I Appear to Have Purchased a Mountain

I have no idea what I’m doing.

People think I have a plan because I say things confidently.

This is an illusion.

Yesterday I spent twenty minutes researching the proper way to deadhead hydrangeas.

This morning I Googled, “Can chipmunks climb screen doors?”

Apparently they can.

I live on fifteen acres now. That still sounds ridiculous when I say it out loud. Fifteen acres. At my age most people are downsizing. I bought a ridge.

Not a mountain. I’m not getting delusions of grandeur.

A ridge.

It’s just enough elevation to make weather feel personal.

Guests arrive and immediately say, “Wow.”

I try to act like this is perfectly normal.

Inside I’m thinking, I know! Can you believe this?

Sometimes I walk outside after everyone has gone to bed just to make sure it’s still here.

The stars.

The silence.

The ridiculous privilege of owning a place where the loudest sound is frogs arguing about something that is apparently very important.

Owning Sky View Ridge has taught me many things.

For example, weeds don’t care how old you are.

Mulch reproduces when you’re not looking.

Garden hoses possess consciousness and use it exclusively for evil.

And there is no known scientific explanation for where all the dust comes from in a cabin no one has occupied for three days.

Guests see sunsets.

I see laundry.

Guests see swallows swooping.

I see peppers and tomatoes that desperately need weeding.

Guests see peace.

I see that the damn chipmunk is back.

Yet somehow…

They’re right.

It is peaceful.

Not because everything is perfect.

Because none of it is.

It’s peaceful because nobody here is pretending life isn’t messy.

Nature certainly doesn’t.

The chestnut doesn’t apologize for dropping leaves.

The goldfinches don’t file flight plans.

The coyotes don’t worry about their personal brand.

Meanwhile, I spent ten minutes yesterday wondering if my Google Business profile needed another photograph of the petunias.

Perhaps I’m the only species with this problem.

Anyway…

If you’re wondering what it’s like to build a tiny retreat in your seventies, the answer is surprisingly simple.

It’s mostly sweeping things.

Leaves.

Porches.

Cabins.

Self-doubt.

Not always in that order.

Doom With a View

The title made me laugh before it made me think.

A Room with a View holds old memories of discovering there were other ways to live. Sometimes all it takes is a different window. Sometimes you have to leave the whole damned room.

I’ve always had a complicated relationship with rooms built by other people. They tend to come furnished with expectations, respectability, and someone else’s idea of a proper life. I learned long ago that the view gets better the farther you walk from the floor plan.

Maybe that’s why Doom With a View amused me.

It names something I’ve come to recognize in myself.

Every morning, reality arrives carrying war, corruption, cruelty, ecological decline, and enough outrage to fill every room in the house. It invites me to believe that despair is the only rational response.

Some days, I almost agree.

Then I step outside.

The wind has no interest in the news cycle. Swallows still carve impossible arcs through the sky. The sunrise burns without asking who deserves it. At night, the Milky Way stretches across the darkness with the quiet confidence of something that has outlived every empire.

The world is wounded.

The view reminds me it is also breathtaking.

Those truths are not enemies. They simply refuse to cancel each other out.

I’ve spent enough of my life walking away—from expectations, from certainty, from rooms that demanded I shrink to fit them—to know that perspective is an act of freedom. Sometimes changing your life begins by changing where you stand.

The truth is, Doom With a View belongs to me.

It’s the private conversation I have with the world. The wrestling match between grief and beauty. Between despair and wonder. Between wanting to turn away and choosing, instead, to keep looking.

I don’t expect anyone else to carry that.

In fact, I hope they never have to.

Perhaps that’s why I built Sky View Ridge.

Not to escape the world.

Not to persuade anyone to see it as I do.

Simply to create a place where the horizon is wide enough to interrupt the noise. Where silence isn’t empty but restorative. Where people can wake to birdsong, watch the light move across the hills, follow the stars after dark, and remember—if only for a weekend—that they belong to something older and larger than their inbox, their timeline, or the latest crisis.

Guests don’t need my questions.

They only get the view.

And for me, that’s enough.

Alternative plans

I spent years looking

for someone

who could make my heart

skip a beat.

Life, apparently,

has an odd sense of humor.

It had other plans 

for my heart. 

Who benefits when we believe consistency is a virtue?

We’re taught that changing our minds is weakness.

Changing careers is failure.

Changing politics is betrayal.

Changing lovers is instability.

Changing beliefs is hypocrisy.

Maybe.

Or maybe the opposite is true.

Maybe refusing to change is the greater lie.

The oak tree doesn’t become a prairie because someone tells it to. But neither does it keep producing acorns after lightning hollows out its trunk. Life adapts or it dies.

People are the only creatures expected to become monuments to their younger selves.

That strikes me as bizarre.

The twenty-five-year-old who chose medicine didn’t know what the sixty-five-year-old would know.

The woman who married at twenty-two couldn’t possibly promise what the woman at fifty would want.

The activist.

The executive.

The mother.

The monk.

Each of them was real.

None of them was permanent.

I don’t admire people who never change.

I admire people who notice they’ve changed and have the courage to rearrange their lives accordingly.

Starting over isn’t courage because it’s adventurous.

It’s courage because it requires disappointing everyone who preferred the previous version of you.

That’s the real cost.

Not uncertainty.

Disappointing the audience.

Perhaps that’s why beginning again feels so liberating.

You’re no longer trying to keep a promise your younger self made to strangers.

You’re simply trying to tell the truth about who is standing here now.