We moved to Florida in August of 2006. This house was, by far, the best of the twelve we looked at during our one-and-a-half-day, mad-dash, house-hunting excursion. The outside of it, as you can see, does nothing to inspire a person. But the first thing I thought when I stepped out of the car and walked up the driveway was, “Wow! This feels like being at Itasca State Park!” Itasca State Park, in northern Minnesota, is where the Mississippi River has its headwaters. When I was a kid, we used to go there in the summertime to have picnics, swim at the Lake Itasca beach, and wade across the Mississippi. (For those of you who aren’t native Minnesotans, know that the Mighty Miss isn’t so mighty way up north!) What makes this place of ours so like Itasca is the fact that there are so many tall pine trees. Pines do something to the air, too—it seems cleaner, somehow, and easier to breathe.
I have always wanted to have a piece of property with a name. You know, like those old homeplaces people once had—and still do have, for I see this idea of naming one’s property is making a comeback. Perhaps we have the Internet to thank for that!
But what to name such a place as this? It’s not a cool old farmhouse, or a quaint Victorian, or even something neat and modern. I had originally thought to call it Something-or-Other Cottage, because it has cottage-style windows (sort of). But look at it! It’s not a cottage, and that’s the truth. Technically, it’s considered a ranch-style house. A 1983 ranch-style house. But we don’t have cattle or horses or any livestock whatsoever (our homeowners’ association won’t even allow chickens!), so we could hardly call it Something-or-Other Ranch.
Then one day in fall of ‘07, my son Urban and I were walking home from his bus stop, and when we reached the end of our driveway, we were talking to each other in rather loud voices—perhaps I was ordering him to fetch the mail while I brought the trash can back up to the house. We noticed something odd: our voices seemed to be echoing. Not those big, vibrating echoes one hears when hollering into a canyon, but short, fast echoes. I don’t know how else to describe it.
We stood there at the end of the drive, shouting up to the house and listening for that little bitty, quick echo to bounce back at us. After a few days of doing this every afternoon after school, I said to Urban, “Maybe we should call our place ‘Echowood.’” He liked it, and here we are!
When I started this blog, my husband Brian didn’t know that the kids and I call our homeplace Echowood. Maybe when he found out, he thought it was stupid. Or maybe not (he didn’t say). It’s too late now, though—well, at least as far as this blog is concerned!
