Here at Achenmead West, spring is starting to finally show itself in recognizable ways: the grass is showing brown and damp from beneath the heavy snow, small birds are flitting about and ravens are hovering above, the driveway is a nearly impassable run of foot-deep mud. Early spring in Vermont: two parts delight, one part slimy brown mud.

Before I get into that, though, I feel I should explain “Achenmead West”. It’s my dad’s name for the 10 acres we live on here in Mackville — an old village within the town of Hardwick. He takes the name from the mythical location of the Densmore family back in Scotland circa 1630 or so. The story goes that a Laird Dinsmoor lived in Achenmead and had two sons. The younger ran off to Northern Ireland and eventually had children who made it to New England. While the hunt for the factual Achenmead — Auchenmade is perhaps a candidate — continues, my dad felt that the legend was enough to lend name to the land here.

While I think that the naming of the land was partially a joke or at least tongue-in-cheek on my dad’s part, it still gives a great deal of credence to this house and the land around it. Here is where my dad grew up with his mother and father and grandfather; here is where I grew up with my mother and father; here is where my son and daughter are growing up with their mother, father, and grandfather. There’s a cycle of history within the last few generations around this place and to give it a name that hearkens back to pre-family times that cycle is strengthened and made clearer. This is my father’s land as it was his father’s land. I continue the cycle as its current steward — I’m in no hurry to own it, just in case any wights are reading this — and the name gives all of that a reason to tell the story.

A farm of your own is better, even if small,
everyone’s someone at home;
though he has two goats and a coarsely roofed house,
that is better than begging.

Cattle die, kinsmen die,
the self must also die;
I know one thing which never dies:
the reputation of each dead man.

The power of the place and of having a place of our own. Stories of family, of names of land, of histories of homes all lend to building the reputation of all of us. Here in Mackville in Hardwick is Achenmead West staking a humble claim to these 10 acres. What stories might be told about it and its residents in the future? What stories do we want told about it? Those future stories are our current lives. We make them as we live.