Something Real

The farmhouse is about forty minutes away.

For a few years now, I’ve gone there to give the owner a massage. About a month ago, she asked if I still knew any housekeepers, and I began texting her a few names.

Before I could send the message, another text came through.

“It’s really just cleaning the kitchen, vacuuming, and doing laundry.”

I smiled.

Well, gee, I can do that.

Those are all things I genuinely enjoy. But what really appealed to me wasn’t the work itself. It was one more reason to go to the farm.

Because I simply like being there.

No matter how late I leave my home to drive there, the eight-mile country road that leads me there slows me down. It winds through evergreens and gentle roller-coaster hills and my phone loses its signal. More than once, I’ve found myself in tears along that stretch—not from sadness, but from gratitude. The quiet makes room for thoughts and emotions I didn’t know I was carrying. By the time the road ends, I’m settled into myself. 

Then I turn onto the road where they live.

Their road is always longer than I remember. On one side, the land opens to tidal water. On both sides, wide expansive fields stretch toward the sky. Dotted here and there are old homesteads. Even in winter, when the fields have gone still, the openness fills my lungs. 

It feels like entering another way of being.

The farm does the same. 

Last summer, the owners added a horse. Now there are cows and goats in the pastures, and they’re building a massive barn. It’s fun to watch its progress.

Somewhere on the property, a rabbit recently had babies. One morning, while I was cleaning the kitchen, one of the little girls came in holding what I thought was a stuffed rabbit. Then it moved.

I stopped what I was doing.

At sixty-two years old, I had never held a real baby bunny.

She gently placed it into my hands, and for a few quiet moments the whole world seemed to disappear except for that tiny heartbeat.

The girls are three and almost two. There isn’t a television in the house. Instead there are piles of books and children’s paintings, handmade blocks, crayons, sweet dresses like doll clothes they change into several times a day simply because it’s fun, and sometimes the youngest wears nothing at all, happily running around in her birthday suit.

They’re growing up in something real.

Outside, up on a hill, there’s an outdoor kitchen where they host gatherings like wildflower arranging. Guests stay in a yurt tucked into the property, where I’ve given massages to both event guests and friends of the family.

Recently, the owner asked my friend Jen and me if we would take over the hospitality side of the business.

Jen is a professional housekeeper. She’s the one who remembers to dust beneath the refrigerator and wipe down the door trim—the places most people never think to clean. Together we’ll prepare the two guest houses between visitors—making beds with fresh linens, folding towels, resetting each space, and making sure every guest walks into a home feeling cared for.

These houses are old and full of character. They aren’t polished or perfect. They sit beyond a long dirt driveway off a road that winds around a river. Just before the driveway, three roads come together. Between them is a significant-sized triangle planted with old-fashioned perennials—daylilies, bachelor buttons, black-eyed Susans, and probably a lupine or two earlier in the season. How lovely—every summer they bloom, welcoming everyone who turns in.

They’re real.

At one point she had taken them off Airbnb because a guest complained about dust bunnies and said there wasn’t enough to do.

I laughed.

“You should advertise exactly that,” I told her.

Not everyone is looking for luxury.

Some people are looking for quiet. 

A place where they can hear themselves think.

Not long ago, I had my own Airbnb. My favorite part was never managing reservations or collecting payments. It was making the bed with clean sheets, straightening the room, and imagining someone arriving after a long journey, opening the door, and feeling welcomed.

Eventually that room became my massage room again after my partner moved in.

Without looking for it, that part of my life found me again.

Cleaning the farm doesn’t pay nearly as well as giving massages.

By almost any practical measure, it makes little sense.

Yet every time I leave, I feel richer than when I arrived.

I come to care for the farm.

And each time I drive away, I realize the farm has cared for me.

And something inside me becomes real again.