Nathan’s Letter
Latitude Change Agent Nathan Reimer recently sold his first home. Here is a letter he wrote to the future owners.
On the final day of 2015, I fulfilled a long-held dream by purchasing my first house. For years, I had yearned for a home where I could cultivate the land, establish vibrant summer gardens, provide stability for my daughter, and foster a sense of community. This cherished abode—Sweet Home Chateau — represented the culmination of years spent nurturing this vision and diligently taking practical steps to save money, build credit, and qualify for a loan.
When we bought the house, it was entirely unremarkable. It had served as a rental property for many years and lacked personality. The walls were painted in a typical beige and the carpet shared the same tone; the house was small and dark. However, the property's redeeming quality was its spacious lot, though it had succumbed entirely to the overgrowth of Himalayan blackberries and English Ivy. These plants had formed colossal racks that climbed the trunks of the Douglas Firs. The previous owners had resorted to simply mowing a mere 15-foot circumference around the house. This management left nothing but a muddy mote, surrounded by impenetrable walls of blackberries and Ivy. It was only after several months that I stumbled upon the surprise of mature cherry and Hazelnut trees hidden amidst the entangled mass.
I moved into the house with my five-year-old daughter, Aiya, and our dear friends Alexa and Margaret. I bought a 1950s Oasis travel trailer and put it in the backyard for our friend Dee. This setup quickly transformed into our cherished home. We embraced a close-knit community lifestyle, sharing meals, fostering friendships, and enjoying moments of laughter. We warmly welcomed guests from afar and invited our community to partake in the nourishment and care we provided. Aiya thrived in the expansive yard and the company of the shirt-tail aunties we shared our lives with, creating an extraordinary and remarkable environment for all of us.
In the small space nestled between the kitchen and my bedroom, I crafted a loft bed for Aiya, giving her the freedom to paint it in any color of her choosing. I knocked down a wall between the living room and kitchen to open the space up. We fulfilled a five-year-long desire and adopted two kittens, Indigo and Ghost, as a special gift for my daughter.
I went to work in the yard — deep medicine for my soul. I removed tons of blackberries: I cut them down to stubs and burnt their stocks, hand dug the roots, put down 5 layers of heavy cardboard, and covered it all with 18-24 inces of mulch. The blackberries still found their way through and for 2 years afterwards I would walk the property daily in the spring and summer to pull the fresh shoots out. It was through the restoration of neglected land that I embarked on my metaphorical healing journey.
Nathan enjoyed rewilding the land and growing food for his family and community.
The soil was rich and good.
I started bringing in plants - fruit trees, berries, natives, medicinals, and flowers. I planted native grasses and wildflowers where the blackberries were and brought plants back from all the special places I visited in the Pacific Northwest. Our palettes salivated and senses rejoiced over the asian pears, peaches, apples, plumbs, blueberries, strawberries, figs, raspberries, and paw paws, lilies, lilacs, elderberries, lavender, herbs and vegetable gardens every spring. There was an old shed on the property and I put up a fence and raised 5 goats that we harvested for meat. Simply put, we grew loads and loads of food.
Aiya spent hours in the cherry trees creating worlds.
Mariette came from New York to stay with us for a summer.
Justin came and we built teepees in the backyard and slept outside.
In the spring I harvested fir tips from the big trees and berries from the Hawthorne and made teas. Morrells would show up in the wood chips. I terraced the lower garden and built cedar garden beds in the sunniest spot. There was magic and prayer and immense gratitude for this opportunity to be in service here.
Lives and needs changed and I met my wife Danielle in 2017. When Danielle got pregnant she moved in and we decided to remodel. For 7 months, while Danielle was pregnant, we tore the house apart and transformed it.
The kitchen was stripped down to nothing but a stove tethered to the house by a floating gas line. Plywood over saw horses were our counters. We did dishes in the bathtub for 6 months —wires and insulation hanging out of the ceilings.
We vaulted the ceilings, replaced the roof, put in 4 skylights, uncovered and restored the original douglas fir floors, installed wood floors in the newer rooms that had never had them, remodeled the kitchen, and updated a lot of the electrical. I ran thousands of feet of plumbing around the property and put in an irrigation system that could water the extensive gardens that had replaced the scorched earth and blackberries. The room between the kitchen and main bedroom, became a pantry/ laundry room that would double as a nursery for Delphine when she was born that spring.
It was rough and dirty and not how most people want to spend their pregnancy but it was our own wild version of nesting. Through it all Danielle’s belly grew and the house held us even as we took it apart and put it all back together.
Delphine was born in our bedroom May 16, 2018. We were all there together, Danielle, Aiya and I, welcoming her into our family and the world. It was a fast and wild birth in the middle of the night. Danielle's mother and sister came and stayed with us for 6 weeks while Danielle rested and Delphine grew.
We put in another spring garden.
Delphine learned to walk and talk and eat solid food here.
We hung a silk from the big beam between the kitchen and dining room and Aiya and Delphine both spent hours swinging from it. We put a giant trampoline in the backyard.
I built a treehouse in the big cherry tree for Aiya.
We cultivated relationship with our neighbors.
We grew gardens with our neighbors.
We hosted neighborhood potlucks and solstice bonfires.
We shared tools and garden space and kept a look out for each other.
As Delphine and Aiya grew, the house increasingly felt small. We bought a larger house in March of 2020 with the intention of selling this one and then the Covid pandemic happened.
Initially the stock market plummeted and I assumed that the real estate market would too. Instead of putting the house on the market to sell we rented it out for a few years. During this time I built the fence between us and Sandy Blvd, rebuilt the back deck and continued to maintain and care for the gardens and fruit trees.
As a rental it became increasingly clear to me that the home and land were not best served. The marble counter tops and soft wood floors and the gardens deserve someone who can tend them and enjoy them day in and day out and I can't do that anymore.
So, this spring of 2023 I set to work preparing the house to sell.
I built more fences, polished the floors, repainted, replanted, cleaned the siding and tended to a dozen little odds and ends that hadn't gotten finished when we remodeled 5 years ago. During that process Kevin and Erica, who were renting a house across the street asked if they could buy it. I gave them a tour of the yard and gardens and showed them the inside and the work we had done. I gave them everything I knew about what the house, who will turn 100 years old next year, was still needing or would need soon and they said they could handle it.
It's a wild feeling to transfer stewardship —to let up on the line I've been holding, and hand off all of the work that I've done.
It's impossible to pass off everything that I've learned about this place and structure —the names of the plants, the trick with getting the old door knobs to open, where the trilliums will come up in the spring, the shapes that I've slowly been making with the fruit trees for the last 7 years.
Handing it off to someone else is scary. Everything physical that I've done could be undone through neglect or by intention. Someone may add walls where I've deleted them, or cut down a tree that I planted. The blackberries may creep back in from the edges unchecked, the floors may be gouged... I can not control these things anymore. I am surrendering.
What can not be changed is everything else: the sense of pride and accomplishment that I felt in working so hard to buy my first home, the immense depth of love that was shared between friends, Danielle and I finding each other in the world and forging our love in an intentional process of healing, growth, and reimagining of this physical space.
My soul and being is forever changed by the transformative process that I went through working this earth —learning to listen and observe and wait until it was clear what wanted to happen.
Vaulting the ceilings, redoing the kitchen and putting in the skylights brought more light into me, and into my family, not just the house.
My daughter’s play and imagination and her connection to the plants and this place will ripple through her entire life and into future generations. Delphine’s very life began in this home. The root of her existence is anchored here in ways that she will never consciously understand. All of that carries on regardless of what happens here next.
So if you are reading this, whatever your relationship is to this place, please know that we loved this house and this land deeply. We showed up to be the best stewards we could for the time that we were here and we were fed deeply for that.
I hope that however you've come across this letter, that it brings some joy into your world to get a little glimpse into some other chapter of this home’s life.
I hope that you are thriving here.
I hope that the fruit trees we planted are still feeding you.
I hope the flowers we planted are still smiling on you in the spring.
I hope the sunlight still spills in through the skylights and casts that magic glow.
I hope that delightful conversations are still being had over the kitchen bar and that the richness of those old wood floors pleases you as much as it pleased me.
I also hope that this letter can be an invitation - or a reminder if you already know - that tending this place, or tending any place, is a way to tend yourself. It is all metaphor. This land is you. This home is you. The way you treat it, the gifts you give, are all for you.
Pour yourself out so that you can be filled up again.
