A Little House in the Country

For as long as I can remember, I wanted a house in the county. A little home to write letters and drink tea and fill with books. It would be filled with comfy old furniture as though I had inherited from many generations before and not had the stylish mid-century modern Grandmas that I did.

I would let my hair grow long and wild and I would rarely wear shoes. I would trade my pencil skirts and high heels for flowing dresses and sandals. I would keep whiskey in a fancy decanter and sip it out of an old flowered tea cup on cool spring evenings while wrapped in an old quilt on the porch swing.

While wild, creative children running in and out of the house to play in the fields would occasionally appear in this day dream, the constant was a couple of large dogs. These large dogs would catch sticks, love rambling walks and sleep at my feet while I sat near the fireplace.

Sometimes I would like to imagine life if I had any ability to paint. With long skirts wrapping around my ankles, I would sit on a stool in front of a giant picture window and create beautiful pieces of art that would cover the walls. When I died, they would be auctioned off for huge sums of money and I would designate a charity for animals to collect the profits of what was during my life just a way to pass the time.

I wanted the town to be filled with colorful characters and when I would drive to town in my rusty pick up truck, I would talk and interact with them. Whatever fruits and vegetables I did not grow myself, I would buy from the roadside or from wooden bins out on the sidewalk in front of the store.

 I always pictured the man I would end up with would be creative and musical. He would play his guitar in the mornings and I would give loving looks over the top of my book.

I  got that.

Kind of.

Sort of.

If you stare into the sun for a minute and then look back at my life with the burned in black blur, it kind of resembles what I thought my life would look like.

I have a house in the country that I live in on the weekends. All week long, I run on stress and coffee and then make my way home to the country on Thursday nights. I wake up to the birds and sunrises on Friday mornings but have to make coffee and get onto my email before I have time to fully enjoy it. Life is anything but idle there and by the time I drive back to my city home on Sunday, I am exhausted.

My garden is an over grown mess and we pay a retired neighbor to mow down the weeds ever couple of weeks. All of the plants I put in last October died of neglect but I have high hopes for the two olive trees that remain that they might grow big and provide shade to the hot side of the house.

My town is full of colorful characters but many of them are just like me where we work in our city lives all week just to be able to afford a life on the weekends. Some of them were once like me but found themselves breaking away from the career path trajectory and find something else to fill them with purpose but most just paid their dues and retired. Spring and Summer are filled with dinner parties and charity benefits. I love meeting new people and hearing how they ended up finding our little town. There's under 200 people in town and many of us are weekenders. We work all week long just to escape to art auctions, barn parties, and various other fund raisers. On the weekends where there is nothing on the town calendar, we invent adventures to find the wineries deep in the woods up winding roads with incredible views.

My boyfriend, James, is a musician and sometimes he plays in the afternoons but mostly he is antsy and ready to explore and find fun. In San Jose, we're homebodies but out in the country, he is the more social one of us two. We take long walks through the hills and sometimes if I don't go with him, he returns home telling me that we now have plans that evening. He is happier there and more in his own skin than I have ever seen him. Buying this house strengthened our relationship and created the long term goal of moving there full time.

And while we have a dog, she looks at me like I am an asshole when I throw something and ask her to bring it back to me. She hates walks and prefers to sleep on the furniture rather than at my feet.

While my life is nothing like I once pictured it, I really do love it a lot. It feels like a period of transition right now. While what I pictured may never, ever happen, I am perfectly happy with the version evolving now. It is real and tangible and more true to who I am. It's a creative and yet structured, organized and yet messy, and full of love.