Rural Living

I started a new category on my blog called Rural Living. I know that we are not as remote as some people are but to us it is pretty remote. I hope you enjoy this new category and the goings on of living in the country. I wanted to share with you how we got to this area.

We live in a very rural area or as my sister calls it “where the sun don’t shine”. But the sun does shine and it is beautiful especially this time of the year. It’s really not that far out or maybe I have just gotten used to it.

We have lived in this area for more than twenty years. I love it now and always for the most part. Well except when the roads are snowy and icy. Luckily that’s not too often. We are about twenty minutes from the nearest small town with a Walmart or any other grocery store. We are about an hour from Knoxville or any other larger cities. We don’t usually just run out and grab a hamburger because it can take almost an hour even if we do drive through. So we plan our trips accordingly. Luckily Mark and I are both homebodies. I have about a twenty five minute commute to work and Mark has about an hour.

How did we get to this area? More than twenty years ago my husband’s dad had bought property on Tellico Lake and built a house there and he loved it!! We loved it too when we went to visit and fish and just hang out. I always thought it was a bit out of the way. Like I said only about twenty minutes from town and about thirty minutes from where we were living at that time, but it seemed longer the first few times we drove it. Mark loved the area and had always said if he couldn’t live on the ocean he would love to have lake front property and build a house. A piece of property came available near my father in law’s house and we checked into it. We were sort of forced to move because highway 322 in Sweetwater, where we lived, literally came through our house. We had to move. We wanted to build a house and we were living in a starter home so we decided to build on the lake. It took almost a year to build our house. We broke ground on June 8th of 1998 and the house was finished in April of 1999. It was thirty minutes from Sweetwater, where we were living. We moved in with my mother in law for the year it took to build our house.

I was skeptical about buying the property it was all wooded and overgrown and it was hard to imagine a house being built there. A lot of the land had to be cleared. It would take a lot of work. I remember the day we went to look at the property. The drive seemed to take forever. I kept throwing out derogatory comments about living in the country. When we got to the property we had to make our way through the woods to get to the lake bank. The wind was blowing. We were being slapped in the face by tree branches as we walked through the thick wooded area. I was trying to imagine a house being in the middle of the woods and looking at this lake view every day but it was a little hard to do. I was very skeptical at this point. Once we got to the lake bank and I was standing there with the wind blowing through the trees and gently lifting my hair I noticed something strange. I couldn’t hear anything like traffic or people or anything!!!! All I could hear was the wind in the trees. It was so peaceful and soothing. That is the moment I was hooked. I was sold.

We bought the property, picked out a house plan and the clearing of the land started. Mark and poppy, my father in law, did a lot of the work. Poppy lived just next door to the property and he was retired so he was able to go to the property every day and check things out. It seemed like it took forever. Especially during the winter months when the builders would stop for weeks at a time to go on a hunting trip. I was livid and threatened to withhold any pay they were owed until they finished. My husband said that would not be a good idea so I didn’t do it.

We finally moved in almost a year later. I got used to planning everything around a twenty minute drive into town instead of five minutes like before. We had no neighbors except poppy. We could only see his house in the winter when there were no leaves on the trees. When we first moved in I longed for the normalcy of being near a lot of people and running out for food or groceries in five minutes. But now I love this place and can’t imagine living anywhere else. Sure someday we may choose to move closer to town but for now we love our little rural area.

I apologize for the photos you will see. Twenty years ago cell phones just aren’t what they are today. Some of these pictures were taken with a 35MM camera with actual film. So many of them are pictures of pictures.