Happy anniversary to us!

Back when I first met my future husband, Jim, I would bike out or find a ride to "the farm", an old farmhouse just outside of town, where he lived with a few other guys.

The house had been brought back to life by my brother several years earlier when he and his wife were starting their married life. I had even stayed there with them and helped in the garden and with summer canning.

A few years later, here I was again. Jim, my future brother-in-law Tim, and several others were installed in the farmhouse and it became a little getaway for us college students. It was far enough out of town to make it feel like country yet close enough to be accessible. Once I was invited to come out, I became a habitual visitor. Impromptu music jams, tasty cookouts by the fire and enlightening late night conversations over coffee kept me going back. I never knew who might be there and what might happen. 

It was a wonderful space. The farmhouse itself had two porches, a summer kitchen and a smokehouse. Out back, a big red barn also hosted a few tenants. The large kitchen was a welcoming place, especially when the old wood stove was cranking out the heat in the depths of winter. We gathered there around the table to eat and chew the fat. In the warm days of summer, we walked barefoot through the grass and reclined on the porch, watching the sun go down.

During that lovely summer, I started spending more time with Jim. The kitchen table became our spot to dream about the present and the future. There was talk of building guitars and baking bread, of taking trips to Europe and playing music. We became good friends.

As students graduated and moved on, “the farm” slowly emptied. I hosted one last big two-keg party in September. Then the house fell silent. Later that fall, I moved in with Jim and we started a household. One of the first things he did when I settled in was to make us a four poster bed with wood and rope, just one more sign of his thoughtfulness and creativity. I discovered that, after years of restless traveling, a country couldn’t root me but this man could. 

I worked the night shift as a waitress and Jim played late night music gigs so we often slept in late and stayed up late. Every now and then, the house would still be overtaken by people who thought it was a hangout. But I slowly cleaned the grease and grime accumulated over years of student life. The windows, once covered with the heavy stain of cigarette smoke, started to shine again and the bathroom, once home to a mushroom crop from a damp floor, started to gleam. We did a little decorating and I started to cook in earnest in the large farmhouse kitchen. Friends would often stop in for mealtime. And in the winter, when the snow flew, we still fired up the wood stove for warmth.

As these stories go, I soon was pregnant. We had a small ceremony to share our love relationship. Jim’s band played at the reception and then, we looked at each other and decided it was time to go home. We fled the party, drove back to the farmhouse and donned our regular clothes. Within the hour, friends and family showed up with the gifts. In all my cultural experiences, I had never known about “the gifts”.  I had wondered why someone at the ceremony asked about a gift table…

These many years later, Jim is building guitars and I am baking bread. We continue to dream and have enlightening conversations but, these days, we get to bed a little earlier!