Making Space: the Journey from House to Home

The purpose of our placemaking shifted with the seasons and with the growth of our children. In the early days, we opened the many doors here at Maplehurst with abandon. Front door, back door, garden-side kitchen door, barn-side kitchen door—we flung them all open and hosted other people constantly, sometimes strangers, sometimes friends. When families came, we tossed our children in together and watched how quickly they learned to play hide-and-seek on all three floors of the house or flashlight tag across acres. Later, with the pandemic and teenagers, we learned how to open our doors with care. The black-painted barn we had built with dreams of a family reunion became a schoolroom for virtual learning. We began to understand that this house was not ours only but was home and haven for our children too. We moved our oldest up to the former guest room on the third floor. We gave each of our sons a room of his own. We accepted that Maplehurst could be a spacious place for us as well as for our guests. I learned that hospitality comes in many forms. We offer it to strangers, and we offer it to our own kids.

While pilgrims of old may have valued a staff, a hat, stout shoes, and a good canteen for water, we have needed tables and chairs for gathering, a sofa for naps, a garden for beauty, and trees for children to climb. We have needed desks for working, bedrooms for retreating, and a firepit around which we could make s’mores. We may carry more things than a typical pilgrim, yet truthfully these things have often carried us. Growing a marriage, raising children, loving our neighbors, serving our communities: such work is a privilege. It is full of purpose, but it is exhausting too. Sometimes a comfortable mattress and a bedroom blackout shade can make all the difference in the world.

To be a pilgrim is to walk through life motivated by a clear purpose and an aim. But there are seasons when the purpose that seemed so clear can feel more like water slipping through our fingers. The aim that was sharp in our minds for so long is sometimes obscured by fog. Here at Maplehurst, I have learned that it is okay to release my grip on my dreams for a while. If certain dreams have been planted in me by God, then they do not need me to muscle them into reality: I can release them, I can open my hands. But whether we are aware of it or not, the dreams we release will often hold on to us. Sometimes we are only waiting for the thing we are sure has gone forever. When the fog finally clears, we may see ahead of us the dream we dropped miles back.

Maplehurst has fertile soil, perhaps from the Guernsey cattle once kept here, and this soil has shown me that dreams are cultivated like gardens. First, there is the smallest seed. It might manifest itself as you thumb through a magazine by the pool where your children swim, when you turn a page and feel your breath catch at the sight of a real estate ad for a large white farmhouse. Behind the house in the picture are enormous maple trees in full autumn glory. On the porch are four pumpkins. The house has a tall round tower, and you can suddenly see yourself writing in that tower room while four children play far below on the lawn. Except you are not a writer, and you only have three children, and you struggle with infertility, and you live in Florida where houses are one story and overhung with palm trees. And so as quickly as the dream blazes up like a flame, it dies back down. It is only a seed, but it has died in you, it has broken open in you, and things will never be the same.

Seeds are so small we can forget we carry them. In the daily work of tending our gardens, we can forget how it all began, how the soil was so bare and the emptiness seemed so absolute. Our winter waiting can feel endless when every circumstance of life seems to hold us back from doing anything at all to realize our dream. But then spring rises up like an open door, and that door leads to a dream come true, a promised land. Yet no sooner have you arrived than you are overwhelmed by tasks, by clearing and building and beginning, and so you hardly think of dreams. Until, one day, you are sitting up in the third-floor attic room that has become your office, with its two small windows and sloping ceiling. You are typing away at a book when the sound of children laughing pulls you toward the window. As you lean down, you remember how God brought you home to Maplehurst, how God gave you another daughter, how your dream of home grew into such an abundant garden it sometimes felt as if you might be buried under vines and leaves. And here you are, not buried but very much alive, and beginning to think of next year’s garden. Your own children no longer play on the lawn down below, but the voices you hear of neighboring children sound like new dreams. You let yourself imagine a grandchild running across the lawn. You let yourself imagine a good and fruitful future.