I thought I had made the biggest mistake by buying a ruin in the middle of nowhere—until I discovered that among the rubble and weeds, something else was waiting for me.
Six months ago, exhausted by the noise of New York City and the relentless pace of the advertising agency where I worked, I gave in to an absurd impulse: I bought an old house in a small town in Kentucky, based on a friend’s recommendation. In the pictures, it looked like a romantic little cottage. In reality, it was just a shack.
The first night, I slept in my car. The house had a broken roof in two places, a rotten wooden floor in the back room, and an entire colony of rats staring at me indignantly, as if I were the intruder.
Sitting in the dark, with no phone signal and the rain tapping on the roof of my car, I mentally slapped myself for my stupidity. Me—a guy raised among skyscrapers, used to food delivery and high-speed WiFi—what was I doing out here, at the edge of the civilized world?
A rooster woke me up in the morning. Not figuratively—a real rooster, perched on my car hood, announcing the sunrise with such determination that I cursed it in every language I knew. When I opened the door, I found myself face to face with an old man holding a steaming pot.
“Good morning, neighbor. I brought you some chicken soup. I knew you were coming—my gut told me.”
That’s how I met old man Henry, my 78-year-old neighbor, who would unknowingly become my best friend in the town of Cedar Hollow. As I sipped the hot soup, he sized me up and probably decided I was a hopeless city case.
“I’d say you should stay at my place until you fix this wreck,” he said, nodding toward the house. “Because if it rains one more time, you’ll wake up with the ceiling on your head.”
The first week was a cultural shock. Henry woke up at 5 AM every single day, no matter what. “The chickens don’t know when it’s Sunday,” he’d say as I watched his silhouette moving around the yard. I, who had never seen a sunrise voluntarily, got up at 10 and felt like a parasite.
By the second week, I started helping him—more out of embarrassment than altruism. I discovered that a day in the countryside had an entirely different rhythm. No deadlines, meetings, or urgent emails. Just the natural sequence of tasks: feeding the animals, working in the garden, fixing the fence, hauling water from the well. And surprisingly, at the end of the day, I felt a pleasant kind of exhaustion, different from the nervous burnout of corporate life.
No one teaches you in school how to repair a roof, bake bread in a wood-fired oven, or recognize when a chicken is sick. These skills, passed down for generations in rural life, were completely lost for people like me—raised in cities of concrete.
Only someone who has lived their whole life in sync with nature can truly understand the joy of seeing a plant grow from a seed you planted or the deep peace of sitting on the porch at dusk, listening to the crickets.
When I started fixing my roof, five men from town showed up to help. I hadn’t called them—they just appeared one morning with tools and materials.
“That’s how we do things here—we help each other,” one of them explained, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. Back in New York, I barely even knew the names of my neighbors.
One month turned into two, then three. The calls from my corporate job became less frequent. I started working remotely for a few clients—just enough to afford staying here. The house was slowly coming back to life—a new roof, repaired windows, a functioning wood stove. But more importantly, I was coming back to life, too.
One Sunday, sitting on my porch, I noticed for the first time how the light changed over the rolling hills. How the golden hues of sunset draped over the treetops, how the shadows gathered in the valley, how the last rays of sun lit up the distant windows of houses.
I found myself crying, without really knowing why. Maybe because, for the first time in my life, I had time to just sit and watch a day come to an end.
Yesterday, when Henry asked me how long I planned to stay, I answered honestly: “I don’t know.” He smiled and told me something I’ll remember forever:
“You see, son, the land has a memory. If you stay in one place long enough, you start to grow roots. And once you’ve got roots, it’s hard to leave.”
I’m not naive enough to think life in the countryside is perfect. It’s hard—sometimes brutally so in its simplicity. But it has something I’ve unknowingly searched for my entire life—a rhythm that doesn’t drain you, but builds you up.
A sense of belonging—not to a job or a social circle, but to a place, to the land, to a community that still knows how to live together.
These days, when a friend from the city asks me when I’m coming back, I don’t know what to say. How do I explain that here, in this “middle of nowhere,” I’ve found something New York, with all its opportunities, never gave me—a life that makes sense not by what you accumulate, but by what you live, day by day?
How many of us have strayed so far from life’s natural rhythm that we’ve forgotten what it’s like to truly live—not just to exist from one deadline to the next?
