Southern Mom Rediscovers Rural Roots on Ohio Homestead Next to the Amish

Handwritten Hills, Melissa Renee's homestead in southern Ohio, is captured at sunset. Courtesy of Melissa Renee

It’s a picture-perfect summer morning amid the rolling green hills of southwest Ohio, and Melissa Renee settles into her chair on the deck of her two-acre homestead.

Drinking a cup of coffee, she takes in the sights and sounds of horses neighing, birds singing, hens cackling, and the hoot from a solitary owl. She waves at an Amish family riding by in their horse-drawn buggy.

The scene represents a new routine for the single mother of two medically complex children who abided what she says was a Godly call to move from the city to this rural retreat. It is here where Ms. Renee has found peace after a story marked by multiple challenging chapters. It is here where she has returned to her simple roots in the South, where gardening and living off the land are ways of life.

There was a time when many Americans lived on farms and raised their own food. Today, though, most people are several generations removed from commonly knowing how to process foods, tap a maple tree, and plant tomatoes. Ms. Renee is no exception.

Melissa Renee started homeschooling her daughter 20 years ago and continues the tradition with her youngest sons. Courtesy of Melissa Renee

Her parents were raised in Louisiana, and she grew up in neighboring Mississippi. In those states, gardening and canning food are commonplace.

“We didn’t call it homesteading because it was just how we lived. My dad was raised in the country and was let out of school at lunch to go pick cotton,” Ms. Renee explained.

Ms. Renee’s parents had a garden, where she picked cucumbers, snapped beans and peas, and helped her mom can the food.

As Ms. Renee grew older in childhood, the simple country lifestyle was replaced by school activities, and her father worked multiple jobs before starting his own business. Her life shifted away from simple country values.

“I tell people I was kind of raised half country, half city. My Wi-Fi here is Country Mouse, City Mouse. Because I feel like that’s kind of who I am,” she said. “We became the city dwellers who ordered everything and made sure that everything was delivered.”

Ms. Renee married in her early 20s and had children. Then life took an unexpected turn with a divorce.

Ms. Renee’s middle son, who is now 13, later became sick with a rare disorder. They traveled to children’s hospitals around the country seeking an accurate diagnosis and treatment. Not long after, her youngest son, who is now 7, was diagnosed with autism. She found herself a single mother of four children, including two with medically complex issues.

“I reached a point where I asked, ‘How do I navigate this?’” she said.

Melissa Renee's homeschools her two youngest sons, and gardening is part of the education process. Courtesy of Melissa Renee

Ms. Renee had homeschooled her daughter since she was 5. She did the same with her three sons.

“A great thing about homeschooling is you can adjust the way that you homeschool and the style that you homeschool to go with wherever life is at the time and whatever your children’s needs are at that moment,” Ms. Renee said. “During times when life has been chaotic and uncertain, homeschooling has been the constant that has given focus and a purpose.

“I now had a child with autism and a child with a rare disorder, which meant we homeschooled in a lot of doctors’ offices and we homeschooled at therapy. School is anywhere you want it to be when you homeschool,” she said.

Ms. Renee’s middle son finally received an accurate diagnosis and treatment plan at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, which is the world headquarters for his disorder. She learned there was a clinical trial there, and doctors said he would get significantly better.

“I packed up everything on a whim and a prayer without knowing where I was going to live or if I was going to have a job up here,” Ms. Renee explained. “I just left Mississippi and everything that I knew, and it was scary.”

Ohio

The weekend before moving, Ms. Renee took a flight to Cincinnati to find a home, and what she calls a divine encounter at the rental car area eased her fears.

“I was frightened. I didn’t know anything about Ohio. I thought Ohio was a bunch of cornfields,” she said with a laugh. “I didn’t know what I was getting into other than God was sending me here and the reason was to save my son. When your child’s sick, you do whatever you need to do to make him better.”

The man at the rental car counter, Ms. Renee recalled, told her that she looked like she needed a map.

“I was in tears, and I had not said two words to this man aside from handing him my driver’s license. He told me that I am about to move here, and I didn’t know anything about the area. He took a marker and crossed out areas he felt I shouldn’t live as a single mom, and showed me places that were more appropriate.”

Ms. Renee was given a car that she had no clue how to start.

“I sat there feeling so defeated because I knew that if I couldn’t even figure out how to start the car, how am I going to do everything that was needed,” she said.

“He somehow knew why I was there. He knew that God had sent me for my son’s medical issues. He prayed about my son’s issues. He knew that I was looking for a house, he prayed that I would find the right house and that God would continue to open the doors for me, and he invited me to his church,” Ms. Renee added. “He was placed there at the right moment, and I knew that I was going to find a house and that life in this new state was going to work out.”

Ms. Renee found a home in a neighborhood with a large fenced-in backyard and a deck. The first six months were lonely as she didn’t know anyone, and there were multiple visits to the hospital for her son’s treatment. They encountered a hurdle when the Food and Drug Administration recalled the drug being used in her son’s clinical trial. That required her to remain in southwest Ohio long term because Cincinnati Children’s was the only place that could provide his necessary care.

Once again, the constant was homeschooling, and she returned to the roots of gardening and food preservation.

She had the space to plant, but she didn’t know what grew in the harsher northern climate. She sought recipes from her mother and found her late grandmother’s cookbooks, which included handwritten food preservation recipes.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic arrived.

“We started growing more and buying less from stores during COVID. It was an uneasy time because we didn’t really know how long that was going to last,” she explained. “Since we homeschooled, it wasn’t a difficult transition, and we weren’t stressed.”

Around that time, Ms. Renee counseled new homeschool parents who were suddenly thrust into the role because of pandemic shutdowns.

In a Facebook community of homeschool moms, 700 new members joined, most of whom were beginners.

Melissa Renee documents her homesteading and homeschooling journey at Handwritten Hills through social media platforms. Courtesy of Melissa Renee

Ms. Renee has a background in health and wellness along with advocacy for health-related issues. During the pandemic, new homeschool parents approached her for advice as a mother on how to adjust to the new role.

“Homeschooling is completely different than traditional school at home, which is what school was like for parents whose kids went to a traditional school and suddenly had to attend school remotely,” she said.

“You learn to adapt. You learn what works for your children. The beauty of homeschooling is the freedom to specialize the instruction that is state-based and federally recommended, but you have the ability to teach in a way that your children best respond.

“Maybe instead of teaching math in a workbook, you take part of a day, go to the grocery store, and you say the recipe needs 32 marshmallows and there’s 12 in this package, how many bags of marshmallows do I buy? Every place and every moment is a teaching opportunity,” Ms. Renee said.

For Ms. Renee and her children, COVID marked a time when they returned to their Southern roots.

“We baked bread, we canned, and we preserved. I had a basement with a pantry that had rows of shelves. We had food and medicinal herbs.”

Ms. Renee then felt another Godly calling—this time to leave the city and find a property in a rural area.

Rural Life

The new path led to a 100-year-old Amish home that needed more renovation work than originally anticipated. Yet the house sits on two acres amid rolling hills dotted with Amish farmhouses occupied by Amish families.

“It was intimidating for me because I felt comfortable as an urban homesteader. What I didn’t grow, I had delivered by a produce company that bought Amish fruits and vegetables. Now, I have Amish produce next door.”

The home needed so many repairs initially that Ms. Renee and her two youngest sons lived in temporary housing for three months. During visits to the home under renovation, and once they moved in, Ms. Renee got to know her Amish neighbors.

“I knew that our faith was similar, even though the way that we lived out our faith might be different. I knew having them as neighbors would be helpful because of their knowledge, and the fact that I was out of my comfort zone.”

In the new chapter, Ms. Renee has combined homeschooling and homesteading.

“In many ways, homesteading and homeschooling are similar,” she said. “At an early age, homeschooled children are encouraged to explore what they like, and they discover gifts and talents that they develop because they have the freedom to do that.

“You can put a seed in the ground, but unless there is rich and fertile soil, it won’t grow. You have to create good soil and give it sunlight and proper care,” Ms. Renee said. “You prepare for storms and droughts, and there are times when you don’t have as big of a harvest as you thought.

“In homeschooling, the child is that seed. The child will experience storms and drought, and some seasons will be better than other seasons. That is why a strong root system is important.”

Handwritten Hills, Melissa Renee's homestead, is located next to Amish farms in southern Ohio. Courtesy of Melissa Renee

Just as she shared her homeschooling story on social media during the pandemic, Ms. Renee decided to name her homestead Handwritten Hills and create an online forum where she shared her homesteading and homeschooling story in the new chapter.

She brainstormed for days trying to find the right name.

“It dawned on me that as a single mom who had been teaching her children to write and to read, that handwriting itself is unique. Everyone’s handwriting is unique to them,” she said. “All the curveballs that life has thrown me are part of my handwritten journey that is unique to me.”

Handwritten Hills started as a personal ministry and has evolved into what Ms. Renee calls a media outreach platform to inspire people who homeschool and homestead or want to do one or both.

She documents her experience on Facebook, Instagram, and other social media sites. Five generations of her family have embraced sustainable living, and she learned those skills as a child, but the transition to homesteading as an adult is an adjustment that she hopes others can learn from.

In June, Ms. Renee attended the Food Independence Summit, which is one of the country’s largest sustainable living events where experts provide insight and hands-on demonstrations about organic farming and food preservation.

The summit is situated in a region in northeast Ohio that includes the second largest community of Amish in the world, behind Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Most of the settlement is located around Holmes County, which has the highest concentration of Amish in any U.S. county.

Ms. Renee learned about the event from her Amish neighbors, who received a bulk order from Berlin Seeds, one of the summit’s co-founders, and brought over the event brochure.

“My Amish neighbors got a bulk order from Berlin Seeds and brought over a brochure,” she said about how she learned about the Summit. “I had been laughing and joking with them that, as a new homesteader, I had no idea what I was doing with adding a dairy cow and trying to figure out how to add chickens to go along with a garden.

The Food Independence Summit “not only taught me a few things I didn’t know, but more importantly, it renewed my spirit because of the sense of community among people with a like-minded purpose of providing for their families from the land,” she said.

As a single mom with two medically complex children, Melissa Renee moved to the country and is renovating a 100-year-old Amish house into a modern house. Courtesy of Melissa Renee

At long last, Ms. Renee said, she feels a sense of serenity, whether she sits on her deck drinking coffee in the morning or stands outside before bed and stares at the vividly bright starlit sky.

“When you go through hard trials, you pray that you will reach a point where you have peace. I felt it right away, even though I’m living in a house where repairs continue,” she said. “This farmhouse, I say it’s the Amish house that became our house, our dream, and our vision.

“It’s the place where I found peace and a true purpose,” Ms. Renee added. “When you slow down and look all around you, you find beauty and peace in something as routine as just coming home.”