Home is where you put your feet up (for more than a few years)
- Carolyne Aarsen
- Jul 28
- 4 min read
“Being lost is worth the coming home.”
This is a quote from Neil Diamond which I especially love. Home is something I talk about a lot in my stories. Being home, coming home. Setting out to look for what is waiting for you back at home.
I think some of this is working out my own life. We currently live on a farm which is at, what Malcolm Reynolds liked to say, the intersection of No and Where. (still sad that Firefly got cancelled). This meant that when my kids decided to go to college or university, they had to move. Away. Then they stayed. Away.
I did the same thing to my parents when I got married and moved from the city to a farm in Bloomsbury two hours away. Nothing glamorous like a ranch. It was a pig farm. We farmed with my father-in-law who then left his wife and left the farm in our hands five months before our first wedding anniversary. We tried to make a go of the farem but it was too much and we were too young for all that responsibility. We sold it and thought, maybe we would move away.
That didn't last long. I wasn't ready to make a move too far away. I liked our community and friends.
So we bought a plot of land that was still close to our community, moved a mobile home and our baby boy into it. We had enough land that we hoped to build a pig barn. It was what we knew and we could do it our way.
But despite months of wrangling with the County, hours of letter writing, that dream died. (If you want to call running a pig barn a dream but the money was good) The land was more than we needed, so, we sold it and then decided to go walkabout and see if there were other places we could live. We went to Vancouver Island and wandered around there for a month with three children, imagining living in some of the beautiful places there, but nope. Too many places for sale, not enough work to pay for them.
Didn’t find what we were looking for so we came back 'home' and ended up working for a year for another pig farmer while the owners did the same thing. Went looking for other places to live.
By this time, our community was so much a part of us, we thought we might stay. So we decided to stay. We bought another piece of property, moved a smallish older house onto it, and renovated a house as we could afford it. Took about seven years, give or take. When it was finished, my husband caught the wanderlust again. We went looking in British Columbia and found what seemed like a perfect place. A ranch on the lake, a small woodlot and a perfect little house. But as I mentally tried it on for size, I knew it was too far away from civilization and I knew our kids would move far away when they graduated. And I also really wanted to stay 'home'. So, I thought, this is it. This is our home.
One day The Boss went out looking for firewood for our wood stove and came back with a novel proposition. Why don’t we move, again, and buy two quarter sections of land so we can have the cows and horses he'd always dreamed of. No pigs this time. I liked cows better anyway. They smell better and though the baby pigs were cute, baby calves are cuter. And a sawmill. Interesting new career choice. Making lumber instead of building with it.
Bonus, this move was only eight miles away. Still in the community. Still close to our church, school and the Co-op. I hemmed and hawed (Hemming is easier than hawing by the way). Then he whispered the magic words into my ears.
“I’ll build you a brand-new house.”
After living in tiny houses, a third hand trailer that was falling apart, small cabins, a half-finished house for eight years….I wavered. I am a weak woman. I can be bought. We purchased the land, built the house, set up the sawmill, bought the cows and told our kids, this was it. The last move.
And it has been.
We’ve been living on the farm for over thirty years, a record for us. I love it. Even if our kids left as soon as the tassle on their commencement cap barely stopped swinging.
I love our community and I love my home. The kids come back, put up their feet and I can tell they are happy to be home for however long they’re staying.
Which is good enough for me.
As for my characters. Like I said, it’s a bit of working through what I dealt with. I think I am putting them through the wandering my husband and I did. Making them realize that sometimes you need to be away, to appreciate what you have at home.
If you want to find out more about my characters and their own journeys to home, click on any of the links below to be directed to some of the series I've done.
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