I can’t remember a time when I didn’t dream of having a home of my own.
I was ten when I saw the magazine that first put a shape to it — a DIY cabin, ten feet square, with a tiny kitchen and a sleeping loft that held two single mattresses on either side of a central ladder opening. We’d just moved from a small rural town on Lake Ontario to Buffalo, after my parents had some harrowing commutes during the Blizzard of ’77. I wanted to go back home. That cabin looked like my ticket.
Twenty years later, I was a single mother working retail management. No money, no credit. But the dream of having my own place stayed with me — quiet, persistent, hopeful. Maybe someday, I’d think. Someday I’ll have a place all my own.
By 2002, my son was in high school and I had married the love of my life. We were renting a run-down apartment in an upscale town. I worked long and odd hours, but I still made time to scour the real estate listings — even though I knew in my heart we couldn’t get a loan for a postage stamp in our bourgeois village, let alone anywhere else. It was discouraging. There were nights I came close to giving up on the dream entirely. But I couldn’t quite let go of it. I just hadn’t found the door yet.
The door turned out to be a piece of land I’d been ignoring my whole life.
My mother owned a parcel back in my hometown, right across the street from the house I grew up in. She’d held it for years as an inheritance for me and my brother Jim, and she’d complained more than once about the taxes on land that was just sitting there. Jim wasn’t going to use it — he’d put down deep roots in the Southtowns and wasn’t going anywhere. So, I started to wonder: would she consider giving me my share of the inheritance early, so she didn’t have to keep paying tax on something nobody was touching?
But before I could ask my mother anything, I had to convince my husband.
Myron is at least as stubborn as I am, with a healthy dose of doubt for company. Asking him to move an hour away from everything we knew was going to take more than a conversation at the kitchen table. First, I had to get him in the car. On New Year’s Day 2004, we finally made the drive — an hour and a half from our Southtown apartment up to the shore of Lake Ontario.
It was a crisp, cold, sunny day. Perfect for driving. Myron complained for most of the way out — it’s too far, on a loop. He wasn’t wrong; it was far. But somewhere along the route, the complaining thinned out. By the time we pulled up alongside the unkempt strip of woods I’d been telling him about, he was quiet.
“Where does it start?” he asked. “And where does it go?”
I led him into the trees toward the edge of the creek valley — a wide cut in the land carved out over millennia by water working its way from the surrounding countryside down to Lake Ontario, just a short distance away. Snow covered the woods. It was still and quiet. He stood there for what felt like a long time, looking over the lay of the land without saying anything.
I held my breath.
“Let’s do it,” he said.
A few weeks later, I sat down with my mother to ask about the property. She was cautious. She wasn’t worried about the money or the taxes; she was worried about me. She and my father had done exactly what Myron and I were proposing — moved out to a piece of land, built a temporary shelter, put a life together from the dirt up. No power. No water. A small cabin and a long list of unknowns. She walked me through it: the trials, the hard winters, the things that didn’t get fixed for a long time.
I asked her whether it had all been bad. My parents had been divorced for several years by then.
She thought about it. “No,” she said. “There were good times.”
First, I asked her if she would deny me those good times. Then I told her that there were going to be hard times no matter which path I chose. That was the part I couldn’t negotiate away. If I stayed in the apartment in the upscale town, working hours that didn’t get me any closer to a house of my own, I was going to have hard times. If I moved to the land and tried to build a mortgage-free home with our own hands, I was going to have hard times.
For once in my life, I wanted to choose my hard times — deliberately.
With that, she agreed. And we were off.