Gap in the Hedge

We are planning several fall decorating projects to share with you, but before we begin I thought I would share a little story about our home, or "Gap in the Hedge" as it has lately been dubbed....more about that later.

When our family relocated to Atlanta in 1999 I had dreams of finding a lovely farm house on some acreage to fill with antiques and animals. After a rather frustrating search for our dream home we decided to shelve the idea and purchased a smaller house in a nice neighborhood close to the children's schools. While reading the Sunday paper a couple of years later I spotted a stamp sized advertisement in the real estate section that caught my eye, "1860's Era Farm House on Two Acres, " in our zipcode! It was no more than two miles away from where we lived. Later that day we drove over to the house and as a I walked up the drive to get my first view I had the most eerie feeling come over me, deja vu if you will. As I gazed at this lovely "plantation plain" style farm house from the street with its long front porch welcoming all I could hardly contain my excitement. It was so familiar somehow as if I had seen it in a dream...but how? We walked along hand layed brick pathways to the backyard and discovered a boxwood bordered herb garden with its own period summer kitchen that had been plucked from an estate in Alabama. We made an appointment with the realtor to view the interior a couple of days later. As we entered the house it was as if we were transported back in time, we were surrounded by period lighting, hardware, and furnishings from the 18th Century. Then it all came together! The realtor explained that the home owners ran a local antique business that specialized in 18th and 19th Century antiques and reproductions. Furthermore, she pointed to a stack of magazines on the table that had featured the home in several articles, books, and tv programs over the years. I began to flip to the marked pages in a Country Home from 1983. It was as if these images were burned into my mind. I remembered this article and each and every picture was still familiar to me...but it had been published 16 years earlier. Later at home I went through my stash of boxed magazines that I had saved over the years and viola! The very same magazine was there waiting to join the others given to me when, after many sleepless nights and prayers, a couple of months later the keys to the property were handed over to us.
The Lord works in mysterious ways and if we trust Him and are very patient we can all find our Gap in the Hedge.

Deborah Dean Scarbrough Nelson