Building Our Five-Acre Wood
Where we've come from, where we're at and how it's all coming together.
So I settled on a name for this here blog-letter. Random Thought Process is now Missives from a Five-Acre Wood, which is what I affectionately call our little slice of the Ozarks that we hope to soon call home. Welcome!
It’s becoming a little less wooded each day we’re able to spend a few hours over there clearing trees and brush. Buying and DIY converting raw wooded land is definitely not an undertaking for the faint of heart. But for all the clearing we’ve done, I’d say it’s still at least 95 percent woods at this point. So far, we’ve cleared a driveway, a lane for our shipping container, an area to park our RV and have a bit of a yard, the area where we presently keep our chickens, an area for hanging out and grilling and building a campfire, and some trails so we can get down in there and see what else we’ve got to work with.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
In my last post, I talked about how the dreams of my youth are fading and making way for dreams involving how my husband and I both want to spend the back half of our lives. Building this homestead is one of those dreams. Preferably, if possible, doing so without a mortgage or going into major debt and being able to retire someday with no bills to worry about. Which means building it slowly and relying a lot on our own abilities and whatever help we can get from our friends and neighbors.
But I feel like I need to back up a bit more and tell my story for those who are new to this tale.
I’ll go back to the fall of 2018, when various and sundry events led to us moving to Arkansas to caretake the lake home and property of a friend that she shared with her siblings (their deceased parents’ former residence). When I say lake home, I mean it was in close vicinity to the lake, not that it was on the lake or had a lake view. It wasn’t that bougie. In fact, it was a doublewide, which hardly anyone would consider bougie in the least. But it was in good shape and sat on about 40 mostly-wooded acres, and in exchange for keeping the non-wooded parts mowed and maintained, we got to live there very cheaply for about five years.
During this time, my husband caught up to where I’d already been parked and waiting since 2010 — wanting to start homesteading. With our friends’ blessing, we got some chickens, built them a coop and a chicken run, built some raised beds and got a nice garden going — all the homesteader gateway drugs. (We also got a German shepherd puppy, ostensibly to be a guardian dog, but she has turned out to be way too spoiled, and also has far too intense of a prey drive to be entrusted with small livestock.)
I gotta say, over all, I loved our time there. It broke my heart when we had to leave. But one difficulty with the place was that it was a long drive from there to get anywhere. And, while it wasn’t exactly secluded, with neighbors within shouting distance, said neighbors were all multi-generational Ozark natives and wanted very little to do with us yankies (we’re Okies, actually, but that didn’t make a difference).
The semi-isolation was a double-edged sword for this introvert. On the one hand, I loved the sense of seclusion. But it could get lonely, even for me. And it didn’t take long to sink in that if anything happened to either of us, our closest support network was five hours away back in Oklahoma. We did eventually make friends with a semi-local couple, but they still lived about 45 minutes from us. And after we crossed the threshold of 2020, we realized that the crazier the world got, the more we needed neighbors and community that we could rely on.
I prayed a lot for that in the ensuing years. Last year was a year of the Lord working all of that out and making it happen. We found out in 2022 that our friends wanted to sell the property, and we would either have to buy it or move. Buying it wasn’t really an option, so we ended up spending about a year in this crazy housing market trying unsuccessfully to buy a house. Long story short, in spring of last year we threw up our hands and decided to look for land instead.
On the very same day, my husband saw an ad for five acres for sale in an area we really liked and made the call. The owner was a very nice man who was open to owner financing “for the right people.” We met him and looked at the property a couple of days later, and we all immediately clicked. They had moved here from Washington to get away from the craziness and were wanting to build community with like-minded people who shared similar goals. He financed the property for us for very generous terms and started introducing us around to the local community.
It was all pretty much exactly what we’d prayed for. Now, a year later, that man and his family are good friends, and we’re all going to the same church. Not only that, but we’ve got our RV parked next to his driveway while we work on making our land livable. And we’ve got an abundance of friends and neighbors and church family who are happy to help us accomplish this particular dream. After so many years being on our own, that blows my mind.
Anyway, when he invited us to park our RV here, we thought it would be for a few months. We had fully expected to be moved onto our own property in time for last Thanksgiving, at the latest. But the weather interfered with that plan, and that’s probably for the best, because it revealed that the section where we had planned to put the RV turns into a swampy, muddy marsh during the wet season. We had to wait for everything to dry up and dry out enough that we can get an excavator in there and fix it so that it won’t turn into a mud hole every winter.
That’s where we are now — things have finally dried out, but it’ll be next month before the excavator we’ve engaged can fit us in. Nevertheless, it’s all starting to come together. The more we clear, the more we can see the possibilities for farming and making use of the land. Our chickens have been happily ensconced on it since last summer, and we’re getting ready to add some ducks to our flock. Our neighbor-friends are getting rid of all their backyard poultry because they’re starting a big commercial pasture-fed egg farm and they’re giving all their remaining birds, as well as their big chicken coop and all their fencing, to us. And we hope to add some guineas and house them in our little coop after we get our chickens moved to their new digs.
And now that things are in motion after a looooong wet winter and spring stuck in limbo, I’m dreaming of goats again, and of getting an actual guardian dog. And in lieu of the raised beds that I had originally hoped we’d have had ready to go in time for spring planting, I’ve got some summer veggies growing in buckets.
Little by little, it’s all starting to take shape, and in another month or two, Lord willing, we’ll be completely moved over there and able to truly call our little Five-Acre Wood home.
That’s not the only dream that’s in the process of coming together, either. For years, my very talented and musically-gifted husband has been wanting to get into music production and sound design. The biggest hurdle was getting a computer that could handle it. But in addition to all the other ways we’ve been blessed these last couple of years, the Lord has also allowed us a small measure of prosperity following a lot of years of scraping by, enough so that we were finally able to invest in good computers a couple of months ago, along with the software and equipment he needed to finally get started.
And last month, we took a big step by launching his YouTube channel and debuting his first synthwave single on Bandcamp. If you want to check it out, you can find everything right here on his website. And here’s his first single, Into the Quantum:
I’m really excited about this, too. He started out with talent, intuition and some knowledge of music theory and has made compositions that are good enough to impress me. But he’s also learning a lot about sound design, and I know when he adds training and education to all the rest he’s going to make some amazing music, and hopefully be able to parlay all of it into a production and sound design business, which is his ultimate goal.
I’m still figuring out exactly where I want to go from here as a writer, but I’ve definitely arrived at a place where writing is a relatively small part of my life and no longer my raison d’etre. In the meantime, I’m enjoying the fruits of a relatively successful freelance writing business — successful entirely by the grace and provision of God — and how all of that is allowing us to pursue these other dreams and goals.
Now that you know the backstory and what has become the major focus of my life, I’ll keep y’all posted on our progress as we move forward.
Until next time!
