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Old Purple Farm

To be honest, it's easy for me to get excited about a lot of my real estate listings. I love good home design. I've gone so far as to fall in love with more than a few properties over the years...some for their views...some for their kitchens...or the general feeling you get when you walk in.

This home is one that I've loved for over 23 years now. It's an antique center-chimney colonial circa 1746 known as Old Purple Farm, and today I put it on the market for the owner.


Isn't it a beauty? You enter through the courtyard at the back door into the kitchen with a lovely tiled mudroom spot to sit and remove shoes, and hang your coats. The owners remodeled the kitchen in 2000 and kept the original chestnut posts and beams, and the fireplace is just stunning! Right now it is outfitted with a ventless propane system, and the propane is also used for the cooktop. The light fixtures were custom made by local artisan shop Classic Lighting Design for the kitchen, and I espec…
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How I Became a Student Exchange Mom & Host Mom - Part I of My Exchange Experience

Today's post feels fitting due to the fact that it's November 8th...and yes, we did hug our exchange student!!

I get a lot of questions about how we got into hosting exchange students, and lately everyone asks how it happened that we sent our 15yr old son off for a year to do his own student exchange in France. (Update: he turned 16 in France this Fall.)

It started just about 7 years ago with the Chair of our local Rotary Youth Exchange asking if we'd consider hosting a high school exchange student from Spain. At that time, my own kids were very young...around 6 & 8, and I declined based on the fact that I didn't think we had the kind of lifestyle a young European kid would be looking to experience here (early bedtimes, etc.) The school year went by and we put it out of our heads.

That Summer we spent 6 weeks kicking around the UK, France, and Iceland before coming home right before school started, to find we were being asked again, urgently, if we could provide te…
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Once Upon a Time...

Once upon a time I wrote this blog.

I started writing here in 2008. It was surprisingly successful and I really enjoyed my Thursday morning blogging routine. Then, after writing and not publishing the last few posts I wrote back in 2015, I realized that EVERYTHING I wrote felt sad. Between grieving the loss of my father, and the other heartbreaking news we'd received, the sadness and fear bled into my writing. In truth, I love reading other people being honest and open about what they're facing, seeing their vulnerability, but I felt I needed to grieve privately, and I had to protect my brother's privacy because he wasn't ready to tell anyone that he was so sick. 2015 was a really hard year for me, and it was a rainy Autumn afternoon while I was sitting at an open house in Glastonbury that I decided I had to take a break from writing.

Fast Forward four years to today...a beautiful, sunny, perfect October day...2019.


Of course I still miss my dad. I ask him to watch ove…
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