We fell in love with the land. The pond, about an acre, lies at the bottom of the hill near the gate. The driveway winds up the hill about 300 yards to the house. The yard is full of mature trees–red and white oak, ash, hackberry, cedar, white pine, maple. The house faces east, and the sunrises are gorgeous, especially when the fog is rising off the various ponds in the neighborhood.
We bought this property in the fall of 2013, after looking for property in the counties surrounding Nashville for a year or so. I had wanted a small farm since moving to middle Tennessee in the late 1980’s, but had never had the time or the money to buy one. I had, however, built good-sized vegetable gardens, and planted fruit trees, grapevines, and berry patches on three properties I had owned over the years, and Vanessa had raised chickens and milk goats and kept a small garden on six wooded acres an hour south of Nashville.
It was goats, gardening, eggs, and the prospect of bee-keeping that brought us together in the late winter of 2010. We met online. I had been divorced for nearly seven years; she had been widowed for about three. I was on the last couple of days of my Match.com subscription, having given up after two years of hit-and-miss (mostly miss) online dating; Vanessa had just signed up. I was the second person she met online.
We got married on May 20, 2011, a day before the world had been predicted to end, wrongly as it turned out, and we spent the first year in her house in College Grove, south of Nashville, the second year in my house in downtown Lebanon, thirty minutes east of Nashville.
We wanted a place that was ours. We wanted some land, about 10 acres, goats, chickens, bees, and a big garden. We also wanted a well for watering the livestock and garden, and a pond, if we could find a place that had one, would be a plus. We looked at a lot of places only to be disappointed. It turned out that our experience of looking for a farm was a lot more like my experience in online dating than hers.
We found this place in the summer. It wasn’t listed as a farm at the time. It was just a house and a couple of out buildings on twelve acres in the country, about twenty minutes north of Lebanon. There was a pond and a well, but the back half of the property was largely brambles and brush. One of the neighbors, we later found out, bush-hogged it once or twice a year in return for letting his cattle wander around.
We knew it was too far from both of our jobs (45 minutes for me, 80 for her), but we decided to drive up and look at the area. About an hour northeast of Nashville, we are on the Wilson/Trousdale county line. The land is a hilly mix of pasture and woods. The livestock is mostly cattle, though you also see lots of goats and horses, and occasionally sheep. The land is every bit as beautiful as Williamson County, just south of Nashville, at about half the cost. We are more isolated, which means less traffic and noise, but also slower internet, fewer craft beer choices, and no Starbucks.
