Finding Home

By Margot Fosnes | Scenes From Homer Worsham Rd

I’m not native to this place. I like to tell people who have lived here all their lives that I chose this place…and that’s a compliment.

There are a lot of places my husband and I could have ended up. He’s from Colorado, I’m from Florida. We met in Nashville, spent three years in St. Pete, came back to Tennessee to start his family medical practice in the small town of Centerville. After 6 years there, various circumstances led us to the decision that we needed a fresh start.

So we started to explore. Where would we raise our two young sons, start a new solo practice and find a sense of community that would nurture our little family?

Robertson County checked all the boxes. At first we settled in town in Springfield. A lovely neighborhood of new homes and lots of families. But we soon fell in love with a couple of quarter horses and decided to look for a home with room for horses and two boys to play hoops, football and baseball.

We thought we found the perfect place but another contract got in before us. Out of the blue one day when I was visiting family in Florida the realtor called my husband and said “I’ve found the reason the other house fell through.” He went to look and called me to say I think we’re buying a farmhouse.

It was love at first sight when I turned down Homer Worsham Road and saw the two story, white frame house surrounded by magnificent old oaks and maples. Oak Field, built in 1862, had had its ups and downs but was lovingly renovated and remodeled by its most recent owner.

There’s always something going wrong with a 150 year-old house and for most of the 23 years we’ve been here internet service was non-existent, but we’ve left our mark on this grand old thing and we’ve made it a home.

And the peace that one feels at the end of the day driving up to this place is matchless. There are dark nights filled with stars and sunsets that take our breath away. There are geese and herons, turkeys and deer, raccoons and possums and thousands of fireflies rising on spring nights in the hay field. The path here may not have been a straight one, but it was surely meant to be.