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It was election year 2000. My husband and I made a bet that if Bush won, we’d vacation in Sundance, Utah, and if Gore, in Italy. Since there was no clear victor, we bought some land in Arkansas. That’s what a hanging chad will do for you.

I’ll concede that it was a crazy idea—buy some land on the War Eagle River near Fayetteville, Arkansas and build our dream home, about 30 years before its time. David, my husband of 15 years, had just graduated (at 41, the eldest in the engineering program at North Carolina State) and I had just accepted voluntary severance from Nortel, where I’d worked as a technical writer. We had the time, we had the money, and we were ready to squander both. It helped that David also had the skill—he’d built houses for a living prior to college. So we moved from Raleigh, North Carolina, to the Ozarks in Northwest Arkansas, his childhood home. We were heady, full of risk. Clearly, we were childless.

Our history proved that we liked to move, and we both had a bad case of wanderlust. Or, it could be as simple as what David Sedaris said—when the sex gets old, all long-married couples eventually turn to real estate. We thought it would be the good life, the simple life, and this was before Paris Hilton made a joke of it. I was a romantic, the English major to his engineer. I’d dream something up and he’d do the math, and then actually create something. I was ready to live off the land, live cheaply, forget the inside-the-beltline values (forget that I’d never gardened in my life). I had delusions of romance with nature, so I traded my Lexus for a Jeep Wrangler.

We moved in with David’s father while we built, problem number one. His father had a two-bedroom, one-bath musty lake house that smelled like dead fish. His father also had a religious-extremist woman friend who called at all hours of the night. His father probably didn’t want us that close. Silly us, thinking he’d enjoy our company, some work, some meals. Right off, we knew we were in trouble. The good life comes with lots of baggage, and some really strange people.

We weren’t at the lake house much anyway, working pre-dawn to late night. We built the house in a record three months, just David, his Dad, and me. Some thoughts plagued me, though: Are the cliffs on our property really called the ABC cliffs where kids jump to their deaths every summer, screaming the alphabet? Is that trailer down the road inhabited by more than 20 mangy dogs? Is everyone here evangelical? Do I smell chickens?

Problem number two—we built too big. It was now going to be a hefty mortgage instead of a little cabin by the lake. This is what happens when the dreamer is in charge of the plan and the purse—when she dreams of a cedar- sided, red-tin-roofed, luxury home with Saltillo tile, red oak countertops and above-the-counter sinks, all on a hillside that required the unaccounted-for basement level. In the last month, David and I worked all hours of the night pasting Colorado River rock onto the 22-foot wall of the fireplace, sanding floors and polyurethaning, grouting tile by flashlight. American dreaming is not for the weak of back. The only thing we forgot was a doorbell, a harbinger of things to come.

We moved in just in time to pay off the owner-financed land and acquire an out-of-state mortgage. Most people get the construction loan first, I hear. Not us—nothing like more stress to motivate you. Right off, my husband found his first engineering job, for which they paid him a 22-year-old’s starting salary. True, he was just out of college, but he had 20 years of building experience under his tool belt. Which concludes problem number three.

My lovely husband (bless his heart), who previously had said, “After you put me through school, you can do anything you want, baby,” suggested that I get a job to help cover our new mortgage. There are few jobs to be had in Northwest Arkansas, home to Wal-Mart, J.B. Trucking and Tyson—I had my choice of a greeter, a truck driver, or a chicken plucker. I took the rest of my pension and 401K and invested it in grad school. The good life was racking up.

But the penultimate problem was to appear. Come that fall, near Halloween, the visitations began. The plug-in battery-powered doorbell rang late one night too close to All Hallows Eve to be insignificant. My father-in-law’s woman friend asked permission to enter. At that moment I recalled the movie The Lost Boys in which a vampire must ask permission to enter a home, an identifying gesture. She launched into a PR campaign to sell herself as the friend of choice for my father-in-law, whose wife lay dying of Alzheimer’s in a nursing home nearby. She ended by damning us to hell. All I could think to say was, “There’s medication for that, you know.”

Within a few months’ time, I cracked a double-yolked egg into a waiting bowl. I was, unbelievably, pregnant. It’s one of those dreams we’d never even thought of. I called a realtor and we sold in a few months’ time.

The good life was becoming a new idea again, and it had nothing to do with a house. I was becoming a home to someone, and I wanted to be back near my old friends and family and in normal living conditions. The miracle built there was our baby, our surprise ending, another ache uncovered; one I’d just discovered.

I began with an idea of bucolic living, rolling green acres, Norman Rockwell in New Hampshire. What we got was more like Chevy Chase in Funny Farm. I was pregnant and unemployed, and my husband had actually lost a tooth.

The good life evolves for all of us. For me, it was the feeling of a baby move inside me, which forced me to move outside myself, my little plans and designs, my pocketbook. Life happens, and it’s probably not what you expect.

It’s been six years now since life began in that big house in Arkansas, and we’re still paying off the debt we’ve accrued with our choice to move back to North Carolina, and then to stay home to raise our son. My husband finally found a firm that treated him like a grown up, and he travels a lot. Our son, Dylan, is a barefooted, barebacked, nature boy—which my husband likes to attribute to where he was conceived—his backwoods roots in a hillbilly mansion.

We thought we could do anything, go anywhere on God’s green earth, but there is so much you can’t control—who rings your bell, or making a child grow, behave and love you when you’re old. Now Dylan is our story, our punch line, a constant reminder that the story is never about what we thought it was; both surprising and inevitable, it is stranger than fiction. I would have sold myself short if I’d told you years ago what a good life meant. Forget the McMansions, I’ll take a Happy Meal any day.

Sheilah is a freelance writer and stay-at-home Mom in Denver, NC.
She’s a regular contributor to Literary Mama, and enrolled in the MFA program at
Queens University of Charlotte. She has a good enough life.