Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [29]
In my case, the attention deficit was all mine. I had moved to the country in order to lie down in more blessed fields, to live closer to the Divine Presence that had held me all my life, but I had once again become so busy caring for the household of God that I neglected the One who had called me there. If I still had plenty of energy for the work, that was because feeding others was still my food. As long as I fed them, I did not feel my hunger pains.
CHAPTER
7
After six months in a rental home that was too large for us, Ed and I began looking for land to buy. Our search for an old farmhouse had run into a snag since everything that went by that description really was a farm house, with chicken houses out back, a falling-down barn littered with broken machinery, and muddy pastures full of cows. We even looked at one place with its own hog shed before deciding that we would build our own new, old farmhouse if only we could find the right piece of land.
Ed’s requirement was that the land have running water on it. Mine was that we live no farther than ten miles from town. For the next year and a half we trekked all over the county, finding property that met one requirement but not the other. I ruined a great pair of Cole Haan shoes walking river property with strange humps all over it, which turned out to be old pits from an early mica-mining operation. We looked at mountain property that had been clear-cut, leaving tooth-shaped holes in the ridgeline. We found a heavenly piece of land with rolling pastures and a fast-running stream that was almost twenty miles from town as well as a striking knoll just four miles out of town that had not a drop of water on it, but after all our looking we had not discovered a single piece of land that one of us did not disqualify within five minutes of setting foot on it.
Then one day Ed said that he had met a man who was selling off some of his own pastureland for what sounded like a decent price. We could buy almost a hundred acres with what we had saved from the sale of our quarter acre in Atlanta. Unrolling the county map that he kept stashed in the trunk of his car, Ed pointed to a large white space with no roads in it near the northwest edge of the county. “See this?” he said, running his finger along a thin blue line. “Stream. And this?” he said, caressing another. “Stream.” All in all, three streams crossed the land, converging on their way to the nearby Chattahoochee River. As tired as I was of being disappointed, I pulled on my rubber boots, got into the car, and set the trip meter to zero.
Following the directions Ed had been given, we drove well out of town, passing one gas station, one barbecue stand, and four churches along the way. “Eating forbidden fruit makes many jams,” read one church sign. “Give Satan an inch and he will become your ruler,” read another. Leaving the pavement, we turned down one dirt road and then another, as a huge cloud of red dust fanned out behind us. I counted seven houses over the next mile and half, including one log cabin and one Christmas tree farm, before the road ended at a red metal farm gate. The trip meter said nine miles even.
Ed and I parked the car in a clump of scrub pines, lifted the heavy chain that held the gate shut, and walked onto the land under the spread limbs of an old white oak. As I stepped from its shadow into the full light of morning, I looked up to see green flowing in every direction. The land rolled like a silk sheet in a big wind, with matching hills on either side of a valley that wound out of sight. While the tops of the hills were bare of trees, their flanks held dark patches of woods where I could see brown cows switching their tails in the shade. The word copse came suddenly to mind, a word I had read in poems but had never seen in person. The flanks of the hills were covered with copses, and the very sight of them softened me.
Some people spend years of their lives searching