Taming Needle Eye Mountain

My husband Scott is an Iowa farm boy, raised in a small town (300 people) amid endless cornfields. He’s got two degrees from the University of Iowa, but he’s still a country boy at heart. Describing myself is a little more complicated. My father’s career took us to Denmark when I was a child, but I graduated high school in Tulsa, Ok., and then graduated college from The University of Arkansas. So if Scott is an Iowa farm boy, let’s call me an International Suburban Razorback girl.

Our own careers in health care kept us in, or near, large cities with our last stop in a booming suburb south of Dallas, Tx. Scott is an avid outdoorsman. He’s not really built for the suburbs. He lives to hunt and so early in our relationship (not our first marriages) we agreed that when the kids started college we would move to some place rural where Scott could more easily scratch that itch to hunt.

That time came last year when my youngest, Kate, graduated high school. My son Tripp was attending the University of Arkansas and Kate soon picked U of A too. Since my parents live in eastern Oklahoma, the decision to search for some property in Arkansas seemed like an obvious one. We’d be closer to my parents and closer (but not too close) to the kids at college.

So what did we do??? Well… we bought a mountain. Literally a mountain! OK, it’s not a huge mountain, but it is enough of one that it actually has a name: Needle Eye Mountain.

Not only did we buy Needle Eye Mountain, we got far more than we bargained for. Join me on our journey to tame this mountain. Or maybe it will be me that gets tamed, or perhaps both. Let the adventure begin!