Oh my goodness

Image from here

Have you seen this adorable cottage?  I saw it on Tranquility du Jour, which directed me to The New York Times article that was written about it.  While

I was originally drawn to the idea of the cottage.  Its beauty.  Its charm.  I actually enjoyed reading the article more than looking at the pictures of the cottage.  Sure it's cute, but Sandra Foster, the woman who renovated it, had some wonderful things to say.



She talked about the time she spent homeless while she was growing up.

“If you don’t have a home, you don’t have a sense of place, you don’t have a life, you don’t have a soul,” she said.

She tells the wonderfully, simple story of how she and her husband met and fell in love.

“I was a gardener, he was a gardener,” she said. “There is a plant called nepeta. I had trouble growing it. He grew it like gangbusters. I was fascinated by this very handsome man who could grow something I couldn’t grow like there was no tomorrow.” 

She then explained how she and her husband took on too much when they were trying to renovate a huge, old farmhouse.

Image from here

“The only thing holding me together was Todd’s love, and his love of food and feeding me, and his love of flowers. Every single day I come here, there are flowers. A whole path of rose petals leading to a bath full of rose petals and candles. He’s a magical man, despite his flaws.”

After they realized that renovating the farmhouse was putting too much stress on them, they bought the land they currently live on that has a trailer and the cottage that she has been renovating on her own.  I'm not exactly sure why I liked the article so much, except that she seemed really willing to be honest and open about the things she's been through and the things that are important in life.  I really liked that.