From the Top of the Hill

the first chicken coop, long before the barn was rebuilt and painted.

The view from the top of the hill on our farm the evening of December 31, 1999, was much as it is today, though certainly with fewer lights from fewer neighbors or the industrial halogen glow of nearby towns. Below, no lights shone from the windows of our house … because there was not yet a house to light. Our “home,” that year and the following two, was the semi-converted bays of a concrete-floored garage. A light was mounted over the side door, but all else was dark and still.

The valley on that night was quiet. Traffic on the curvy two-lane state highway, almost non-existent at most times, was even less so on New Year’s Eve. Our small flock of Rhode Island Reds were long asleep, safe in the new chicken coop. We had built the coop four months earlier, working into the late night after coming home from full-time jobs in Knoxville, 50 minutes away.

That night on the hill, we sat on the tailgate and shared a glass of cheap champagne to toast the year to come and the year just leaving. No worries for us of a Y2K technology crash: there was nothing much in the bank to be lost. With the purchase of the farm and the remains of a mortgage on our house in Knoxville, ours was now a money-in, money-out world.

A dozen yards away from us, resting in their great bovine bulk of contentment, lay our herd of strawberry-roan Shorthorn cattle. Our first cattle on the farm, we would keep them until the arrival a year later of a larger herd of Milking Devons.

Snorting from time to time, down the hill and on the far side of the barn in the corral, was Cindy’s horse, Paint, her gangly-legged filly no doubt trying to nurse. Cindy had purchased the pregnant mare a week before we closed on the farm. It was for Paint that we had hastily built our first fence. The clumsily constructed wooden corral, erected in a stiflingly hot late summer drought, provided us a hard and humbling lesson in just how much we needed to learn. Cindy was told by the seller that he expected Paint to foal in the fall. Instead, she had given birth two weeks after arriving at the farm and days after the corral was completed. This evening, on the top of the hill, the story was still fresh and new to us. We laughed (as we still do a quarter-century later) at the experience. Already we felt a tiny bit more confidence that we could pull this change off, to live from our land and our work and pay off any debts.

Today, as the year 2024 closes, our immediate neighbors from those early days in the valley—Lowell Raby, Joe Kyle, Rex Ensley, James and Marie Moore, Alex and Sissy Bettis—have all passed away. In those first years Cindy would saddle her horse and set off to deliver them eggs. It’s an idea that now seems as unbelievably quaint, as it does dangerous, because today our small-highway traffic has increased eightfold courtesy of mostly neighbors from out of state seeking their Tennessee “4ever” homes.

While there are many more lights to be seen from the top of the hill at night, ours is still a reasonably quiet rural valley. Many sights and sounds remain familiar. Cattle still ruminate contentedly, chickens wheeze from their coop, traffic can be heard approaching from miles away … and now lights shine a welcome from the windows of our home below.