We had outgrown our lives in Madison, Wis., and we knew we wanted property, and we knew we wanted to do something larger with it--something beyond having a menagerie of animals and a peaceful country life (although those reasons were important too). We wanted to do more than work a nine-to-five job. We wanted to connect back into the larger community and to offer something, to leave the world a better place than we found it. The more we talked about it, the more our talk turned to inviting people into our lives and giving them a space in which to create. We knew it would be a lot of work. We knew it sounded crazy to other people, but it made, and still makes, sense to us.

 

The first order of business was to find a farm. We spent six months looking at various properties. We came close to buying two of them, but for various reasons, negotiations broke down. We kept looking for the perfect location. In late June 2007, we saw the listing for the farm that would become Bullfinch. We decided to drive by the property before we asked our Realtor to set up a showing. The drive to the farm took us through two small rural towns, and when we turned off the county highway and began to wind our way past working farms and wooded swaths, I had a feeling that maybe we were onto something big.

 

As we climbed a large hill and then began to descend into a wooded channel surrounded by bluffs, the canopy of trees shaded the road into a tunnel and the birdsong thundered in the trees outside our car window. I turned to Jesse and said, “I’m getting excited, god help me. I’ve never seen anything so beautiful.”  He flashed me a silly grin, and it seemed like a funny adventure that would end in an anecdote about falling-down farmhouses and beautiful country drives.

 

The road uncurled into the valley, and the tree cover opened up to the milky-blue sky overhead, and the view. Oh, the view. The view put its hand around our throats and leaned in and said “You know you want to wake up next to me every day,” and we nodded, “Yes. Yes, we do.” We crept down the road, looking for the farm. It was nestled down below the road, and the house’s welcoming front porch with the gingerbread trim looked out over the valley, situated just to capture sunrises and sunsets, to bring animal life into view, to seduce its owner through hard winters and lean years. The house was built to inspire desire and love and loyalty, and it had ours in an instant.

 

We bought the farm. We laugh when we say that because, of course, it has import and weight and meaning in light of what happened next. A part of us did die the day we signed the papers and came to our new house to celebrate and discovered that somehow, despite all of our caution and care, we now possessed a house that smelled like a litter box, like 10,000 cats had taken up residence in the house and urinated everywhere in the two days between when we did the final walk-through and when we signed the papers and got our key. We were stunned. How had we not smelled it before? Had we been sleepwalking through the past month, through the many inspections, through everything that could have saved our lives?

 

We couldn’t live in the house because the air quality was so poor. Thus began our home renovation odyssey. The urine damage was extensive, covering all of the walls four feet and down, the window sills, the floors, and inside the heat ducts, and it required full removal of all damaged materials. Because the house was built on balloon construction and had only one layer of flooring, we had to jack up some walls in order to remove the damaged flooring and replace it with subfloor. While we were at it, we replaced the damaged heat ducts, added a more energy efficient heating system and air conditioning, upgraded the electricity and did some minor remodeling.

 

Ultimately, we lived through five months of intensive home reno, complete with snakes under the living room floor, full days of paid work at our regular jobs followed by eight hour nights of hard physical labor at the farm, a “catastrophic gas leak,” stolen personal property, two mortgages and exhaustion that defies description. All the while, we hoped we could live through the process, and we hoped that we would actually like living in the house.

 

One day Jesse came to the farm, and one of the electricians was sitting on the hillside outside the front porch eating his lunch. Jesse sat down next to him, and the man gestured to the view across the valley and said, “This is why it’s all worth it.” Even when we thought we might lose sight of what we hoped to achieve and why it’s so important, it was moments like those that kept us going. If, as naturalist and writer Ben Logan say, “the land remembers,” then surely this farm has its own sentience, its own desire to serve as catalyst and muse to those who come here.

 

We wouldn’t have chosen Bullfinch Farm voluntarily, if we’d understood what was at stake, but now that we’ve done it, I think we truly understand what Emerson was trying to say when he told his readers to “go where there is no path.” In that moment when we descended into our valley, we stepped off the path and into the underbrush, and there was no way to backtrack, and really who would want to?

 

We hope you will find time to visit our farm in 2008 for a lecture, a workshop, a reading, a simple visit. When you stand in our house and on our land, you will understand why we did what we did, crazy though it may seem.

 

~Heather Lee & Jesse