Home

We sold our house. The house we built. The home we loved. There are reasons based in logic for why we sold. There are also matters of the heart that are still being negotiated for why we sold. All of those logical reasons carried me through the sale and onto our temporary digs from where I’m writing this entry. I imagined it would not be a big deal to move into 700sf of someone else’s space while we waited for the close of our new home. And then after that closing to move into another temporary housing situation for another six months while our home gets remodeled. No big deal, right?

Wrong.

What I’ve discovered in six short weeks is that I miss ‘home.’ Not our house, per se, but our home. I thought home is where the heart is. I thought as long as I was with Terry and the dogs, that’s where home was. And in part, it is. But there is something else missing. It’s not really tangible. It’s not our stuff- we got rid of most of that. It’s not the permanent physical address- we don’t have one at the moment. It’s something a bit deeper.

Home to me, to us, is respite and rest, joy and celebration, comfort and (yes) convenience, domain and element, retreat and sanctuary. It is in the realm of safety that we call it home and not hovel.  The space that feels close to certain, not shifting.

What I’ve also discovered is living in another community is fun for a few days, until I realized that this wasn’t my community, my tribe. Sure, the people are great, the food is diverse and tasty, the streets and houses are perfectly adorable, but it too doesn’t feel like home.

Why, you might be asking, am I writing about this personal experience on our company journal? Because I realized through this experience what home means to me, and likely means to a lot of people. We work with a lot of amazing people and firms. Their sole jobs are to create communities and build homes. It is the desire of some of these firms to do this work with actual people in mind. Countless hours of planning and designing, and reworking and redesigning to manifest these places in which we hope to find that respite in our house and full connection with our neighbors and our neighborhoods. Thoughtful, considerate planning and execution is far from easy, or cheap, yet there are people out there who choose this path over just building and pushing rooftops and big box retail. I admire you. I praise you. I am grateful for you.  

Home matters. Community matters. It gives more meaning and definition to how we play and operate in our own worlds rather than just shuttling from duty to duty only to crash into bed with no regard that our lives are for living. 

Birds::Art+Nature

When developers typically start new communities the focus is more on selling rooftops than selling place, much less nature. We had the privilege of working with Summers Corner on a project that would embody both art and nature as this new community came out of the ground. This community was originally a pine plantation and we wanted to honor and restore the bird habitat that existed there and help to create a future for new healthy habitat. 

Working alongside a very thoughtful landscape design team, LaQuatra Bonci, Fred Bonci took inspiration from The Living Landscape (Rick Darke and Doug Tallamy) for the design and implementation at Summers Corner. Understanding that the plant life that would be installed here would help to promote wildlife habitat rather than hinder it. This was the foundation for their plan. 

To compliment the landscape plan, we worked with South Carolina Bluebird Society to install bird boxes (Bluebird, Robin, American Kestrel, and Wood Ducks) throughout the first phase of parks. This group of devoted bird and nature lovers made the drive from Aiken, SC on more than one occasion to help us locate and install boxes, and showed up for the grand opening to help educate visitors to the importance of their work, and the necessity of supporting bird habitat. 

The icing on the cake was incorporating art as a reflection of habitat into the community. We worked with sculpturist, Tom Holmes, to design and install four sculptures throughout the community that would support the natural habitat while also giving roost and respite to birds of all kinds- from Carolina Wrens to Robins to Osprey. We spent the week prior to the community grand opening working with Tom to gather wood and branches from the site, cutting, sorting and assisting him on the construction. What a privilege to work alongside Tom for that week. Hoping to see more of his work here. 

We were so grateful to be part of a team willing to stretch into something new, something necessary to support the ethos of this community which is based in garden and nature. We were honored to work with such talented and thoughtful people that were just as excited and passionate to be part of some crazy idea of making habitat a priority, and doing it in a very unconventional way. We were reminded that we are part of nature, intertwined, existing only because of it. 

As the community grows, we hope that the residents will champion the efforts to support the natural habitat. That taking care of the land and its inhabitants will be just as much of a priority as it will be in their own yards and homes. Hoping that nature and art is observed and honored with the realization that it to is part of our communities.

This is just the beginning of this story. Looking forward to see how it unfolds. 

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Best definition of Meaning I've come across.

Terry and I are in the middle of reading this book called Insight Out by Tina Seelig. It's terrific, and if you dare embark on the journey- and the homework- it's a useful tool for getting your boat out of the mud and onto the bigger waters of life. 

I'm certain there will be other "insightful" posts of our path through the book, but I found this quote to just ring my bell. This greater idea that "we choose how we approach every single thing in our life."

She quotes John Gardner from a speech he gave in 1990. The full transcript you can read here.

"Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it passed on to you. out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life."

BOOM. Take that with you.  

Gathering around the table.

In some initial meetings with Summers Corner, a master planned community in Summerville, SC, we conceived of an idea to take a more grassroots approach to community engagement – let's invite some people to dinner. Let's make them intimate. Let's invite stakeholders in the community. Let's pick a discussion theme for each dinner. Let's eat. 

This is not a new concept. The salon. The Jeffersonian dinner. We called them Dinners and Conversations. The client wasn't sure how this might translate to home sales or success, but we knew if we could gather people around really great food and have a conversation about what a new community could and would look like, then the outcome would be infectious. 

Turns out, they were a huge success and will most likely transition into the community itself. 
Here is a nice little blog post, in their words, of what they discovered. 

Dinner-thoughts-learned-table.