It’s been a year since we settled in and my back deck has slowly become my favorite room in the house. My three-bedroom home is nothing showy around 1400 sq.ft., but the walk out basement is full of light, and we love to spend the cool evenings on the back porch. Most mornings I’m out on the upstairs porch off the main living room, coffee growing cold, just watching the stream catch the light. The stream’s constant murmur sold me on this lot before we’d graded the house seat. At 2,400 feet, the hardwoods hold onto a coolness the valley below doesn’t get, and I trimmed the rhododendron along the bank so I could see our many visitors.

I’ve learned the creek’s morning rhythm. Most mornings I’ll see a doe and her fawn pick their way along the far bank. Wild turkeys work the leaf litter past the tree line. Chipmunks scold me from the rock pile, while the songbirds and Carolina wrens fill the air with song. The occasional pileated woodpecker hammering somewhere up the ridge never really stops. It’s the kind of quiet during the day that’s full, not empty.

At night, it’s the other kind of quiet. No streetlights, no traffic, with only two homes above my end of the road means the only thing passing by after dark is the occasional set of headlights pulling into a driveway I recognize. Crickets and katydids take over from the birds, an owl calls from somewhere across the stream, and the stars do what they can’t do in town. And yet I’m not alone out here, my neighbors in Pinnacle Mountain View are close enough that someone notices if my lights are off too many nights in a row, close enough to call when a tree comes down across the publicly maintained road. Privacy and community, somehow, in the same acre of woods.

On weekends I’m at DuPont or Pisgah admiring the waterfalls, miles of trail, with more biking than I’ll ever get through. Some days it’s a slow lunch at The Local Table near Main Street in Hendersonville or over to Flat Rock instead to spend a few hours wandering through the books at Blue Ridge Bargains. I never thought I was the type to enjoy plays, but The Playhouse put on a great version of Rent and now I’m a season ticket holder. No city taxes, no HOA, It’s the version of my life I’d been waiting to build, with a creek for company and just enough neighbors to make it home.