When Mark and I left New York City, our landscape and garden design business was well underway. As a lucky break, we were able to rent a sweet little a cottage on an estate we were designing. It was beautiful, open and bucolic there with guinea hens at our kitchen door and cows out in the field. It took a few years to implement our designs there but at last the time came when we decided to leave and buy a house of our own.
Having been city dwellers for so long, and having just lived in wide open spaces, we wanted a place to break loose in. We wanted to go outside and play and create gardens and spaces of our own and at will.
Try as we might to explain this to our real estate agent, we were shown little squared off back yards, and told "This is a nice flat lawn and just right for a garden!"
We'd leave each property with our visions of wild tangles and birds and water and rocks and trees and nature dashed and bashed once again.
What was there to do but change agents? This time the agent heard our cries and we were brought to the land that time forgot or at least wasn't payed attention to. It was an absolute mess with a gravel slope out the back door and a field of poison ivy that grew up the trees and hung down like Spanish moss. It was on a wetland and had a small woodland. There was no trace of a garden anywhere. We loved it! We wandered and dreamed of what this could be...
Finally, the agent called us and asked, "Would you like to see the house?" and it occurred to us that we should.
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. The interior was paneled and gave us the feeling of having entered the interior of a nut. The kitchen had a stove that we learned was once the rage in a color called "Avocado" and the fridge was "Harvest Gold". Old mustardy curtains hung from the windows. A hooked rug was on the floor.
It had originally been a one room cabin, circa 1938. There was a large fireplace for cooking food and across the way and down some stone steps at the edge of a wetland was their outhouse. Birds sat on the roof loving the rotting shingles. As their family grew the cabin was added onto in a higgledy-piggledy way.
Before I collapsed with disappointment and horror, Mark, who is an architect, said to me, "Houses can be changed. It's the land that's important." He was so right and so was the price.
We changed the house and we changed the land and had great fun with it all. And thus because of the copious acorns across the driveway crunching under our tires and the massive Oak tree that fell across the driveway right after we moved in, we understood that this truly was Acorn Cottage and we were home.
