An Affair of the Heart, Part 1
Round Peg…
Moving to small-town rural life in New Hampshire after 30 years living abroad felt like slipping into a new identity, into a place where I longed to be. As much as I loved our wanderlust life, It was nice to no longer feel like the outsider, the square peg in a round hole, but the opposite, a round peg perfectly fit into a round hole, embracing familiar ordinary days.
I start each mornings with a drive into town, a five-minute journey from our home. I turn from Concord Street to Main Street, past our town library on the Contoocook River, celebrating its 190th birthday as the first tax-supported free public library in the United States. I take the next turn into Depot Square, past Roy’s Market, the local grocer where we buy our Thanksgiving turkey. Next door is Peterborough Diner, a cozy, circa-1950 dining car known for its “Peterburger.”
Across the way is the Peterborough Community Theatre, built in 1914 with a capacity of 500. A little beyond is Toadstool Books, the bookshop we love to support. I park my car outside the small post office built in 1936 in the Georgian revival style, complete with a hand painted mural expanding the top of an interior wall depicting our town in the 1930’s. It reminds me why I love being back in New England. Our postman greets me each day with a smile, handing me the contests of Post Box #74 saying “Have a good day,” and I respond in kind “Thank you, and you too.” I can’t help but love my ordinary days; they feel pretty extraordinary to me.
My husband, Mr. H, and I still feel like the new people in town even though we have owned our house for ten years and have lived here for half that time.
I discovered our country home, Tahilla Farm, in 2012 after helping my youngest daughter move into her college dorm. I took two weeks to explore the New England coast, from sea to forest and met out “gentleman’s farm” on the last day. I was all in at first sight. I called Mr. H, from an antique Inn at the top of Crotched Mountain in Francestown, New Hampshire to say I found our forever home. He was in Vietnam, helping our youngest settle into his new school, the British International School in Ho Chi Minh City. We were newly transplanted to Vietnam, our fifth international home in twenty years. A few years earlier, between living in Australia and New Zealand, I felt the soft pull of my New England roots calling me back. I knew the day I saw Tahilla Farm my search was over.
Two years later, in 2014, we were empty-nesters for the first time when our youngest son followed his big brothers footsteps and moved to Australia to attend boarding school. A few years later, I moved to Australia when Mr. H accepted a role to work in China. Life was anything but ordinary back then as I traveled between Australia, China, and America to keep the wheels of our family moving and connected. During those years, our house and landscape in New Hampshire slowly transformed to one day meet our families needs. In 2017 that day arrived when I moved to Tahilla Farm full-time with my son while Mr. H continued to work in China. Two years later, he joined us, flying home on the tailwinds of the pandemic.
My husband moved to Tahilla on the heels of retirement, a transition in life we planned for, just like all the other moves we managed during his corporate career, but this one felt different. We were like awkward newlyweds settling into life together. After years apart; we could count on two hands the number of weeks we spent together over the previous three years. We were ready for growing pains and there were a few.
Winter storms blew in from the north as we nestled in for our first New Hampshire winter together. Snow blanketed our fields in knee-high drifts, with a thick icy layer on the treetops of North Pack Mountain beyond it. We lived in a Henry David Thoreau world, the two of us in the woods under a mountain with woodland creatures at our doorstep and a roaring fireplace to keep us warm. Time stood still in our white winter wonderland as we settled into this new stage of our life.
Months passed, and as winter flowed to early spring, we had a heightened awareness of the way our lives were moving forward. Our life shaped itself into a horticultural ramble into the natural world. You only have to glance out the window to feel peace at Tahilla Farm.
In the spring of 2020, after the snow had melted and the first flush of red buds on the maple trees started to show, our trees filled with birdsong. Tufted Titmouse, Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, Dark-eyed Junco, and White-breasted Nuthatch hid from view and filled the woodland airwaves to the tunes of a Pileated Woodpecker tapping on an old pine tree. Mr. H and I made the rounds each day through our 1.5-mile woodland trail, cleaning up broken limbs as we moved. Through those months we found our natural rhythm again.
By mid-March, the pandemic gripped the world and three of our four children retreated to Tahilla Farm. They stayed with us for six months welcoming an English Springer Spaniel puppy, Tani, into our lives. Our new life in New Hampshire felt complete; we were a family living together again, on the same continent in a little plot of land next to a mountain in New Hampshire. Nature helped to renew and strengthen our family bonds.
Our vibrant spring fields mellowed into peaceful meadows surrounded by our 230-year-old stone pasture walls. Wide grassy paths took us into paddocks of goldenrod, the color of a warm late afternoon sun. Long feathery grasses tickled our legs as we walked through sedges with names like the characters in a Roald Dahl book: Fringed, Hairy, Shallow, Sprengel’s, and Broom. Common milkweed and bands of ferns: Eastern-hay scented, Royal, New York, Sensitive and rusty-tinged Cinnamon ferns swayed in the wind with just the pop of a dog’s tail, a white flag darting between them. The names of native wildflowers flow from the pen as they do in the meadows, long curvy scrolls of White heath; New York and New England aster; Nodding ladies-tresses; Giant hyssop; New England and Great lobelia; Bee balm; Butterfly weed; Columbine, New Zealand White, and Mammoth Red Clover. Dragonflies darted from the understory of this horticultural delight, gliding along the tips of grasses. Ramblers could hear the birds and bees before they could see them as they rustled through the grassy paths to the four corners of our fields, each leading to the rim of woodland lined with maple, white pine, hemlock, birch, and oak trees and to the mountain beyond.
Read Part Two…
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