The historic home, one on a row of old, venerable houses on Main Street, appears quaint to a passersby.
Main Street doubles as a state highway, so there is no lack of admirers. Yet look a little closer, maybe take a stroll in front of the house or step inside, and the rustic charm soon dissipates. The front door, the siding, the white picket fence, are all covered in soot from the passing vehicles. That same traffic is audible, at all hours of the day and night, from every bedroom in the house. It's an apt metaphor, the owner of the house told me, for what it's like to live in a scenic country town—attractive at first glance, but dirty and noisome when more carefully examined.
The owner, who recently contacted me to tell his story, moved to this rural town several years ago to take one of a limited number of white-collar jobs there. It wasn't just the rural setting—with its lower housing prices and less expensive cost of living—that attracted a young married man with several children and no little amount of debt. As devout, well-read Christians, he and his wife yearned for the kind of small, tight-knit community described in Rod Dreher's The Benedict Option. So the two purchased that historic home and he began his career in earnest.
Yet all has not been well in this country community. “I'm not sure whether the incomplete happiness of this life is enough to explain the dissatisfaction I feel or whether the modern way of living really does make it all that much more unbearable,” he writes. These are strange words to read from a man who would seem to be fairly resilient. He grew up in a military family and previously worked in the fishing and agricultural industries.
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