People ask me how I knew. Usually over coffee, usually somewhere in the second half of the conversation, after the practical questions are out of the way. Square footage, taxes, how far to a real grocery store. Then it comes, almost apologetic. But how did you actually know? I can tell its coming from a place of curiosity tinged with a little anxiety. No one wants to make a million dollar, cross-country mistake.
I’ve written about the pull before. The image that keeps arriving uninvited. I still believe in that. But I’ve started to notice it’s an incomplete answer, because it only covers the first half of the question. The pull tells you something that is worth trusting; its recognizing something you need or want and that some particular place has that thing. And, if you listen to it, you might end up sitting across from me at one of the 5 coffee shops in the region (we’re not counting, Dunks, sorry Boston readers) talking about how you’re not quite sure, but you think a life on the lake or in the woods might be calling to you.
But once you’ve made the move, the pull goes quiet and it doesn’t tell you whether you were right to trust it. That verdict, if there is one, doesn’t arrive at the closing table. It doesn’t arrive on moving day, or even in that strange, held-breath first winter. It arrives later, sideways, usually while you’re doing something else entirely. And it arrives over and over again.
Here’s what I mean by “you’ll just know” being an incomplete answer. When I moved, I knew what I wanted. Quiet. Land. A house with some age on it, something with a story I could become a part of instead of a subdivision where I would have every opportunity to be an anonymous blip in the life of the neighborhood. I got all of it. By any reasonable measure, the place I found (both the house and the area) matched the list. And for a while I thought that was the whole test. Did it deliver what I came for. Mission accomplished.
That’s not actually how I know now. For the first year or so, that was enough. I wanted this, I got this, I’m happy with my life. What I’ve noticed, three years in, is that the place stopped agreeing with my list somewhere along the way. Not by withholding what I asked for. By checking those boxes and then quietly replacing the list with a new one, an expanded one, and not asking my permission first.
I did not move here to cooperatively farm and raise chickens, especially not for meat. That wasn’t on any version of the list, not even a stretch goal. I moved here for a certain kind of quiet, and somewhere in year two I found myself standing in the yard with my neighbor, doing something I would have found completely alien three years earlier, and not just tolerating it. Wanting to be good at it. Caring whether I was doing right by the animals we were processing in a way that had nothing to do with efficiency or homesteading aesthetics and everything to do with some new part of me that apparently needed this particular kind of connection and identity.
Nobody warns you that this happens. That the place doesn’t just satisfy the person who arrived. It goes to work on her. Quietly, without asking, it starts handing you wants you didn’t order. And the strange test, the one I think actually answers the question people are asking me over coffee, is whether you’re willing to let it. Or maybe more, whether you’re excited by the evolution.
Because there’s a version of this that goes the other way. I’ve watched it happen to people who moved for a feeling and then spent years defending the version of themselves that had the feeling, refusing every single thing the place tried to hand them instead. Still commuting to the old identity two, three, five years in. Still narrating the move in the past tense, like it was a decision made once and then preserved under glass. Still mourning cocktails after 9 and food delivery instead of embracing breakfast on the farm down the road at 8 am and a bonfire held by the lake association where everyone brings a thermos. Holding on to what was while going through the motions of being here is not rightness. That’s just relocation with the furniture rearranged.
I don’t think you find out a place is right by checking whether it gave you what you asked for. I think you find out by noticing, later, that whatever it was that you thought you wanted, what you got continues to be the thing that makes you thrilled to be here.
I used to think of the farmhouse as a fixer-upper I was patient enough to take on. That was the frame I had when I signed. A project with a timeline, however loose. I have slowly stopped believing that frame is even accurate. Somewhere in the last year I noticed I have quit thinking of the unfinished rooms as unfinished and started thinking of them as not yet, which is a completely different posture toward the same pile of lath and horsehair plaster. The want shifted from get this done to something closer to get to keep doing this, which is not a want I moved in with. It’s one the house gave me. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that past owners, all of whom stuck around for 30 years or more, were given the same posture.
I still have a morning ritual I do most days. But its a little different than it used to be. Rather than reading the Times while I have my coffee, the dogs underfoot, I read sound of the crows in the trees, and the roosters continued attempts to crow (he’s almost got it!), and the what the color of the sunrise portends for what the day is going hand me. I get to the Times eventually, but I realized what is happening on my 10 acres gives me joy in a way that what is happening elsewhere doesn’t. I bring this up not because I think a place hands you epiphanies on schedule, it doesn’t, but because that practice is where I actually catch these shifts happening. Not in some big cinematic realization. In the small, boring recognition that the question I’m sitting with this morning isn’t the question I was sitting with a year ago, and I never consciously decided to trade one for the other.
So if you’re asking how you know, and you’ve already found your version of the pull, here’s the most honest answer I have for you now, though fair warning, it will probably change again when I’m 5 years in, or 10, or 30. You don’t know once and for always. You know over and over again, if its right. You know the first time when something inside you recognizes the place before you can explain it. You know the second time, later, quieter, when you notice the place has been rewriting what you wanted the whole time you weren’t looking, and instead of resisting the edit, you signed off on it without even registering the moment you did. And then you know again, each time you realize you’re not entirely who you used to be, but you’re happier than ever.
That last kind of knowing doesn’t feel like a verdict. It doesn’t arrive with any fanfare. It feels like standing in your yard doing something you never planned on, fully invested in getting it right, and only realizing afterward that you used to be someone who wouldn’t have understood why.
The right place was never going to just meet you where you are. If it’s actually right, it’s going to move you, and you won’t notice until you’re already standing somewhere new.
If you're mid-move, or mid-decision, and wondering whether the pull was right — I've had this exact conversation more times than I can count, and I'd like to have it with you too.
Here’s to the wants you didn’t put on the wish list, and the ones you’re glad you got anyway.
🧭 Jenn
Keys to the Lakes