Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [32]
From where I stood, I could not see a sign of human occupation. Like a child who has not yet dodged a blow, the river in front of me was innocent of what lay ahead. The water was so clear I could see a lazy carp paddling below me. The only debris was a high-water mark made of small sticks and leaves. There were raccoon tracks in the sand where the rock met the riverbank and white splats on the stone where some big water bird had stopped to fish for a spell.
“How long do you think this river has been here?” I asked Ed. When he did not answer, I tried out answers of my own. Since the mountains were made? Since the first rains fell? Since the earth cooled?
“Forever, I guess,” he said at last. If I softened my gaze and stopped holding myself apart from all that surrounded me, I became part of something so old and so powerfully alive that I lost track of my self. The river ran through me. Trees breathed for me. My feet grew from rock. The only thing wrong with any of these sentences is that there was for that moment no “me” or “my.” I lost my “me” altogether, which of course was not apparent until I came back to my self, recovering one sense of reality at the price of the other.
When we had received the river’s blessing, Ed and I headed up the hill through the woods toward the old county road, where we found the first graves on the highest ridge. The piles of stones were miles from the famous Indian mound in White County. Most of them had been plundered long ago, but both their east-west orientation and the stones placed at cardinal points around their edges told us that we were walking through an old burial ground. This was no real surprise, since the land had felt sacred from the moment we set foot on it. Water was plentiful, the river was thick with fish, and the level floodplain was perfect for a small settlement. We did not need to check the county records to guess that we were on old Cherokee land.
By the time we returned to our car, we had named the place Indian Ridge Farm. All that remained was to haggle with the owner over the price—and to decide which hill would be the site of our new home.
The announcement that we had bought land was welcomed at church, where it served as a sign of our intention to stay put. Once Ed and I had chosen a builder, a blueprint, and a flat spot to build, we asked a couple of members with construction savvy to come help us site our house. While Ed and John talked about where the driveway should go, I walked Bob up the steps of my imaginary mudroom into my imaginary kitchen.
“I want the window here so I can see the mountains while I’m washing dishes,” I said.
“I understand that,” Bob said, “but there is only one way your house is going to fit on this hill, and that’s not it.” The kitchen vanished. We were standing in a cow pasture again. Bob leaned over the blueprint of the house, traced the footprint with his finger, and led me around the hilltop counting off paces as he went.
“You see?” he said. “It won’t fit.” I did not see, but I believed that he did.
“So what are we going to do?” I asked him.
Bob picked up the blueprint, turned it over, and held it up to the light. “You’re going to turn it over,” he said. “You’re going to flip the whole thing the other way around and learn to love seeing the woods while you’re washing dishes.”
And that is exactly what we did. We also moved the driveway from the front of the house to the back, added a free-standing garage with a workshop for Ed, and saved a flat place outside the mudroom for my clothesline. The congregation was not alone in seeing this house as a sign that I meant to stay put. I saw it the same way. Beyond that, I saw the