March 1, 2024

Happy March 1, 2024.

Two years ago, today, I woke up for the first time in North Carolina on this property. I arrived in the wee hours of the morning and slept terribly, but we had arrived safely at our destination and new home. Moving to a new house was bittersweet. There was the excitement of a new place with property, but everything needed to be cleaned up. There were sheds full of things the prior owners left, including an unplugged refrigerator full of spoiled food.

The backyard was full of things we wouldn’t use, like a large swing set and an abandoned chicken coop with old eggs laying everywhere. There was no way to tell how old the eggs were, and the coop was one large, sharp, and rusted mess. It was a chore to take it all apart without cutting myself with the sharp, jagged edges of the metal siding and chicken wire.

And then there was the horse manure. The previous owners had horses, but had left them without a care for who knows how long. They had neglected to clean up the horse manure in the barn, pasture, and yard for probably a year. I shoveled horse shit for a week straight before it was all cleared. Later in the summer, we enjoyed a well-fertilized yard from all the manure we spread. Today, I wished we had more of the foul stuff, just never again in that quantity. 

Two years later, the house was barely recognizable from the place we first stepped into. We cleared away all the trash, dismantled the coop, replaced the air conditioner, sealed the crawl space, replaced all the water piping and lines, fenced the backyard, and replaced the carpet with wooden floors. My wife repainted the entire interior, had the rear door replaced, and the list went on and on. The result was that we had a beautiful, cozy, and comfortable home with a well-kept property that had become something we cherished and appreciated. We loved living in this place.

It seemed crazy to know we had been here for two years. While several weeks and months seemed unbearably slow, the overall time passed in the blink of an eye. We honestly felt like we had just arrived, and we looked forward to my wife finishing her schooling later this year. Her graduate program brought us to North Carolina, and we were well into the home stretch of achieving that goal. Two years was a great place to be.

It was Friday morning, and my wife was off from her medical rotation since she would have to work the weekend. We enjoyed coffee together before she invited me to have breakfast with her at the Cracker Barrel in Wilson. The restaurant was quiet, and we enjoyed sausage, ham, bacon, eggs, hash browns, and pancakes. The food was on point. After we got back home, the two of us took a walk into the woods. It was a beautiful way to start my last day of the workweek. 

During my lunch break, I went into the woods for a short walk through the forest alone. My wife, who had returned from running errands, informed me that a large herd of deer were feeding by the green barn on a neighboring property. This barn was owned by some locals that invited us each year for a cookout, which included an entire pig barbecued North Carolina style. While it took a little while for this Texas boy to get used to the vinegar-based barbecue sauces in this region, I had developed a taste for the sour nectar. Come to think of it, I needed to marinate a steak in some vinegar for tomorrow’s lunch. I had not done that in a while.

I made my way south through the pine grove that connected to a series of open fields where the deer had been. Walking down the cleared lane in the grove is always a pleasant, and eerie, experience. There’s a reason we dubbed this trail, The Haunted Forest. When I arrived at the south end of the pine grove, the deer had already moved on. I turned north and headed toward the woodland, taking my time to soak in the gorgeous day. The wind was calm but cool; the woods seemed relaxed, and the birds were all singing, as if nature knew today was Friday.

My wife and I were tired from the week, and although we are usually full of energy at Friday quitting time, this evening we felt sleepy and lazy. As the sun hit the horizon and darkness fell over the land, my wife and I stared out the window as we embraced each other on the couch, spooning, watching six deer feeding in the pasture. Eventually, we got up, made some dinner, and enjoyed a quiet evening together. Our special North Carolina anniversary day was over and tomorrow we would start anew.