I want to live where I can have chickens in the road.” I made this pronouncement one day while driving down a dusty back road bordered by weedy woods and intermittent dilapidated farms. A big red rooster led a line of hens across the lane, lending a charming, storybookish air to the run-down scenery.
I was so smitten.
52, by my side, said, “You can have all the chickens you want.”
Maybe I loved him. Maybe I just wanted the chickens. I thought I wanted both, but it was hard to tell. They were deeply intertwined.
He and I were cousins six or seven times removed, which isn’t unusual in West Virginia. Unless you are talking to someone fresh from Alaska, you are probably related. He’d grown up in Roane County and his family roots went back as far as mine, though he was living in Charleston then. At the time we met, he was 52, which became my endearment for him. He was more than a decade older than me, with an air of calm wisdom. He was bespectacled, gray haired, and he smoked cherry tobacco in an old pipe. Tall, neatly dressed on workdays in an ever-present button-down white shirt and the day’s choice of navy blue or khaki slacks or his weekend uniform of worn jeans and a plain T-shirt, he was my soft place to land.
He liked the nickname I’d given him. “I’m 52 forever,” he liked to say.
We’d started out as friends, but our relationship gradually deepened. He told me a story one day about a feral cat that had shown up outside his door in Charleston. The cat wouldn’t let him come near her, but one day he left his back door open. The cat came inside. For three weeks, he didn’t even try to touch her.
He was, just simply, kind to her. “And eventually,” he said, “she was mine.”
It was how he got me, too.
I’d had a couple of hard years. I’d left my marriage and my life behind to move “home” to West Virginia, a place I’d visited often during childhood but had never lived. I could already point to a jury of family and friends who would say I’d lost my mind. Now I was going to buy a farm.
With 52.
Who was so kind.
I couldn’t think of anyone with whom I’d rather start a flock of chickens.
He got me. He completely understood my crazy desire for a farm. He wanted one, too. We were, most of all, mutual enablers, ready to pull each other by the hand as we leaped into the mist.
I could never remember later who first said, “Let’s buy a farm together,” but we were both on board. I’d dreamed of a farm all my life, though my motivation wasn’t that simple. I was lost and trying to find myself in my childhood memories of West Virginia. I’d come to test myself, to discover the real me. He’d actually owned a farm in the past, which had ended badly in a broken marriage, and he was ready to go back to a farm again and do it right.
I was the one who found the real estate listing online. Forty acres, free gas, green meadows, blue skies, a dirt-rock road. In my imagination, I added butterflies on the breeze, chickens in the road, and bluebirds on the windowsill. I was instantly transported to fantasyland. I was going to be a pioneer! All I needed was an apron and a bonnet!
The free gas turned out to be a lie, and the best house site was halfway up a hill with a steep, terrifying access. But the property was in my family’s long-ago stomping grounds of Stringtown.
Even the real estate agent got lost trying to find it. The fact that the sign had been knocked down didn’t help. The farm was on a two-and-a-half-mile stretch of dirt-rock road that ran between two paved roads. To reach the hard (paved) road on one end, you had to ford a river.
To reach the hard road on the other end, you had to cross three creeks.
There were no bridges.
Bridges were for sissies.
This was rural Roane County, West Virginia. It was only about thirty miles outside the capital city of Charleston, but there was a world of twisty, curvy roads and wild terrain between them. In the hills of West Virginia, barriers don’t take up much mileage. Once you hit the back roads, go country or go home. I had only recently figured out the difference between hay and straw, but I was going country all the way.
From a population perspective, West Virginia is a small state. The total population is slightly under two million, which is roughly the same number it held a century before—and that is after some slight recent growth. The largest city in the state, the capital of Charleston, boasts just over fifty thousand residents—which is but a medium-size town in many places. Roane County is a typical county within the state, its heyday in the gas and oil age of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries long gone, leaving a population of only around fifteen thousand. Most of that population is centered in and around the county seat of Spencer, with a few small towns in the outlying areas, including the tiny town of Walton, outside of which my cousin’s farm is located. It is a very rural county with many small communities that long ago disappeared, such as Stringtown.
Walton has its little store, an elementary/middle school, a post office, and a couple of tiny churches. In Spencer, one can find the courthouse, the one high school in the county, a Walmart, a few fast-food restaurants and mom-and-pop diners, and the Robey Theatre, which holds the distinction of being the longest continuously operating movie theater in the United States. (In 1941, when my dad was sixteen, he could take a date to the Robey with twenty-five cents—tickets, popcorn, and Cokes included.) If you need more, Charleston is less than an hour away, but from those lost communities like Stringtown, tucked away on near-impassable rock roads in the depths of the hills and hollers, you might as well be on the moon. I was attracted to the isolation, the challenge, and the charm of the unspoiled land.
I went home to the Slanted Little House and told Georgia I was buying a farm in Stringtown. She was Mark’s mother, and my stand-in mother, adoptive grandmother, constant friend, and waking nightmare. Georgia had grown up in West Virginia, and she was smarter than me.
Georgia said, “How will you get out in the winter?”
“Other people live out there! They must be able to get out! If I can’t get out sometimes, I’ll stock up!”
Georgia said, “Well.”
In Georgia-speak, “well” could mean many things. That day, it meant, “You don’t know what you’re doing, girl.”
Georgia was a woman of few words and she said a lot of them with her eyeballs.
Not that I was listening. I was about to buy the most magical farm in all the land! Or, in fact, I was about to embark on an intense experience of hardship, deprivation, passion, danger, and romance gone awry.
But it was a good thing I didn’t know any of that right then.
I’d been living in the Slanted Little House for well over a year by that time. The Slanted Little House was—and still is—a one-hundred-year-old farmhouse that stands on a farm in Walton, West Virginia. The current owner is Georgia’s son, my cousin Mark, who built his own home next door. He’s actually my second cousin, but in West Virginia, almost everyone is your cousin to one degree or another, so we don’t usually get that detailed.
Back in the day, Mark’s grandparents, my great-aunt Ruby and great-uncle Carl, lived in the Slanted Little House. Carl Sergent was a farmer and an oil field worker, and he was also active in local politics, which meant he got his road paved. When the road crew arrived, they told Carl to cut a nine-foot rod for them to use to make the width of the road as they paved. Carl didn’t want a nine-foot road so he cut a twelve-foot rod. Nobody double-checked him, so he got a twelve-foot road. Carl knew how to get things done.
The original farmhouse (dubbed the Slanted Little House by my younger son because of its uneven floors) was built sometime around the turn of the twentieth century and consisted of what are now the front rooms. The construction was typical of its era—a simple white clapboard home with a small front porch that was later expanded to become quite large, stretching across the entire front. Porch swings hung on each end, and large rocking chairs with peeling green paint lined up in front of the wide banisters. It was the kind of porch that begged you to sit a spell in its shaded cocoon.
An old-fashioned well, the kind with a pail on a chain enclosed in a quaint well house, still stands to one side. On the other side, there is a stone cellar, which was later attached to the house through the cellar porch and the addition of back rooms. No hallways exist—all the rooms open onto each other, one doorway leading to the next. (Where there are doors, that is. Ruby didn’t like doors.) A small bathroom was added at some point. The kitchen was remodeled sometime in the 1950s or 1960s and remains a testament to Formica and linoleum.
During my childhood, family trips to Stringtown, where we camped out in an old cabin, were always bookended with visits to the Slanted Little House, which was only a few miles away and over the hill. Ruby would be outside doing strange things, like taking corn off an actual cornstalk. Who knew you could grow your own corn? And truly, I didn’t think anyone did, except for my great-aunt Ruby. She grew all kinds of things I didn’t know people could grow, plus some other things I’d never heard of and didn’t want to eat, like beets and rhubarb. Then she’d do some trick where she’d get the stuff into jars and keep it in the cellar. The old stone cellar had a short medieval-style door that latched with a chain. The ceiling was low and inside it was dark. Cobwebs lurked in the corners. The sagging shelves were always lined with jars filled with Great-Aunt Ruby’s garden witchery. As a child, I found it both creepy and mysteriously alluring.
At home, we had a bright, clean pantry full of food with labels from Green Giant and Kellogg.
In earlier days, Carl and Ruby raised chickens, cows, sheep, and pigs, but by the time I was a child, they’d retired from farming and just kept a pony around for the grandkids and other visiting children. For some reason I can’t imagine, I was allowed to take off down the road with the pony one day. The road just past their farm was dirt, because of course Carl only had the county pave the road to his farm and no farther. The pony got away from me. It had been raining, and I can still see the puddles in the dirt road as I ran screaming and crying after it. The pony kept running, and I went sobbing around the back of the house to find Ruby in the garden. She said, “It knows where it belongs. It’ll come home.” And it did.
I never saw Ruby get excited or upset about anything. She was an ocean of calm on her farm of wonder. She wore an apron all day every day, and her table groaned with bowls and platters of food at every meal. She was comfort personified, and her house was a beacon of everything I thought home was supposed to be, from the huge, shady front porch with rocking chairs to the ticktock of the grandfather clock in the slightly shabby sitting room, from the sheets hanging on the line in the sunlit breeze to the fat, juicy tomatoes in the biggest garden I’d ever seen.
By the time I came to live in the Slanted Little House, it stood empty but for its crowded collection of antique furnishings. Ruby had been dead for over ten years, and Carl more years than that, but the Sergent farm, like so many family farms in West Virginia, was well populated. Rural Appalachian farms commonly have two, three, even four homes. Grandma and Grandpa in one, their child or two in others, then their child or two in yet others. West Virginia is often said to have higher home ownership than any other state because so many families have generations-old family farms—and everybody lives there. By the time Ruby died, her son Bob and his wife, Georgia, had built a house on the farm, as did their son Mark after that. Bob had passed away, and Mark was married with a son around the age of my sons. I was never alone. The kids went to school. Mark went to work at the courthouse. His wife, Sheryl, went to her job as a nurse at the local hospital. But Georgia, in her late seventies by then, was always there.
She was the lady of the manor, a workhorse, a slave driver, Miss Marple, and Martha Stewart rolled into one. Her hair was short and white, and she had it styled like clockwork every Tuesday at the old folks’ home. She wore a sweater unless it was the hottest of days, and she was always, constantly, doing something. She came over to the Slanted Little House ten times a day, and if I was in the bathroom, she waited outside the door. With my mail. Or a plate of sandwiches. Or orders to come help her hoe.
She suffered from macular degeneration, and she liked me to drive her places.
She’d come over and say, “What time did you say you were going to town?”
Because I’m slow, I’d always say, “I wasn’t planning to go to town.”
She’d say, “Yes, you were. I need to go, too. Let’s go at ten.”
There were only a couple hundred people in town and she knew them all. Usually, she was taking some kind of food basket to somebody, so we’d have to make deliveries. I’d play her Secret Service detail, chauffeuring then hanging around outside, waiting. I’d take her to the bank and the post office and the little store, then we’d run out of places to go on parade because the town is that small. Sometimes, just to exasperate her, I’d ask if she wanted to joyride and find a bar.
She thought I was funny. Or crazy. In any case, I was entertaining.
Back home, she’d turn into the chore Nazi. Time to hoe. Time to can. Time to climb on ladders and clean out the gutters. Time to rake, time to drag branches to the brush pile, time to sweep something. If she couldn’t think of a good chore, then she’d come into the house, walk into my bedroom where I’d be sitting at my laptop trying to write, and just stand there.
ME: What are you up to?
GEORGIA: Nothing.
Then I knew she just wanted to talk, and I learned to listen.
Anytime I went anywhere, when I came home, she was right there, like she’d transported herself to the porch from the Starship Enterprise. She’d bring my mail to me whether I wanted her to or not, and she’d donate all her leftovers to me, whether I needed them or not. She checked up on my kids, whether they liked it or not, and none of them could get away with anything because she was half blind with laser vision.
When I came back to West Virginia as an adult, leaving a broken marriage behind me, whether it was instinct, fantasy, or pure insanity, the first thing I did was go “home” to the Slanted Little House, like a pony finding my way back to the barn. I’d never lived in West Virginia, but it was home to me all the same. My childhood summers there had filled me with the intoxicating fantasy of its hills and woods and gurgling streams, and something about it felt just right. I was supposed to be there. I didn’t need a rhyme or reason, and I didn’t really have one. I was following my heart, pure and simple, and at that most difficult point in my personal life, my heart led me like a heat-seeking missile to my roots in West Virginia. Here, I was certain, I could find the real me.
I barely knew Georgia when I asked her if I could live in the Slanted Little House. She and Bob had lived in various parts of West Virginia during Bob’s career before retiring back to the farm, so I had spent little time around them during my childhood visits, but she didn’t blink. She said, “Of course, you’re family.”
I had always loved that old house, though I found it wasn’t easy to live there. There are a number of things nobody tells you about living in a hundred-year-old farmhouse before you move in.
TEN THINGS NOBODY TELLS YOU
1. Somebody probably died there. Maybe a couple people. Maybe they’re still there. Maybe in that ammo box on top of the pie safe. People are practical in the country. Why buy a fancy urn when there is a perfectly good empty ammo box available?
2. It’s cold. And it’s going to get colder. And the house is not going to get warm. Remember when you were five and you thought living in an igloo would be so neat? Try to be cheerful. Buy an electric blanket and a space heater no later than November. You can forget about finding any in the store after that.
3. You’re going to be cold anyway.
4. Those noises in the wall? That’s mice. Huge, giant, evil mice with flaming red eyes and poisonous fangs. Your cats aren’t going to get them out of the wall for you so just forget about that, but you can stock up on scented candles because when they die there? You’ll be the first to know.
5. Buy really, really long wooden matches. You’ll be less scared that you’re going to blow yourself up if you have long matches when it’s freezing and you’re lighting the gas stove in the cellar porch every night in the winter to keep the pipes from freezing.
6. The pipes are going to freeze anyway.
7. Don’t get excited about buying ten extension cords with multiple plugs to make up for the lack of existing outlets in the house. You’re just going to go home and blow all the circuits.
8. Those slanted floors that were the first thing you noticed when you moved in? You’ll totally forget about them after a few years. So be careful when you’re drinking.
9. No matter the inconveniences, no matter the hardships, living in a slanted little house is a privilege. It might change your life. It will certainly change your perspective.
10. If you can move out before anyone puts you in an ammo box, it’s all good.
By the time I met 52, I was longing for a home of my own (with insulation and outlets), a fresh start, a new life . . . a farm. A real working farm, like Carl and Ruby’s used to be.
We met at the farmers’ market in Charleston, or one day when he pulled over at the Slanted Little House to ask directions—depending on which story we were telling that day. In fact, we met online at a dating site. Neither of us liked that story, so we had a few alternate versions.
I had regretted signing up for the site nearly as soon as I’d done it and quickly removed my profile, but not before receiving a message from 52. We began to correspond. I thought he was funny.
“Funny ha-ha or funny strange?” he wanted to know.
Maybe a little of both.
We did, indeed, meet in person for the first time at the farmers’ market in Charleston. We had lunch at Soho’s, a trendy Italian restaurant located inside the Capital Market. He had the minestrone, which I later found he always ordered there, and I had a sandwich. He was supposed to go back to work, but we talked for three hours. He spent much of that time describing his failed marriage. He had three grown children. His relationship with them had been strained in the past but had since grown closer. It was the continuing bitterness with which he spoke of his ex-wife that was off-putting.
On the drive home, I decided not to see him again, but no sooner had I gotten back to the Slanted Little House than he’d e-mailed me.
He’d been satisfied alone, he said, but he wouldn’t be as happy that way as he could be.
He told me I was cute and thanked me for giving him a chance.
I didn’t have time to respond. Georgia was waiting for me outside the farmhouse when I got home, nearly in a fit because she was worried about where I had been all that time. The kids had just gotten off the bus, and I had to figure out what in the world I was doing with 52 and why I still wanted to talk to him. I’d promised myself I wouldn’t, but later that day I e-mailed him back.
We met for the second time when he did, indeed, pull over in front of the Slanted Little House. And maybe he was looking for directions, in a sense. I had admitted my conflicted feelings about a relationship that was anything more than friendship with him.
“You’re not finished with your experience with me yet,” he said. “Once you’re sure you’re done with that, you can move on.”
“If you’re nice,” I said, “I’ll never move on.”
Aside from my doubts about him, my kids were ten, thirteen, and fifteen. My daughter, Morgan, was my youngest, and I had two boys, Weston and Ross. I didn’t think they were ready to see me involved with a man, but at the same time, I wanted to go on with my life. I wasn’t sure if 52 was the one with whom I wanted to go on, but we had enough in common to make me curious. We had discovered our distant family relationship along with our shared interest in simple living. We took long drives to nowhere on backcountry roads, picking blackberries and looking for old barns. We took walks, holding hands, while he told me all the names of the wildflowers and trees. We went to the New River Bridge, Dolly Sods, Blackwater Falls, the Canaan Valley, Spruce Knob, Seneca Forest. He was my West Virginia tour guide.
I had come empty, looking for West Virginia to fill me up, and he became the epitome of my West Virginia.
We were friends, and eventually lovers, though I kept my relationship with him mostly to myself, seeing him on weekends and summertimes when the kids were visiting their dad.
By the time I’d become enamored of chickens in the road, we were looking for a farm of our own.
He wrote down a beautiful dream and gave it to me. The cats would sleep in the road. We’d leave our doors unlocked and feel safe. We’d have a smokehouse and a woodstove. We’d be so warm we’d open our windows in the winter. There would be cows and horses, and kids playing ball in the meadow bottom. If we needed help, we’d call the neighbors and they’d come ’round the hill in the middle of the night or a Sunday afternoon.
We’d rock grand-babies on the porch swing, can from the garden, and have a giant corn patch, and flowers—so many flowers. There’d be sled riding and Christmas lights, a tire swing and a big rooster.
“And we’ll just sit on the porch and get old together—and we won’t care if we’re fat and old and worn out because we’ll love each other too much to care.”
The sum of it all, he told me, was that I was his dream.
I wanted it all—the sweetness of him, the corn patch, the Christmas lights, the big rooster, and the love. I was a romance writer, and I was ready for my own storybook. He was my hero.
We signed the papers at the bank and we had a farm . . . without so much as a tumbled-down fence post with which to begin.