We Bought The Farm

We are going through all of the paperwork and certification right now. The Closing is May 30th.
On Friday, the mover rep will come and look at all of our stuff and give us an estimate and set a date for the packing and moving - the third weekend in May, perhaps. I am waiting for Tammy to come over and sign the lease agreement, renting this house until it sells - by December, hopefully. We have gotten together the printouts that they require, otherwise. They are ready to fax - 20 pages or so.

This is the house. Built in 1910 and used as a farmhouse and dairy, it has a large basement for the cooling of the milk. There are 60 acres attached to it; long rising and falling hills, mostly grassland, but with a large garden. Three wells and a fourth alloted to the property. Two open pole barns, and a corral, a ramshackle garage and a tack building, are the structures. The rest of the property is wild yet fully fenced; open range with many deer prints upon it.

The house itself is a treasure trove of discoveries. Wood floors covered by carpeting. Chair rails and wood trim that would make a latter-day developer cry - and take out his calculator. Real Leaded stained glass windows, in the bay window and the street-facing bedrooms upstairs. Surprising rooms and cubbies and a grand little staircase for upstairs access. Odds and ends of furniture and other things discarded through the years. A bathroom that extends almost the full length of the house. Cow and bull and deer heads thrown about. PVC and wood trim cast into buckets. An odd back porch/mud room that juts out like a growth. A small box on the outside stuffed with wood for the woodburning stove. Barbed wire and other fencing rolls scattered here and there; once-white board fencing faces the road. Trees that would make a land planner's hands itch for a backhoe. A small shallow cement pond out front, cracked and full of rocks of all sizes. Lots to do, but lots of opportunity to do it. And lots of things to do it with.

Should we tear down the garage and use it to build the chicken coop? Maybe not; it is cedar-shaked and distinctive. Strip back the shakes and put down new tar paper underneath, and we may have a treasure here. The tack room will be His workshop; the basement mine. Can we build the coop inside the garden fence, and double-fence it to make the chicken moat around it to keep away the bugs? How many Dexter cows will the land support? Last week the whole road to the town, east and west, was snowed in - and the next day it was 70 degrees. Wild and woolly, an untamed independent and shrinking town of 125. A restaurant/bar/grill, a bank, a propane gas supplier, a feed store, are about all of the businesses - unless you count the "Ford Motor Company" that hasn't seen any new Fords recently other than the owner's pickup.

What gets you is the silence. No road traffic. No trains. No neighbors jowl-to-jowl, shrieking and banging and boom-boxing their way through life. Every once in a while you'll hear a child laugh, or the kids at the area high school across the street will get out - but still no drag-racing, no
loud music, no invasion of the peace. The robin wanted to know what I was doing in his corral. He posed for several pictures, cocking his head this way and that, then followed me around the yard - quietly, observantly. No Wal Mart within 150 miles.

I'm going to love it here.