Hospitality Doesn't Require Perfection

Some of the best memories are made long before everything is finished.

Before this house became our home, it was Bill's.

Nobody needed an address.

We're hosting their birthday party at Bill's.

Ridge Kids Christmas party at Bill's.

New Year's Eve is at Bill's.

The Fourth is at Bill's.

Everybody knew exactly where we meant.

We bought the house from my husband's Uncle Bill in 2019, knowing that eventually we would gut it and make it our own. But eventually wasn't right away.

So we bought cheap secondhand furniture. We filled the rooms with things that worked well enough for the time being. We didn't worry about muddy shoes, spilled drinks, scratched tables or children running in and out of the house.

After all, it was just Bill's.

And maybe that's why it became such an easy place to welcome people.

Before It Was Our Home

For several years, Bill's was essentially our community gathering place.

There was always something to plan, but strangely, there wasn't much stress in planning it.

We could start setting up days before a party if we wanted to. We could clean it up the next day—or the day after that. Nobody was worried about messing up the good furniture because, really, there wasn't any. The fridge stayed cold and kept surprise cakes. The basement could hide secret presents. All the neighborhood "extras" came here to live...mismatched silverware, plastic cups, random dishes. Bill's had room for it all.

And people. Lots of people.

Birthday parties. Christmas parties. Fourth of July celebrations. New Year's Eve. Bonfires. Fall festivals.

One year, our fall festival grew to nearly 400 people. We ran out of hot dogs and friends were dispatched to the store for more. The cars lined the street and when we ran out of room there, with permission, we started filling the church parking lot across the road. 

There were rented water slides in the summer and hayrides in the fall. At Halloween, kids piled onto hay trailers pulled by tractors to go trick-or-treating. Neighbors came down the road in golf carts and side-by-sides.

Kids learned to ride bicycles in the front yard. Then dirt bikes. Eventually some of those same kids learned to drive here—first golf carts, then cars and stick shifts.

There was room for all of it.

Even the Pond Has a Story

At one point, a tornado ripped through the backyard and demolished much of the forest behind the house.

When the trees were gone, we discovered something we hadn't even realized was back there.

A swampy little pond.

Now, reasonable people might have looked at a newly discovered swampy pond and thought about drainage.

Apparently, we were not reasonable people.

The kids swam in it. The dads hung rope swings from the trees. Eventually we cleaned it up, and that swampy little pond became one of the places where some of our favorite memories were made.

That's pretty much how things worked around here then. We used what we had.

The Ridge Kids

There is something special about our little Ridge.

Families here have known one another for generations. Family names repeat, relatives live down the road from one another, and the roots run deeper than I could probably untangle if I tried.

I married into those roots twenty years ago and somewhere along the way, this became my community too.

Our core group became known as the Ridge Moms—five families who, in many ways, collectively raised our children.

We watched each other's kids, fed them, corrected them when they needed it and celebrated them. Half the time I don't think anybody was entirely sure whose kid was where.

My daughter and my best friend's daughter are the oldest of the Ridge kids. They met in kindergarten, and their friendship eventually gave me my best friend too.

Those girls are 18 now. Another Ridge Mom is expecting twins—our second set of Ridge twins. The first arrived during the summer of 2020.

That's a lot of life we've shared.

And although those five families became the core, it was never really an exclusive group. Friends came. Extended family came. Neighbors wandered over. Someone brought somebody else.

Nobody needed an invitation engraved in stone.

You just showed up.

And although those five families became the core, it was never really an exclusive group. Friends came. Extended family came. Neighbors wandered over. Someone brought somebody else.

Nobody needed an invitation engraved in stone.

You just showed up.

When the World Got Strange

Then 2020 came.

While so much of the world suddenly felt unfamiliar, life for our kids remained surprisingly recognizable.

We had open land, farm roads, dirt roads and enormous yards. The kids still had room to run. We still celebrated birthdays. We gathered around fires. They played outside.

For our kids, that year may have been more normal than it had any right to be, and I am grateful for that.

We couldn't control much of what was happening outside our little Ridge.

But there was still Bill's.

The Fourth at Bill's

If you asked me to choose one gathering to go back and experience again, I'd have a hard time deciding between our fall festivals and the Fourth of July.

If you asked me which gathering I'd like to go back and experience again, I'd have a hard time choosing between our fall festivals and the Fourth of July.

Everybody kicked in money for fireworks, and we put on a show big enough for practically the entire Ridge to see.

Kids ran everywhere. There was food and drinks and noise and people coming and going. Summer nights seemed to last forever.

The fall festivals were different. Hayrides, costumes, fire pits - but kids were still everywhere and people still filled the yard.

New Year's Eve was its own thing.

One of the advantages of gathering at Bill's was that nobody had to worry much about bedtime. If the younger kids couldn't make it until midnight, there was a bed somewhere.

Or a couch.

Put them down and let them sleep.

If they needed to stay until morning, they could.

It wasn't complicated.

And Then Life Did What Life Does

Things changed. They always do.

Eventually we started gutting Bill's so we could turn it into the home we had imagined when we bought it.

By then, though, we had created another gathering place across the property—the Hen Den, our outdoor bar near the pond, with a fire pit nearby.

So everybody migrated over there.

And gradually, things changed.

The kids got older. Their circles got bigger. Sports took over evenings and weekends. Bonfires became more appealing than birthday parties. Everybody got busier.

We don't all hang out nearly as often as we once did.

I miss it.

There was something special about those years, although I don't want to rewrite history and pretend everybody always got along.

We didn't.

We showed up, and occasionally we showed out.

There were disagreements, personalities and hurt feelings. That's what happens when people actually know one another instead of simply liking one another's pictures from a distance.

But underneath all of it, we knew who our people were.

Even now, we can go weeks without seeing one another. But if something really happened and one of us needed help, I know exactly who would show up.

Authentic Community - that's worth a lot more to me than everybody always getting along.

Bill's became our home.

We finally moved into this house on Christmas Eve 2024.

After all those years, Bill's became our home.

It looks very different now.

The cheap secondhand furniture is gone. The kitchen looks nothing like it did then. We've put years of work into the house, and there are still things left to finish. There probably always will be.

But when I look at the old pictures, I'm struck by how little any of that seemed to matter.

The walls were dated. The floors needed work. The furniture didn't match. The yard wasn't landscaped. At one point, our great outdoor amenity was quite literally a swampy pond we'd discovered after a tornado.

And people came anyway.

They ate too much and stayed too late. Their kids fell asleep on our couches. They rode bicycles through the yard and swung from ropes over muddy water. They celebrated birthdays and babies and holidays and plenty of ordinary Saturday nights.

Some of the best memories we've ever made here happened before this house looked anything like the home I had pictured in my head.

I think about that now, especially after spending so many years working on this place.

I love our home. I love what we've done to it. I enjoy making rooms beautiful and finding things that make them work better. That's a big part of why Better Within exists.

But I never want to become so concerned with having a beautiful home that I'm afraid to let people live in it.

Bill's taught me better than that.

Hospitality doesn't require matching chairs or a finished deck. It doesn't require a landscaped yard or a spotless kitchen.

Sometimes it's 400 people in the yard and somebody making an emergency hot-dog run.

Sometimes it's a kid asleep on a couch.

Sometimes it's friends sitting around a fire long after everybody should have gone home.

And sometimes it's simply saying,

Come over.

We'll figure out the rest when you get here.