Brandon here,
You would think making the steps to leave the big city and move out to the country, abandoning your usual comforts for the great unknown and to build something with your own two hands would be scary. Your thinking would be one hundred percent accurate. Big change IS scary…terrifying sometimes. However these new, anxiety inducing lanes in which we travel come with a smidge of familiarity that brings a comfort neither of us were really expecting. More on that in a moment but first a little about how we got here.
Tania and I are both products of rural southern towns that neighbor a more metropolitan city. Both weird kids who loved cartoons, comedy and books way more than the usual backwoods fun our peers got up to. In a small community, when you don’t fit in you feel it hard and if you’re a teenager you feel it twice as hard. I think those two teenagers spent more time planning HOW they were going to leave their small towns than they did WHAT they were going to do once they actually left. Two kids on opposite ends of NC, with similar dreams of fame and fortune, sprinting into adulthood and away from the dark country nights of their rural youth.
We spent the next few years trying to do every little thing we had ever dreamed of. Everything we thought a small town couldn’t provide us. We traveled, moved to those big cities on the horizon, made friends, learned crafts and entertained crowds. We found the lives we thought we wanted forever and then we found each other. “Robot Johnson” the sketch comedy group I helped create was holding auditions for new members. A local theater manager we had worked with in the past was roommates with Tania at the time and basically forced her to audition. She’s a little critical of herself so if you asked Tania she would tell you it was a whirlwind audition and she probably didn’t do that great. I can tell you from being there that she absolutely nailed it and was one of the most relaxed and funny people in an audition I had ever seen. She did so good I was pretty much already telling my cast mates she got the spot before she even fully left the room. I’m so thankful to her friend for making her audition that day and doubly thankful to her actually wanting to join up with our band of weirdos.
Lucky for me she was also a little bit of a weirdo and we spent the next 9 years making people laugh all the while becoming friends, writing partners, BFFS, BFS&GFS, cat parents, and eventually husband and wife. That wedding still remains the best party I’ve ever been to and the best day of my life.
Emphatically, we have had a pretty fantastic life here in Charlotte. We’ve attained so many of the dreams we had as kids and have built a chosen family of friends here that are beyond compare. We cherish so deeply these relationships we’ve built here throughout our early adulthood. Our closest friends are very much family and even friends we don’t see as often feel like beloved cousins more than acquaintances that paint the backgrounds of our life. Then the pandemic hit in 2020 and drove all these even deeper home for us. As lockdowns and distancing began to take pace of gatherings and dance parties our crew really seemed to only strengthen. We had weekly meetings virtually, socially distanced hikes with masks once vaccines became available, and backyard bonfires replaced living rooms for writer’s meetings and rehearsals. Tania and I even hosted a virtual new years eve show with talent showcases, games, dance breaks and signature cocktails created with kits prepared by our amazingly talented friend Kim. It was really starting to dawn on us as the city itself became more out of reach that what we really loved about Charlotte, wasn’t Charlotte itself, but each other.
Just as the pandemic drove us closer to each other, it also drove us closer to the greenspaces that surrounded us. I’ve always enjoyed the outdoors and my dear wife possessed an appreciation for them as well but maybe with a little less of my enthusiasm. As she has taught me many things in life, I learned quickly that a pre or post hike mimosa does wonders for one’s appreciation of nature. Once we started doing more things outdoors I began to notice an interesting change come over my self-described “bougie” wife. She was certainly as fabulous, fashion forward, and adventurous as ever. Now though, that sense of adventure was steering into things I thought were purely side dreams of mine. “Oh you want to get away to a small mountain town on a river to go hiking for the weekend? Oh ok, sure!”. “You want to figure how much the Kia can tow to see if it can pull a teardrop trailer?”. “Build a cabin in the mountains some day?! I mean yeah that sounds cool.”. Always supportively agreeing to these new natural pursuits while trying to not seem too excited at the same time. I was pretty jazzed about her and I sharing some new interests together and I wanted to play it cool.
We spent the latter part of 2020 and early 2021 trying our best to find a small plot of land somewhere in the woods where we could build a place to get away together. A place we could invite our family and friends whenever we wanted. A place to recharge, refocus and relax. Finding that place however was another challenge altogether. It seemed impossible to find any piece of undeveloped land anywhere rural or scenic that wasn’t already behind a gate waiting for wealthy land investors. After gaining zero traction and life getting busy we pretty much shelved our plans for this hideaway of ours for the foreseeable future. Great thing about that phrase though…no one can foresee the future. On a visit to Louisburg to visit family, Tania’s father mentions offhand “Whelp, we gonna have to talk eventually about what you and your sister want to do with the land.” Tania looked around the acre or so lot where sat her father’s house and…collection if you will…of scrap metal and cars. “Clean it I guess?” but then he pointed to the woods behind the house. “Not the house. The land.”.
The dark and mysterious wilderness that served as the backdrop of her childhood. That land that she had always thought of as just “the woods” was actually 15 acres of abandoned farmland that her grandfather used to use for crops. 15 acres of abandoned cropland that would become her and her sister’s responsibility. I feel like at that moment a spark went off in my wife. The place that she had done her best to get away from had potentially been holding safe within a blanket of thorns and pines, the very place to get away we had been looking for.
A number of family matters out in Louisburg needed our attention and we began to come back and forth a bit. As we traveled back and forth along these old country roads where she grew up and that reminded me so much of where I came from we began to feel something we were not familiar with in this setting. Comfort. Remember that comfort I was talking about? When you’re a kid you feel things so deep and the bad things you feel even harder. I’m not in any way trying to downplay the bad things. They happen and you give them power if you act like they didn’t. However the more we came and went the more we remembered there were things about country living that were small comforts to us when bad things happened. For two world weary thirty somethings who had hit their personal glass ceilings for the crowding and noise of the city, these small comforts were now humongous.
The fresh air, the fresh food, the long drives without any other car on the road, and an overall cheaper cost of living began to completely overshadow any surface level delight the city we had called home for over a decade could offer. We realized the thing we loved most about Charlotte was the world we built here, not so much the city itself. How close we kept in touch with our loved ones over the pandemic even with the distance taught us that distance definitely doesn’t equal “closeness”. We’ve built strong foundations in these relationships and they are built to travel. Now with this amazing generational gift from Tania’s family we have a place we can create for those relationships to continue to grow. Two weird and loving kids from the country spent so much time wanting to see the rest of the world we never thought we could bring the rest of the world to us and that’s exactly what we’re doing to do.
Love ya-
B
Comments