homesong is a collection of stories about one family’s effort to try to find home, to imagine what it could mean to be claimed by a place.

Finding home. Part 1

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Part 1: The Backstory

I write these words in a glorious room full of windows, sunlight, and warmth on a cool October morning. Sunlight is glinting off my eyelashes, coming in the southeastern windows, making me squint. Directly ahead of me there is an oak tree where red squirrels and robins gently provoke one another for the best basking places among the branches. The window sills are full of plants and in the corner there are art supplies piled up where I imagine someday there will be a mini “studio”.

This is my favorite room in this house that is ever becoming our family’s home. It is high time we tried to tell the story of how we came to be here, and the radical generosity that has led us all along the way. You see, the ability to live here is a Gift that was given to us, a Gift that means the title document that humans use to imply ownership over land has our names on it, though we pay only property taxes and maintenance to live here, in this magical, beautiful place on 80 acres of unceded Wabanaki territory in what is known today as Freedom and Unity, Maine.

This story has 3 main parts:

  • The Backstory
  • The story of The First Try
  • The story of the place we live now, or part of Hemlock Hill – a place for which we are still listening for a more-than-human name, where we are now so blessed to live.

You could skip Part 1 below. It’s mostly useful to folks who are also seeking home in the world who might want to understand our story and the different things we tried before we got Here. We tried a great many things, and if you are trying such things maybe we could be of service to you in sharing our experiences. It might also be useful to understand some of what we learned in Vermont that we are now bringing back to this place. Perhaps some might find the most interesting parts of the story are Parts 2 and 3, which can stand alone without Part 1. Still, Part 1 is a part of the story and so we share it below.

Part 1 starts in 2019, perhaps earlier, but we’re going to try to keep this as succinct as possible.

It was 2019. Tyler was farming full-time and Heather was working full-time to support the profitability and viability of farmers in Maine. We lived on 30 acres of agricultural soils, next to an active conventional dairy farm, in Belfast, ME.

Heather loved their work, and, had been looking for a higher paying job for the past 2 years. Tyler was primarily farming legal medical cannabis, and Maine had recently legalized recreational cannabis. Being a business planner and market researcher, Heather could tell that a collapse in cannabis prices was coming – and the new recreational cannabis market would be both challenging to access due to regulations AND was going to make medicinal cannabis mostly irrelevant. Our mortgage was high for us ($1,400 per month and increasing annually due to property taxes) and a struggle to pay – the market changes in the cannabis industry was going to make it that much harder to keep the land we tended just 7 minutes from the place where the Passadumkeag River meets Ocean. So Heather searched for a job that could help sustain our family through a transition to lower-profit-margin farming – perhaps pick-your-own fruit, or farm stays, or an agroforestry nursery operation.

Unfortunately, there were no higher paying jobs in Maine. So Heather began to expand their search out of state, hoping to find something that would only require minimal travel. Long story somewhat shorter, in 2019 Heather was offered the job with Northeast SARE (sustainable agriculture research and education). It required us to move to Vermont, but it paid $80,000 a year – over $20,000 more than they were currently making. It meant we had to give up that gorgeous coastal farm that we loved, but we had spent 2 years trying to figure out a way to keep it to no avail. We thought we would move to Vermont, save up some money for a few years, buy a farm in Vermont, or New Hampshire, or maybe even Maine, and then start over. We were heartbroken, but saw no other path at that time.

A dear friend, Adam, was living and farming in Huntington, Vermont and found us a gorgeous place to rent in town there – a small, old house on 100 acres with a view of Old Mountain, known in that area to humans as “Camel’s Hump.” The school system was amazing and the community warm and welcoming. We moved in January of 2020, a month before the COVID pandemic shutdown began. We sold our Belfast, ME farm in March of 2020 and so began 3 straight months of Tyler driving to Maine almost every weekend to try to pack up our farm before the closing in June. It was one of the most painful, laborious, and heartbreaking processes of our life so far. To add to the heartbreak – we sold the farm before the pandemic’s impact on the real estate market was realized. By July 1, 2020 we had the most money we had ever had in our life ($55,000 from the sale), and, it was completely useless to us in terms of finding affordable land to purchase for a farm or homestead for our family.

We lived in Vermont from January of 2020 through August of 2024. In those 4.5 years, 5 growing seasons, we learned things we could never have learned any other way. Here are the highlights:

  • We learned that how you approach the land matters. We showed up to the land in Huntington wrecked, heartbroken, and depressed. Not exactly how you want someone to barge into your home (ie. that is basically what we did to that place, at first)!
  • We learned how to let go of the ideas of “ownership”. The land we lived on was well loved and accessed by the entire neighborhood and that was jarring at first, but became something we learned to celebrate and enjoy.
  • We learned about radical generosity. Adam shuttered his bakery business in 2020 and began giving everything he farmed, baked, and grew away – inviting the community to support him and the farm and those who labored there. Heather was able to be a big part of those early visioning days of the farm and was radically changed by it. Here’s a fun little video about the very early days of Brush Brook Community Farm. Here’s another, shorter video about a late fall cow move across town.
  • We learned more about radical generosity by practicing a gift economy with people in our community. Some of us grew vegetables, others raised livestock for meat, others for dairy, others nixtamalized corn and made masa… there are so many stories and people and beings I am glossing over here. Suffice it to say, we learned a LOT.
  • We learned how to actually be neighbors, and neighborly. How to take care of the people we lived aside and with daily.
  • We learned how to court a place, to fall in love, and how to allow plants and land and rocks and brooks to fall in love with us. We learned how to be in daily conversation with the more-than-human.

There’s so much more we learned, stories that will hopefully emerge here over time. During all this learning and laboring, loving and grieving and growing, there was ever the search for a place to call home. The land we rented had been in our landlord’s family for 7 generations and would likely never be for sale (we tried to buy some of it, twice. We give good credit for how kind they was in their firm “no”). Basically, even though Heather was making the most money they will likely ever make in this life, we were a family of 3 still living a mostly conventional American lifestyle – though we were frugal, and growing our own food, and doing everything we could to try to keep our costs low. And yet, we were burning through our savings from the sale of our Belfast farm – which we needed to buy another home. Here is how the search for a home went:

  • First 1.5 years – try to figure out how to work with traditional financing to find an affordable mortgage. Because our family was trying to live on a single income so that Tyler could remain full-time farmer and father, it soon became clear this was impossible. There was no land in Vermont, even in most of New Hampshire and Maine, that would both be finance-able through a traditional mortgage (which requires things like a central heating system, grid-tied properties, foundations, etc. – so, no cabins or camps in the woods) AND that we could afford AND that met our basic requirements around proximity to community and agricultural aspects.
  • Gave up for a year and cried and prayed. Tried exploring creative possibilities like buying land with other people – nothing came to fruition. If other folks are trying to buy land together – we’ve tried this a few different ways now, and would be happy to share more if relevant.
  • During this time, after navigating increasing hand and wrist pain for years, Tyler was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis – a disability that can cause significant pain and with limited treatment options. This impacted the way our family thinks about farming, home, and planning our future.
  • In year 3, seeing the way one of our dear friends had supported Adam to purchase a farm in New York after the beautiful gift economy farm effort ended in Huntington – due to a lot of powerful and beautiful and terribly sad factors – we reached out to that same friend and made a very vulnerable request: would she be willing to offer us a $250,000 loan at 0% interest so that we no longer needed to work within bank restrictions? She, Ava, said yes. Many months were spent working together to figure out whether a 0% loan was actually possible in IRS rules and regulations and eventually she offered the loan to us as a gift instead. This was a scary moment for our family, to imagine that we were worthy of receiving such a gift, and that we would be accountable and responsible for ensuring it did not stop with us, but continued moving through the world. In the end, we gratefully accepted.
  • So, for the next year, our family looked and looked and looked at land. Somehow, it was no less challenging – despite the Gift Ava had offered and despite no longer needing to work with traditional financing restrictions – the market was competitive. Most places we were interested in were either scooped up before we could even visit or had structures on them that would require $100,000+ worth of work. We kept looking, and got more and more discouraged. Would we ever find home for our family?
  • Somewhere in here, we started looking for home with another, wealthy, family that was essentially seeking tenant farmers to move on the land with them. That did not go on for very long, but we did visit two $2M+ estates with them in the process, and learned a LOT, and dreamed a LOT, and they were lovely people, and it did not work out, all for the best of all.

In 2023, our 7 year old son and Heather attended a magic potion making workshop through Empowr Transformation. We had a beautiful day, and specifically, we focused on making a “homecoming” potion together. A potion that we could offer to each parcel of land and place we visited, to see if they would call us home. We did this for several months – visiting land in Maine and Vermont, making offerings, exploring, singing, praying – finding ourselves looking further and further away from community and people we loved.

That brings us to 2024. We will stop there for now. The next post will tell the story of how we began turning our attention back to Maine.