They say: begin where you are. I saw one of the creepiest inanimate things I've ever seen, today.

We have decided to buy a second home, keeping the place we have to rent out. This is my grand plan. The bank has not signed off on it yet. I suppose its possible they won't see it all quite as grandly as I do. But they  might and I have always been willing to turn on a dime, or as in this case, a chicken.

My husband just accepted a job in a city much closer to where we live. This is a beautiful thing. He's never gotten a promotion, before, that didn't require us to move out of state. Moving out of state sucks up money, basically negating raises as you go. This time we don't have to move. The house were we live now was a super cheap good deal, a well priced starter home. We don't want to give it up.

But we do want a farm. So Dear Husband and I have been talking in circles for weeks. Do we keep the financially responsible home we have? Do we reach now, while we're still passably youngerish, for farm land? What is the best decision in terms of money, soul, and future plans? Its a difficult choice. Everyone KNOWS I want a place to put a cow. And this place is not that. But it is equally true (which is really saying something) that I want a mortgage paid. I do not want, and have never wanted, a fancy house--even attached to a farm. I want an owned house.

Last week animal control pulled into my driveway at 9 in the morning. As I hurried to meet the officer in my yard, rather than having them ring my doorbell and wake my children, I carefully noted that both of my dogs (perhaps miraculously) were sleeping innocently in their favorite inside spots. If animal control is showing up and my dogs are home, I can not imagine what is about to unfold. I figured the officer was lost.

Long story short, my chickens are not free to range in this neighborhood. They have to be penned on my property or will be considered a public nuisance. I was informed that, apparently for years, my chickens have been a nuisance to my neighbors. Wondering why it took anyone 5 years to complain, especially about something so fixable, I decided the answer is spiritual. The universe says it is time to buy a farm. That is the message I received in my pink flannel nightgown at dawn in my driveway speaking with a very nice young woman from animal control. She might as well have gotten out of her truck and said point blank: I have a message here for you from God. It is time to stop dithering. It is time to get to where you are supposed to be. To do what you're supposed to do.

Where is that? We're looking for the place. Today we saw the wrong place: a stupendously beautiful old farm built in 1902 with a perfect pasture for an affordable price. Unfortunately the house has been empty for at least 20 years. I was not willing to cross the front porch for fear of falling through. Yet, it is so beautiful and so affordable. We looked the whole property over knowing we couldn't buy it. I pulled open a tiny door in one of the back out-buildings. I gasped. I clapped my hands over my mouth. I called my husband.

I had been thinking, as I leaned in to peek around this tiny door, how charming, how like a place children would delight to play. I didn't see anything truly horrible. Yet what I saw creeped me to my depth. I was peering into an old abandoned curing house. I saw hams. Many many hams from many MANY years ago, hanging on old hooks in the gloom, desiccated beyond smell, basically all the way back to wax. They were the color of dust and shredded by vermin. The back wall and exactly what kinds and how much meat were not clearly visible.

I'm grown and worldly. I've seen a lot of stuff in a lot of places. My life so far has not been especially sheltered. Why was old meat left to hang through the ages, from a time forgotten, so disturbing? I think it was the waste. But it was also as if I'd come face to face with the farmer, himself. And his wife. And their life on that hill in that house at that time somehow melded to this time here. Who allows that kind of wealthy and beauty, that kind of grace and fecundity to rot abandoned?

I do not know. But I will do my best to nurture grace and beauty in gratitude and service. And I thank you, God, for our lives.