On a day in June I moved nine miles over a wagon road and two miles up a creek bed to a two-story log house in an area of the Cumberlands known in pioneer days as the Big Brush. Erected in 1837 by immigrants from the Black Forest of Germany, it is the birthplace of the noted dulcimer maker, Jethro Amburgey, whose instruments nowadays are sought by collectors. A mile above once lived Edward Thomas whose dulcimers are rarer yet. The dwelling faces east, fair to the sun, bounded on one side by Dead Mare Branch and on the other by Wolfpen Creek, facing toward Little Carr.
Wooded mountains rise before and aft.
Mine was to be a domain of thirty-one acres, most of it standing on end, once a farm, now long lain fallow. I had found a home. A pair of black and white warblers teetered along the banks of Dead Mare and minnows riffled the glassy pools. Partridges called in the water meadow and from a cove sounded an ocasional e-olee of a woodthrush. A rabbit flashed a tail in the wild flax.