Avoiding A Facade Lifestyle...

Urban sprawl kept pushing us farther away from the city, necessitating a one-hour commute to my office in downtown D.C.

Five days a week, I became just another tight collar in a Lemming hoard circling the Beltway, chasing our tails, down and back.

By 1984, when we moved in, that old log cabin was riddled with small gaps in the chinking. Any strong wind could blow out a candle burning inside. Built as a poor man’s house on land that had been a grant from Lord Fairfax, it hadn’t improved on its ability to hold the heat in wintertime since the day that farmer first hung a door on his new home, 260 years prior.

Both feet flirting with the kerosene heater while doing my best to keep Ruth warm, I was in love with the place. Our choice had been between a modern townhouse or this old cabin where the water pipes froze solid each winter and keeping warm was a challenge to our ingenuity that we gladly accepted.

I was tired of apartment living, way too much like overpopulated gerbil cages stacked atop one another. Tired of rush hour parking lots that had the audacity to call themselves streets. There was no rush about it.

Leaving my button down, chrome and glass office on “K” Street every weekday afternoon was pure joy, like being sprung from jail, and motoring directly back home to Camp, Waywayonda.

That cabin, and the Civil War era farm house built onto it, sat in a clearing surrounded by woods that had belonged to the Loudoun Timber company since the late 1800’s. There had been no logging, no activity, and we had no neighbors.

All that came to an end as the area was snatched up to make way for a huge master community, hundreds of McMansions built side by side. Monolith tract homes offered towering three story foyers that opened up to grand staircases, all intended to impress. Vacuous form over function. For me, the impressive part was in the sheer volume of the genetic duplicates and the willingness of customers with an extra million or so, happy to buy into that facade lifestyle.

The Catholic Church made us the proverbial offer we couldn’t refuse. With everything natural being stripped away around us, we took the money and moved farther West.

An elaborate Rectory sits on the spot where the church plowed the protected property under in the dark of night.

That cabin may be long gone, but my memory of snuggling with Ruth while daring a smelly kerosene heater to light my outstretched feet on fire, is very much still burning, alive and well.