ON THE BLOCK

You Can Go Home Again


Seventy-nine percent of the people born in Kentucky die here. That seems like a huge percentage considering that we aren't exactly in the middle of nowhere. Brian Taylor hypothesized that a small piece of collapsed star under the courthouse pulls wanderers home.

Personally, I hope it's true as lately all my siblings and friends seem to have moved to New York City. I feel sometimes abandoned and occasionally quite un-hip.

I actually had talked myself and David, my husband, into moving to Manhattan at one point last year. It seemed like the perfect time. Lucy was a little over a year old and I imagined us back-packing her around the city dressed in hand-knit woolen sweaters and baby combat boots. We could have a cool multi-lingual nanny and life would just generally look like Sesame Street.

As we honed the plans for this great move we visited (as the locals LOVE to call it) the City. We were to stay at David's sister's apartment on a quiet street in Soho but missed our stop on the subway and arrived instead on Canal Street, which in mid-July is a hot, smelly nightmare of cheap watches and Prada knock-offs.

That was at two o'clock in the afternoon. By five o'clock we had made it all the way to Mid-Town but hadn't gotten over the shock of Canal Street, and we were drunk because the only things we could think to do were shop (We would have to lug anything we bought, and as Dave said, he did not come to New York City to be a Sherpa.), go to a museum (too touristy, after all, we were thinking about moving there), and sample pubs (the obvious winner) - and we had decided that living in New York would be way too much work. As we considered how we would do things like buy groceries, we realized that along with all of the other obvious benefits of living in Lexington, it is really nice to be able to buy something without worrying about how to get home and where it will fit once you get it there.

I figure if the lure of life in Lexington pulled me back in three hours, surely I can expect my friends and family to come home at some point.

Carro Ford came home. She grew up in Louisville, but Carro had been living in various places all over the country when the opportunity arose for her to come to Lexington (don't you know Louisvillians just hate it that our collapsed star has such power over them). She jumped at the chance. This freelance writer could live anywhere in the country and she chose to live here.

Interestingly she bought a house that looks as though it should be in Colorado rather than Southpoint. The well-designed wood and stone three-story house sits at the front of a sloping tree-filled half-acre lot. Four decks look out through the treetops to a pond on the farm behind the house. Carro says that cows frequently come up to the fence, presumably to gaze wistfully at the perennial beds that line the yard. A hammock hangs close enough to the stream that runs through the back corner to be lulled to sleep by its burbling. For further burbling Carro installed a square fishpond on the ground level. "To create some drama" she fed the fish for me from two stories up.

The best part of this house is the landscaping and the lot. The architect who built the house knew this and designed the house to take advantage of the outside views. Windows throughout the house create fascinating vistas of the Bluegrass, which is why I assume Carro chose this house when she came home to Lexington.

Stats:

228 Pindell Court

$188,000

2000 square feet

4 bedrooms; 3 and a half baths

contact: Carro Ford 245-4638

If you have a unique or interesting house for sale contact Lissa Sims at lsims@aceweekly.com.


 

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