Somewhere in the first ten minutes of owning 30 acres, Julee disappeared down into the root cellar. Nola went right in after her.
I’d like to say I was shocked. I wasn’t. That’s the whole dynamic in one sentence: one person walks toward the dark hole in the ground like it’s a walk-in pantry, and another person, who a year ago had never seen a root cellar outside of a Little House on the Prairie rerun, follows her without a second of visible doubt. Nola’s policy on rural life is simple: wherever Julee goes, she goes.
Last night we formally took possession. Julee, Nola, and I (plus Julee’s two dogs, who treated the whole property like a personal invitation) drove out to walk the place as owners for the first time instead of as people who were merely allowed to look. Julee, of course, checked out the root cellar and then the barn. Nola, of course, followed. The dogs supervised.
Everything was about what we expected, which after months of paperwork is its own kind of miracle. Nothing collapsed. Nothing was on fire. The barn is still red, the trees are still enormous, and the yard is still the kind of green you only get when nobody has been rushing it.
The Porch
Here is the part I keep coming back to. The covered porch on the old house faces west, out across the lawn toward the barn and a line of big trees, and around sunset the whole thing lights up. I stood there long enough to know exactly what I want the next few years to look like: a glass of bourbon, a porch rail to prop my feet on, and absolutely nowhere to be.
I did not have the bourbon last night. I want that on the record. But I’ve picked out the spot.
The Thing Nobody Warned Us About
Nobody told us how hard it would be to get internet out here.
This is a bigger deal than it sounds, because all of us work from home. Internet isn’t a nice-to-have on Hudson Road, it’s the thing that pays for the bourbon. And out here, the options you take for granted in a suburb (pick a provider, pick a speed, someone shows up Thursday) mostly turn into a shorter and less exciting list.
Our best option is Starlink. If you haven’t run into it, the short version is that a small dish on your property talks to satellites overhead instead of to a cable in the ground. No trenching, no waiting on someone to extend a line to your road. The catch is the one word that defines this property: trees.
Starlink works best when the dish has a wide, clear view of the sky. Satellites are constantly moving, so even a branch or two in the wrong spot can cause brief dropouts, and brief dropouts are exactly what you notice on a video call. Our property is full of mature trees, which is wonderful for shade and sunsets and less wonderful for satellites. The dish’s app has an obstruction checker that shows you what’s blocking the view from a given spot, so the plan is to test a few locations before committing to any of them. Mounting it higher, on a pole or a roofline, is the usual fix, and selective trimming is the fallback. We’re not going to start swinging a chainsaw at the trees that made us fall for the place.
I’ll admit something else: I’m kind of looking forward to this. The homelab part of my brain sees “find the one spot on 30 acres with a clean view of the sky” and lights up like it’s a puzzle box. Whether that enthusiasm survives the first dropped video call with four people depending on it, we’ll find out. I’ll report back.
What’s Next
Now the real work starts. We own it, which means we get to find out what we actually own: what the house needs, what the barn is hiding, what’s down that cellar besides Julee. There will be a post about all of it, and at least one about the internet, because I’m not going to be able to leave that alone.
For now, the sun is up, the coffee is on, and the bourbon is patiently waiting for me to earn it.
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