It was a cold fall day when I brought my children to live in West Virginia. The farmhouse was one hundred years old, there was already snow on the ground, and the heat was sparse—as was the insulation. The floors weren’t even, either. My then-twelve-year-old son (14) walked in the door and said, “You’ve brought us to this slanted little house to die.”

I was at a turning point in my life, a crossroads where for the first time I could choose where I would live, not simply be carried along by circumstance.

People keep walking when a woman is being attacked in broad daylight on a public street in some parts of the United States, but people will drop everything to help a kitten here.

But for all they don’t have, what they do have is each other, along with that deeply-held pride in community and family and plain living that has been largely lost in the contemporary world.

We didn’t come to this slanted little house to die. We came here to live.