Submitted by Amy Butcher, an author and professor at Denison University
Does your family like peaches and do you have dessert planned?
I text, 4:41 p.m. on a Monday, the kind of late September afternoon where the light is dappled gold and begs to be spent not grading, but procrastinating.
Two weeks ago, taking the long way home from campus on country backroads that make me ache, I pulled over along the shoulder to get out and snap a photo of a For Sale sign propped in the first few feet of fallowed field. There, in Licking County, I felt — for the first time — a way to make this place my home: a countryside house, 50 minutes closer to the students and campus where I work.
For ten years, I’ve owned my own home 40 miles west, in neighboring Delaware County, and it’s been difficult to imagine giving it up. I’ve done so much work these past 10 years: Sanding the shed and staining it; Erecting a fence and building cedar garden beds; Installing flooring on the sun porch and new windows and new doors.
When I sold my most recent book a few years ago, I gutted and remodeled the kitchen, knocking down the wall that made invisible my dinner party guests as I cooked in the adjacent kitchen. I imagined a highchair for a baby and how important it would be to see her. I’ve painted every room, pulled up carpet, wallpapered the bathroom with a whimsical scene of forest creatures. I thought I’d live in that home forever, but work and circumstances change, and now what was once a five-minute commute to my workplace became close to an hour one-way without traffic.
I hadn’t known when or how to transition, but last week, cutting through the countryside, I saw a dream and lassoed it. I’ll meet soon with realtors, a financial planner, establish a manageable timeline for how to buy land and build a home closer to Denison and the rest of this new world I am building. But for now, my quiet house and longstanding community, full of friends that feel like family and neighbors who mow my lawn when I get lazy, shrugging and smiling when I confront them, say, “You’d do the same for me.”
I’d do the same for them.
On this autumn Monday, I’m baking my favorite dessert — a peach crisp from Bon Appetit. The recipe is stained and creased from over a decade of baking it every summer. With oats and sugar and Vietnamese cinnamon — my preference for its rich aroma, the heartier flavor profile — it oozes orange and bubbles sugar and makes the whole house smell divine. It makes enough for a small army, but I’m one woman, even on my best days. So I bake and then send my messages.
Do you like peach crisp?
Are you hungry?
It’s not much, but it’s everything: to live somewhere with those you love, to be a part of a community, not just a town.
Yes, they say, yes, please! and so I deliver to sunlit porches — at least on this Monday, if not next year’s.
PS: For those for whom I’ve made hungry, here’s the recipe.
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