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For the purposes of this exercise I’d like to narrow my community down to the 2000 block of Sherred Hill Road, Cambridge Township, Crawford County Pennsylvania. This reduction in scope brings us a half a mile of mostly dirt road, five homes and a trailer, maple buckets, Black Angus beef cows, and a red horse named Rodney. Welcome to Sherred Hill road. About a year ago I bought my first house, and with it my first real place since childhood that fulfills those intangibles brought forth by a place you call home. I’d been looking for almost a year. My girlfriend Tracey and I even visited a few places, but mostly what we found was that two twenty somethings might have trouble finding an affordable home in the country that didn’t include local flora and fauna in the living space. But then we found this place, 21993 Sherred Hill Road, and I’m going to post that very first picture that we saw online as an introduction in to the going ons of life at our new home. We bought a farmette from Terry and Martha Sherred with three acres, an old farmhouse, and a pole barn for $100,000 on the button. Terry and Marty had lived here pretty much all of their adult life, and as the Sherreds across the street explained to me this morning, the Sherred family has been farming this hillside for nearly three centuries. Terry’s brother Red still lives across the street with his wife Doris in a house trailer set behind their abandoned home, and next to them is their daughter Wendy and her children. And all around them is a record of their activities in the last 50 years. Old tractors and combine heads, blown out trucks and livestock trailers, hay elevators reaching to nowhere, piles of scrap junk, couch cushions stuffed in rusting truck cabs, and a pair of puppies whose own mix of brown and white parents blend their colors into their surroundings. More on that later. Down the road is Ron Davis, retired from the North Western Rural Electric Co-op, born and raised in the house where he lives now. We met Ron on our second morning here when an overnight snow brought out his blue Ford tractor to plow out the neighborhood driveways, and the roads too if the township falls behind on their duties. Ron has a pond with a gazebo down the hill from us and a sugar shack set back from the road in a grove of maple trees, his metal buckets hang in all of the neighbors yards. The white house across the road from Ron is stately and tree covered, the hanging syrup buckets and burning wood stove are reminiscent of New England. We haven’t met those neighbors yet.