It was the day after Thanksgiving in 1999 when we first saw the house that would become our home.  We’d moved to Northern Virginia from New Jersey the year before, and we were renting a small townhouse near my husband’s office.  Our daughter was eleven months old.  We’d gotten the hang of packing her into her car seat and settling her in her stroller, and she was typically a happy short-distance traveler.  Our primary weekend activity had become house hunting.  House looking, really, because we weren’t yet prepared to buy.  It was free, entertaining, it got us out of our increasingly cramped space, and it was a good way to get to know the area.  Most homes were well beyond our means, but we looked at everything we found vaguely appealing; we wanted to get a feel for the wide scope of the market.  At an open house that fall we met a realtor with whom we felt an immediate rapport.  We appreciated her humorous quips, made all the more amusing when delivered in her posh British accent.  She won me over completely when she referred to our daughter as that “ex-quisite child.”  (Dawn Jones is savvy.)  She was determined to take us under her wing.  We told her we weren’t sure how serious we were about buying.  Nevertheless, she persisted.  

Buying a home was a very big deal for us.  We were used to university housing and eccentric rental spaces.  As a grad student, I lucked into a cushy house-sitting job on lovely Battle Road for a Princeton professor.  I even managed to get my husband-to-be a similar gig in another beautiful home right across the street.  We relished being mortgage-free high-end real estate dwellers.  And then we began our married life at the other end of the spectrum,  in Princeton’s bare bones and now-demolished Butler Apartments, built in the 1940s as temporary quarters for returning GIs.  We’d never had a place that we could truly call our own.   

We’d seen several homes with Dawn when I found an online listing that seemed promising, if oddly worded and rather puzzling.  The internet was fairly new back then, and I was proud of myself for using it to browse local real estate listings.  The photo showed what appeared to be a sizable white house, far bigger than we expected to afford.  But surprisingly, it was in our price range.  The description read as follows:  This is a lovely home that can also be remodeled.  The garage can be fixed.  Painting done, finish the basement with bedroom and full buth (sic), price would be $150,000 more.  It had been on the market for months.  Worth a look, we thought, but there must be something seriously wrong with the place.  

We anticipated disappointment as we went to meet Dawn at the address.  We expected to find a dilapidated shell, an extreme fixer-upper in need of a daunting amount of work.  What we saw was a plain, unassuming American Foursquare farmhouse with a central block and two symmetrical wings.  Aluminum siding on the outside.  Inside decor featured mid-1970s stalwarts like orange shag carpeting in every upstairs bedroom and faux French provincial white and gold detailing in the bathrooms.  In the kitchen, there was a sort of fake shake roof thing that extended the full length of two walls.  The former owner had been a heavy smoker, and the copious wallpaper, thick carpeting, heavy draperies and all the woodwork were yellowed with nicotine.  Structurally, the house appeared to be sound.  It was spacious, and we loved the floor plan, with a central hall surrounded by four large rooms on each level.  In short, it seemed to be a good, solid house with unfortunate surface treatments.  Familiar territory, for me, from my childhood home in Atlanta.  We could make this old house our own.  

And then, there were the trees.  

The photo from the real estate listing showed parts of two big trees that appeared to frame the house.  Turns out they were silver maples, much like those outside my grandparents’ farmhouse, the beloved central focus of my childhood.  Lots of people dislike these trees.  They grow quickly but tend to shed their bulky limbs regularly.  Their knobby roots, spreading far and wide, are the enemy of a pristine lawn.  But I was delighted to see that a semi-circle of six grand old maples sheltered the front yard.  As I wrote in a post from 2012, those trees spoke to me.  They said, “You’re home!”  

The house dates from 1920, and the trees are of the same vintage.  Not long after we moved in, church friends helped me contact a woman whose family had built the house.  In her 90s at the time, and living in southern Virginia, she spoke with great fondness about her childhood home.  Back then, it was on two hundred acres, on which they raised wheat.  When I mentioned how much I loved the big maples, she told me that as a very little girl, she had helped her parents plant them “from switches!”  

Since settling in, in January of 2000,  we’ve described our home as the old white farmhouse with the old trees in front.    

That description is less accurate as of this summer.  Due to recent weather events, only one maple remains.