I was perched atop a hundred-year-old "crackerbox" house, ripping the structure apart from the tin down, when I met two of my new neighbors for the first time.  They had been out exploring the boundary between our properties on their four-wheeler when they found the tracks of my bare feet in the swamp.  "We thought it might have been a bear!" the wife exclaimed.  "But then we heard you hammering and figured the tracks were human," added her husband.

My new neighbors were perhaps ten years older than me --- in their mid thirties --- and were clearly bamboozled by this young woman who planned to move into a southwest-Virginia tract of remote countryside by herself.  Even getting to my old house required a half-mile trek through swamp and across a creek that sometimes flooded over my head.  And now I didn't seem willing to come down off the roof to greet them properly.  In part, my hesitance was due to being tied to a tree on the other side of the house by a rope around my waist, but mostly I was just embarrassed because I'd caught the seat of my pants on a nail about an hour ago and had heard a loud rrriiiip.  No way was my introduction to the neighbors going to involve exposed underwear.

Since the nearest town is home to only 300 people, I'm sure word of my eccentricities got around quickly.  But it didn't matter because I nearly gave up on my homesteading dream six months later, only to rekindle the spark when my husband-to-be, Mark, walked into my life.  Fast forward ahead five years and Mark was being invited to sit down on the coveted stool in the locally-owned hardware store and chat for a while --- a sure sign of being accepted by the community.  At long last, I knew my craziness had been overlooked in favor of my husband's quiet persistence.

That summer day in 2004, though, I was still alight with the joy of owning a farm the way I'd dreamed about since childhood.  And now, as I write this nearly a decade after purchasing that farm, I'm once again in love, this time with both the farm and with the husband who made my dream possible.  So this is a love story in three parts about how I ended up with much more than I bargained for, and grew beyond the person I thought I'd be.