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Our house is a five-bedroom farmhouse set back from the main road, all the way at the top of the hill. Trees cut it off from the rest of the world, making it seem like its own private kingdom. The living room is sort of small, and dominated by a wood stove across from the front windows. There's no cozier place in the world come winter, with a hot fire burning in that stove, and snow and wind howling around the house, making the windows rattle in their frames.

The kitchen is huge, despite the fact that the house also has a dining room. It's a family kitchen, the kind of kitchen in which you can imagine a mother and her children working together to bake cookies or pies, or to whip up a huge, old-fashioned Thanksgiving feast, complete with a turkey and a ham both.

The downstairs doesn't waste any room on hallways; it was built in the 1800s, when there wasn't money to waste on such useless space. The front door opens onto the dining room; to the left of the door is the living room, with the sunroom and kitchen to the right. Through the living room is what was originally the only bedroom. Moving in a circle, you can trace through the bedroom to the bathroom, then into the mud room, which opens onto an enormous backyard.

The upstairs, built more than half a decade after the ground floor, is divided into four rooms. The bedroom over the dining room is the biggest, taking up fully a third of the floor. Next to that, over the living room, is the second bedroom. That one is as wide as the first, but shorter by about six or seven feet. Keep going clockwise, and you find the store room, which is only about twice the size of a standard walk-in closet. Tucked into a corner of the ceiling there, you'll find the trapdoor leading to a dusty, disused attic. The last room takes up the remainder of the second floor, overlooking the yard and the woods beyond.

The backyard is split in half by a concrete path leading back to a large, open area where wood was hauled and split when wood was a necessity in winter. The left side, behind the house, is dominated by an ancient holly tree, taller than the house itself, which can shade most of the yard when the sun is in the right place. Dwarfed by the tree, there's a modern garage packed with tools and machines, and behind that is the original storage shed, which still holds a number of the treasures belonging to the people who built the house. The shed is old and slowly falling to pieces, but it has the feel of a holy relic about it; even the cracked boards that cover the broken windows can inspire awe in me.

Across the yard, hidden from the road by trees rather than the house, is an open stretch of grass perfectly suited for family games of kickball, tag, soccer, and Frisbee. Pressed back against the woods, a giant pile of bricks bears mute testament to the wall that once surrounded this place, torn down when there was no longer need to keep anything in or deer out.

Alongside the house on the right side is the terrace garden, long overgrown with vines and weeds. The terraces can only be reached by climbing a wall or crossing the stone bridge over a tiny heart-shaped pond that only holds water after heavy spring rains. The chain railing and posts have long since rusted to breaking, and lie under decades of leaves and rocks. The terraces themselves are as straight as ever, hidden under a verdant blanket of plants, stepping down into the woods with a stately disregard to the shape Nature strives to return to them.

On the very last terrace is a well. Of all the old, unsteady, or awe-inspiring parts that make up the whole of this house, the well is the only one to fill me with a sense of mortality and dread. If ever someone died on this farmstead, they did so in or near this well, for a feeling of cold anger hangs over the tumbled stone, chocked with vegetation and filled with the excess of Mother Nature and mankind alike.

The property line lies deep into the woods behind the house, a forest composed almost entirely of pine, spruce, and ferns. The ground slopes steeply down the mountainside to Black Jack Creek, a wide, fast-moving ribbon of water that reaches knee-high on a young boy and still possesses the strength to knock a grown man off his feet.

These woods show the hand of man only with a kind of amused contempt. It's almost as if the trees tolerate the presence of humanity in their midst, viewing us as a kind of private, slightly annoying joke. The muddy ground slips us up at every turn, and trees that fell years ago all over the slope make a straight path anywhere impossible. Come spring, the ground is a riot of greens, with the odd patch of flowers, and winter paints this world in blacks and grays and browns, a somber nod to beginnings and ends, and summer drives the deer from between the trunks and into the yard proper, there to nibble on anything not put away and nudge at strange round rocks that smell of human and roll at the slightest touch.

No other place in the world could ever be exactly like this place, or even nearly. There is a sort of mystery and mysticism about it, a spirit of the dwelling that fondly greets all who enter its walls and silently weeps as each person passes out again. Should the apocalypse come, I can easily imagine this house still standing, defying man and Nature both, determined to hang in as long as the world does.