I am an enneagram one. For those of you who don’t know what that is, I suggest that Ian Cron’s book The Road Back to You is a great place to start. It was in his book that I first learned about the enneagram and started on a journey of learning about myself. Ones are traditionally known as perfectionists. There was something in our childhood that taught us that we had to have everything in order just so, to be right, in order to be loved. This notion of having to always strive to be better, to always be working harder, can be exhausting, so I think that all of my striving is what makes to gospel of grace so very profound to me. There is nothing that I have to do, nothing that I have to improve on or perfect, in order to be fully and perfectly loved by God. Whew! Pressure off. I don’t have to earn that love.
So why is this important to the homestead project? Well, more recently, my YouTube buddy, Ian Cron, has taken to calling enneagram one’s improvers instead of perfectionists. That subtle change in the label has really resonated with me. In everything, I see great potential. The people that I have managed over the years, full of potential. My cooking, always open for improvement. Myself, well, let’s just say that I have a bookshelf full of self-help books.
In every property that George and I looked at during our search, I saw potential. Some had bigger challenges than others, but I felt like we could make something out of almost every one of them. Fortunately, George tends to tamp down my “we can do anything” with a dose of realism. What I know now is that some of the properties that we looked at would have taken more money than we would ever have just to be livable. We have also learned that while it is great to have an abundance of streams on your property, there are challenges with fitting in septic systems when you have to find a spot with suitable soil far away from that water for your system.
On that fateful Sunday morning when we were about to leave the mountains without a clear direction on a property, we dropped by Maple Hill Trail just to check it off our list of possibilities. Getting to the property was a relatively easy drive up the parkway and just a couple of turns to get to the old subdivision called Brushy Ridge. The minute we go to the for-sale sign, I felt it. There was the sense of peace and serenity and the confident knowing that this property had an abundance of potential. We were at the top of a ridge, and the acreage was pretty flat. Some of it was clear, and some of it was wooded in the most wonderful way with beautiful rock formations. There was snow on the ground that day, and ice in the trees, so we did not venture too far into those woods.
Fortunately, we both felt it. THIS WAS THE ONE! Instead of getting on the highway back to Wilmington, we headed into West Jefferson to meet our realtor. We put in a full price offer that very day. We were on our way…
