Harvest House

I ALWAYS PICK a name for the house in which I live. I’ve never been the girl who names her cars, but I do name my houses.

It may be Pride and Prejudice’s fault, with all the Pemberley Manor talk, or maybe it’s Downton Abbey’s fault, or maybe I should point the finger at Barbie and her Malibu Dream House. Whoever or whatever is to blame, it is just something I do.

The last house I lived in didn’t come with a name. In the front yard, three paces off the porch toward the driveway, sat a lamp like the kind you see in C. S. Lewis novels. And of the side panels of glass, two of them were busted out. There was no electricity running out to it, so the lamp never lit up. And when it snowed, or rained, or if the wind blew at just the right speed, the lamp would bend and start leaning toward the ground. (We got a huge snowstorm one winter and that lamp laid ALL THE WAY DOWN on the ground and it was one of the funniest things.)

Quickly my house was named Broke Lamp Manor and there was something mildly profound about that juxtaposition. The regality of naming anything a manor while also having the jankiest lamp in the front yard felt very right and very Annie, particularly in that season of my life.

I GOT HOME to Broke Lamp Manor from Onsite in January and started saving up money. If I’m telling you the total truth, I didn’t want to buy a house again as a single woman. I owned a house when I lived in my hometown, and when I sold it, I told myself owning a house as a single woman wasn’t for me. I would buy again once I got married, but renting was the life for me. There was so much cost around dealing with the yard and the appliances, and I was in my midtwenties and didn’t love all the responsibility that came with owning that house alone. I said over and over again in the decade after selling that house that I wouldn’t do it again while single. I would rent until I got married.

I try not to be the person who puts off experiences until I get married and have kids. I mean, some are better put off (ahem), but as far as fun opportunities or open doors, I fear that if I keep waiting, I may never get to do the thing. Travel Europe, jump out of a plane, buy a house. All those things sound incredibly fun and I could miss it all by putting them on the “when I get married” shelf.

For sure I’m as tired of writing about not being married as you are about reading it. But it’s still my reality somehow, and it makes me feel a lot of things—grateful and frustrated and proud and disappointed. And I keep finding new things I want to do and want to try and pictures I have for my life that aren’t happening. Somehow I’m still supposed to have a great time and call it that publicly to make sure no one thinks I’m desperate. I’m not desperate, but I also don’t feel a lot of permission to be sad in the public space about my dreams not coming true. So I try. I just don’t let myself save many things anymore, even if my brain screams to write this as a Hallmark movie and only drink hot cocoa out of those mugs with the man I eventually marry versus living my real life right now and making excellent hot chocolate with almond milk and a significant number of marshmallows.

I think that’s why that moment at Onsite mattered so much. I knew that buying a house was way more than simply buying a house to me. It was taking one of the few things I had left on the “when I get married” shelf and bringing it down to the “let’s just do this now” shelf.

It felt great and terrible at the same time. You get that. I’m sure you have those things too. Even if everything is going very well for you, or if it feels like you’ve lost everything, there are great and terrible things in your life as well. In that moment at Onsite, I knew it was time to make homeownership a great and terrible reality in my life.

Shannon, my real estate agent and dear friend, helped me house shop in the spring of that year. It took me too long to find the right one, but it was also right on time. I said July while standing in the labyrinth at Onsite, and we ended up closing in June and moving me in on the first day of August. (Also, dear world, why do any of us in the continental United States plan to move in AUGUST? It is so oppressively hot in August, and I cannot pack another house or office and move it in that dreadful month. I feel like I’ve always and only moved in August, and that is dramatic and not true but it feels like it.)

Shannon and I looked at a billion houses (also dramatic and not true but it feels like it). I liked a handful, but I loved one. But that one, the one by the zoo where I could hear the monkeys at sunset, the one with the little kitchen but the big back porch, that one went to another family who wrote a better letter and made a higher offer than me. So we kept looking, and I never loved one again. In fact, when I saw my current house online, I wasn’t sure it was my house. I wasn’t sure when I walked through it either. I wanted to be LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT sure, and I just wasn’t. I’m a love fast kind of girl, and I wanted to love this house fast. But I didn’t. I wanted God to make it incredibly clear and give me some very clear sign when I walked through with Shannon, but it didn’t happen like that.

I liked it. The walls were green, I didn’t like that. The floor was made of maple-colored wood, I didn’t like that either. I liked the house, but, gosh, I wanted to love it.

The timing was right; I knew that. I made an offer that was doable for me and honoring to the homeowner’s asking price. I figured if they said yes, this was my house. If they said no, it wasn’t.

Spoiler: they said yes. And then I panicked, because it was happening. The little condo was mine. The sentence I had uttered to myself and God out in a field on a freezing cold Thursday a few months before was now really happening. I honestly couldn’t believe it. I’m not one to think I can speak something into the universe and so it will be, but I couldn’t miss the reality that I had prayed something in January, and here it was in June.

I am surprised when God answers. Isn’t that dumb? Why am I so surprised when I ask God for a thing and then He does that thing? I’m wrestling with it now. A few nights ago I asked God to speak into a situation, and then on a DIME the situation changed. I’m living right in the middle of the change I asked God for, and I’m shocked.

Why?

Do I really believe in prayer or not?

I do. I know I do. Deep down in my guts. I keep praying, even when I don’t see things change. I just keep sowing into the ground and expecting that someday, far, far from now, I will reap the fruit of my prayers. And I don’t question prayer then, when I’m sowing. But when my prayer brings a harvest, I’m surprised.

But God wants me to see this story from Onsite’s labyrinth in January to the move-in date in August. He wanted me to feel His nudge, His invitation to pay attention. I can tell it is from Him, guiding my attention toward these details. He’s talking a lot to me about harvest.

I WAS MOVED into the condo on the busy street by the stores I love and close to the families I love even more on the first of August. It was a grown-up decision, I knew. I figured out how to balance having fun—because moving into a new place and finding furniture and painting walls and buying far too many throw pillows for my bed is all very fun—with the weight of being responsible for all those decisions. But that feeling I’d been trying to avoid by renting for so many years was back. (Though, to be clear, I bought this particular condo with so much joy because I do not have a yard to care for. Praise Him!) The walls were all repainted a crisp white, the floors stained a dark and warm color called Jacobean. The only piece of furniture I had was my grandmother’s china cabinet. I set out to find a couch and a rug and some stools for the counter between the dining room and kitchen. I couldn’t find the right wall to anchor my bed in the master bedroom. I didn’t know which drawer would hold the junk, and I couldn’t quite sort out where I wanted the plates to go in the kitchen. And what would I put in that hallway closet? During those first few days in the condo, I had more questions than answers and I missed Broke Lamp Manor.

Pretty early into living here, when I asked God what this house was called, I immediately knew it was Harvest House. I saw it written in my heart; I heard it whispered in my guts. And it made sense, still does. He wasn’t saying that this house was going to take less work or even that this season of my life would be easier; He was showing me that the work would change. It’s no longer sowing work. It’s not the digging up and burying seeds kind of work. It’s not the waiting and watching kind of work.

It’s the answered prayers kind of work.

It’s the harvest kind of work.

IT TOOK MONTHS for me to find the right wall for my bed. I bought a couch and kept it for a year and then traded it out for another one. I’ve moved my grandmother’s china cabinet to three different places in the living room and dining room, trying to find the right spot. Everything is all sorted out kind of fine now. The couch is right. The dining room is right. That tiny bedroom across the hall that I call a library because I want to be fancy and I throw all the books I read in there is still a mess, but it’s a real goal to have the room and its closet cleaned and sorted before the end of the year.

Everything has been slow to fall into place, including me. I haven’t had a real heartbreak here. I’ve had small relationships stir up but no real breakups. This house has not held the highest highs or the lowest lows yet. But what has been and what hasn’t been in this house is hard to call harvest. The migraines, the bed rest, the lack of falling in romantic love, the fact that the library is still an absolute mess of a room.

It has been a slow falling in love.

I CALLED HEATHER a few weeks into living in the new house, when the fall started to turn cooler. I told her how worried I was that I didn’t love this house yet. Staying on budget and feeling at home were in contrast to each other, and budget was winning. But, gracious, did I want to feel at home here.

“My mom says it takes until your first Christmas,” Heather said, “and that’s when you really feel at home.” I didn’t know if that could be true, but I knew I would do the best I could to make it so.

I pulled out my Christmas tree and ornaments the second week of November. It was cold and rainy, and it already felt like the holiday season was here. I was going to be traveling a good bit in the upcoming weeks, including that trip to Disneyland, and I would be missing a few weeks of being in my own house. That’s what I told people, at least, when I posted on social media about decorating and when I told my real-life friends. But I knew in my heart, I was just grasping to feel at home in a home I owned.

There’s a small corner between the dining room and the door to the back porch, right inside the living room, that was perfect for the tree. A little clip of mistletoe hung in the entrance to the kitchen (you can’t blame a girl for trying), and the dining room table decor switched from a fall bouquet to a few small decorative Christmas trees. It looked beautiful. Friends came over to eat Christmas treats and watch Hallmark movies, and for the first time, my parents and sister came to town for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. We made Christmas brunch here, all around the walnut dining room table built by my carpenter friend, Stevie, and we ate on my grandmother’s china that cannot go in the dishwasher.

IT WAS DIFFERENT after Christmas; Heather’s mom was right. A home warms up when it is decorated for the holidays. I love this line from one of those cheesy Christmas movies: “Anywhere you feel Christmas, you feel home.” That was very true at the Harvest House. And the rest of the new year continued, and it was more and more home and more and more of the work of harvesting.

I started to feel at home, and I started to feel in love. And maybe for the first time in my life, I started to see what it looks like to love at a slower pace, moving from like to love. To find the right thing and let it have some time to become right.

That might be a side of harvest and home I didn’t know. There must be something about Eden that is slow, that is changing, that is allowed to take time to grow on your soul. Maybe there is a string that ties the work of harvest to slow love, to the lasting kind that burns like coals. It would seem like that’s a sowing kind of love. Maybe it’s because of my experience in life, but it seems like this slow love I’ve felt for the Harvest House may harvest more for me than I can even imagine.