovate it on the cheap. There were cool restaurants and historic neighborhoods (a little known fact: the outlaw Jesse James lived there for a while while he was on the lam). Now East Nashville is the hipster center of town and the bungalows are priced like mansions, so we missed that boat. Then one day we visited some old college friends who had just found a farmhouse in South Nashville. Only minutes from the city, a winding road took us past cattle ponds and ramshackle barns, over bridges that spanned Mill Creek, and finally up a gravel drive to their hundred-year-old farmhouse. As soon as we arrived, I broke the tenth commandment. Sort of. I didn’t exactly covet my neighbor’s house, but I coveted the land. I coveted the peace and quiet, the story of the farm, the stands of hackberry and white oak and cedar. I immediately wanted to move there. By this time I had found in Nashville a people to belong to—could this be the place?
I sat on their front porch, eyeing a little house across the pasture. “Do you think any of your neighbors will ever sell?” He told me it was doubtful since the other houses on the hill were occupied by members of the family that had grown up there. But, come to think of it, the old cabin at the top of the hill was for sale. Jamie and I drove up and checked it out, but it was on twelve acres and well out of our price range. As we disappointedly crunched back down the gravel drive I had a vision. It burned itself onto my imagination so brightly that I can still see it now, clear as day. I saw Skye as a little pigtailed girl in overalls tearing through the meadow in the spring, the air full of sunlit pollen. Even as I pictured it I grieved because it didn’t seem possible that we’d ever live there. So we kept looking. I continued to wrestle with my discontent: was it worldliness or was it the Holy Spirit pulling me toward something? I just couldn’t tell.
Then about a year later my old roomie called and said his neighbors had in fact decided to sell, at a price we just might be able to afford. Jamie and I met with the owners, then we drove out there every day for weeks, dreaming, wondering, praying. I drove friends out to show them the property, asking their opinions, seeking wisdom. One day Jason Gray and I sat on the front porch of what would one day be our home and he prayed that God would give us the wisdom to know if we should try and buy it.
The catch was, the house was 25 percent smaller than our current one. And it wasn’t exactly pretty. The kitchen was literally the size of a walk-in closet and the décor wasn’t, shall we say, “aligned with Jamie’s taste.” But the building itself wasn’t what interested me. All I could see when I looked out the front window was that daydream of Skye’s pigtails bouncing through the meadow. (The boys probably weren’t in the daydream because they were busy building forts in the daydream woods.)
In the end, we went for it. Without knowing America was on the verge of the Great Recession, we sold our subdivision home for a tiny profit and bought a house in one of the last rural pockets of Davidson County. The day we moved in, Jamie cried. They weren’t happy tears, mind you. Our kids were growing by the minute, I was touring more or less constantly, and we had just done a very un-American thing: we had downsized. We had also down-styled. The old vinyl flooring was, well, old. One corner of the outdated carpet had been chewed up by the former owners’ cat. The kitchen, as I said, was miniscule. None of this would have been hard for her except that we had gotten used to the relative niceness of the subdivision house. “But look at the land,” I would say, encouragingly, with a grand sweep of my hand. Bless her heart, she took a deep breath and dug in. I love that woman.
“Can we please replace the carpet sooner than later?” she asked on the day we closed.
“Of course,” I said without really looking at how bad the carpet was. “We’ll get to it.” My mind was on cutting trails and building tree houses. I went out for a weekend of shows and came home to a shock. There was a pile of old carpet in the front yard. Jamie had singlehandedly torn it up and hauled it out with an iron will.
“Now. About that carpet,” she said with a smile. “Here are some choices for hardwood flooring.” Like I said, I love that woman. Without delay, she began making our house beautiful. And I started reclaiming the land. When we moved in I was finishing my first reading of Richard Adams’s masterpiece Watership Down, about a community of rabbits on a great journey to find a new warren. Not only was our new place built on the side of a very English-looking down, there were always rabbits in the front pasture.
We named our place the Warren—not only because our journey mirrored Hazel and Fiver’s, and not only because of the rabbits that abounded, but because the new house was so small that there were times—especially when the kids had friends over and it was too rainy to play outside and we were stepping on Legos and bumping into each other in the tiny kitchen—when we felt like we were living in a little underground rabbit hole.
Don’t get me wrong. I know many people don’t have homes at all, so I shouldn’t be complaining about the size or weird layout of the house. I’m just saying that downsizing ain’t easy, especially with three small children. Especially—especially when one of the two parents has a job that requires weeks of travel. (Sorry, Jamie.) But when the kids came in with skinned knees from climbing trees, or when the sun threw golden light at the hill in the late afternoon and we all went out to watch the clouds catch fire, or when we woke in the misty morning and walked the trails in Warren Wood and saw the kids’ tree forts quietly awaiting their return, or when we sat on the porch on warm nights and listened to the barred owls calling to each other from the dark branches, we knew we had chosen wisely. God had provided a place we could love, a place our grandchildren could love as much as our children did. About five years in, we were able to build an addition that made the inside as lovely as the outside—and once again it was because Jamie, too, had a picture in her mind, and did the hard, creative work of incarnating it.
I tell you all this because place matters.
Of course, not everyone can move to the country, nor should they. But wherever you are, you might as well go ahead and pull up the carpet. Make it beautiful, even if you can’t afford it. Let your imagination run wild. Give your house a name. Watch how it changes the way you treat it. Let thy kingdom come, thy will be done, in our house as it is in heaven. I started keeping bees. Those bees pollinate the flowers we put in the ground. I planted apple, plum, pear, and peach trees, blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries that feed the people who tend these acres.
Jamie hung pictures on the walls. She keeps candles lit in whatever room we’re hanging out in, year-round. If we ever move (and I hope we don’t) we will have left our mark on this home and on this property—in the same way our children, who are too old to play in the woods anymore, have left behind clubhouses and stone paths and Wizard of Oz signs nailed to the trees that say, “HAUNTED FOREST” and “I’D TURN BACK IF I WERE YOU.” When I walk the trails now I can hear the memory of their laughter echoing in the trees. We have become members of this place, members of this community, of this kingdom—praying his will to be done in these woods as it is in heaven.
