John and Mike's Farm Oak Hill, NC 2009 - 2019

Our little part of the world to call our own.  I bought the farm for John.  It was a few miles from where he grew up.  His family was close by.  John had sacrificed so much for me - he helped me through graduate school, he moved to Charlotte when I got a job there.  He was there, unquestioning, when I was sick.  Here was a place I imagined where he could be close to family, something I missed being far from my own, a place to feed his love of history and to challenge his amazing skills as a woodworker.  John loving rebuilt buildings with exacting detail.  We started our small family of cats rescued when others had no need for them:  Meeshu, Skippy, Sissy, Thomas, Charlotte, Winston, Momma and her one kitten, Annelise, Mr. Boots, and Salem.  Along the way, there were several possums we named Einstein.  All of them kept us snake, rat, and bug free.  We loved sitting on the front porch and watching the fog rise from the spring that fed the field across the road.  The farm had many great features, among these were the fields of heirloom jonquils imported from France in the late 1800's and planted there.  John loved to explore the old, sadly abandoned, farmstead started in the 1790's.  We found a lot of arrowheads, the farm was on the Native American trading trail linking the Tidewater tribes to the Catawbas near Charlotte.   John left the farm on February 6,  2019.  He never returned to the place he loved.  He passed away on Valentine's Day 8 days later in far-off California.  I left On August 30, 2019 to start a new chapter in Durham, NC.  It was a special place. It was my gift to John.