I had traveled Toll Gate Road before but never noticed it. This afternoon I was creeping along and trying to find the Hizey-Visintine Covered Bridge, one of the three remaining covered bridges in Violet Township.

Suddenly, there it was, nestled amongst a forest of black walnuts, oaks and maples along Sycamore Creek.

The bridge is on private property, but I wanted a closer look, so I began walking down the dirt lane leading to it. Just then I heard a car. Dust flew on the other side of the bridge. I didn’t know what to expect when bridge owner Sue Visintine abruptly stopped her car and hopped out. She just happened to pick that moment to check her mailbox.

We struck up a conversation, and I liked her immediately. We chatted about the bridge and her late husband Jim, who moved the Hizey Bridge piece by piece to their property in 1991. Originally located on the nearby Hizey property, the 100-year old bridge had been closed to traffic a dozen years earlier. Jim acquired the bridge from Fairfield County for $1. He had spent his entire life around bridges, as his family owned a bridge and road construction company.

“It was in his blood,” Sue said. The one-man restoration project took about two years to complete. According to Sue, Jim had only one major mishap during the project. While working on the bridge rafters, he fell off a ladder, hammer in hand, and broke his wrist, three ribs and a tibia. After a weekend hospital visit, he was back working on his bridge Monday morning.

Sue invited me to follow her home. Like the bridge, her home was tucked away amongst towering trees, flowers and chirping birds. She led me to her kitchen table, which was covered with family photo albums and memorabilia.

I could tell how much Sue loved Jim and his bridge. She met her husband during the summer of 1964. Sue grew up in Brooklyn: she was working on Wall Street and as a model when a good friend invited her to his wedding in Columbus that year. Sue wore her lacy little black dress to the wedding, where she met Jim Visintine. It was love at first sight for the 21-year-old New Yorker and the handsomely rugged Jim. They were married nine months later.

“I was shell-shocked the first few years of living in rural Ohio,” chuckled Sue as we looked through a family photo album. In 1969 Jim and Sue discovered their beautiful 10-acre paradise in “the country” on Toll Gate Road.

When Jim finished the Hizey-Visintine Covered Bridge project in 1993, Sue made a sign to honor her home town – dubbing the structure the “Brook’n Bridge” – and hung it on the bridge itself. A short time later, the local milkman walked over the bridge and carried his delivery down the long lane to the Visintine home. Sue asked him where his truck was, and he replied he left it on the other side of the “broken bridge.”

Jim and Sue lived happily with their bridge for another 10 years before Jim became sick.

“2003 was a bad year,” she said. In May, Jim discovered he had lung cancer. He died a week later. In her eulogy, Jim’s sister Joyce said her brother’s life “was one of character, loyalty and a love of nature.” Appropriately, Sue and their three children spread Jim’s ashes over the bridge and property he loved.

Sue told me about the other loves in her life that have continued to fill her days since Jim’s death – her children and grandchildren, her home, the rare American chestnut trees she and Jim planted, her horses, raccoons, Chinese food, her prized red geraniums and bird watching from her kitchen “office” window.

As we said farewell in her front yard and agreed to meet for Chinese food at a later date, she looked around and said, “If you find paradise and know what it is when you find it, you’re one lucky person.”

It looks like Sue found it, on the other side of her “broken bridge.”

Maggie Arendt is a contributing writer for Pickerington Magazine.