I had been watching the old house tip over for about three months now. It was one of the eighteenth-century farmhouses in our region of Virginia, a carryover from the Germans who made their way to Octonia County from Pennsylvania and stopped here before settling in more numbers over in the Shenandoah Valley.
The building was a thing of beauty – a stone foundation, graying old timbers, solid, hand-hewn doors, and a porch that opened with a view to the Blue Ridge. But like many other big houses in the area, it was just too much upkeep for too little return. A couple houses of similar size nearby had been completely remodeled and one had become an Airbnb but, by and large, the families around here wanted more space or less draftiness. So houses like this one, they were becoming scarce as the
