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The Ideal Country Home

by Gene GeRue  

Except in the 1516 novel by Sir Thomas More, Utopia is said to be impossible.  That is probably a blessing--it would be terribly boring after a week or three. No challenges.  For each of us though, there is an ideal place--one that embodies most of our wants and needs and fewest of our dislikes.  One that soothes us and excites us, makes us feel secure but gives us energy for life's explorations.  With clarification, focus, and persistence we each can find the place that is ideal for us.

In our mind, we can create any world we choose.  Our finest achievements often begin with dreams.  So dream.  Daydream or nightdream, but dream.  Emerson said: "The ancestor of every action is a thought."  Thoreau expounded: "If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."  With a poet's conciseness, Carl Sandburg cut right to it: "Nothing happens unless first a dream."

One's imagined ideal place is often a blend of dreams and chance: lingering memories of childhood camps, vacations, books or movies, college or job experiences.  I recently recalled an emotional connection with place that I made in January of 1970.  My grandmother had died, and my brother and I were driving our "won't fly" parents and sister nonstop from California to Wisconsin for the funeral.

As we sped through the Missouri Ozarks I found myself increasingly captured by the scenery.  And then I spotted a cabin on a hill, just visible through the leafless trees, gray smoke twisting skyward from a stone chimney.  In only a few moments an indelible connection was apparently made.  Seven years later, after considering the entire 48 contiguous states and carefully researching many specific states, never consciously remembering that cabin in the trees, I bought my ideal country place--smack dab in the middle of the Ozarks.

A country home typically defines a house, a somewhat controlled area around the house, and a larger, more natural, maybe wild area expanding beyond--whether majestic mountains, undulating sands, shimmering waves of grasses, or the quiet, cool green of forest.  It is often more, the sum of house, garden, and landscape plus the magical, mystical aura common to a natural place.  The whole can only be improved by working with instead of against nature.

The ideal country home place provides necessities: healthful air, water and soil, climate wherein we thrive, and those utilities and services necessary to our chosen lifestyle.  It provides space and conditions for our buildings and our activities, including food production and recreation and, increasingly, our commercial work.  Located amidst chosen natural beauty, the ideal home provides mental and psychological well-being and it stimulates and nurtures our spiritual explorations.  The ideal home place inspires us to become more than we are. It elicits light, truth, and joy.

Location is paramount.  The reason for the cliche: "The three most important elements of value are location, location, and location," is that almost anything about a place can be changed except its location.  Terrain can be graded, trees and shrubs cut down or planted, and a house can be built, rebuilt, altered, razed, or moved.  Only location and the attendant climate are unchangeable.

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