We Bought A Farm: Now What?
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After a year and a half of searching for the perfect piece of property with the perfect home on it, in the perfect location, we pulled the trigger and bought a farm.
There is nothing about me that would make anyone who knows me think this makes any kind of sense. I have fake nails, fake colored hair, and will never say never when it comes to plastic surgery as I like to keep my options open. I like clothes and I prefer small boutiques, not the Carhart section of the local department store. I adore shoes, and I don’t mean the kind that have any type of rubber attached. I don't muck, mow, weed or slop. I don't pick, plant or hoe or camp. I don't particularly like wildlife, and if my own dogs could talk, they'd probably tell you that they barely eek out a couple of pats a day and have to remind me to feed them. Truth be told, they are really the only animals I'm willing to nurture, feed or rescue. Taking long walks in the woods, risks contact with snakes and bugs and also possible bear sitings, which, to me, is not a plus. Lazing the day away on a hammock, is hot, buggy and uncomfortable and I could care less about birds, flowers, or gardens. Barns smell, there is nothing cute about field mice and I don't ride tractors. Why am living on 55 acres of WTH?
The answer is simple: compromise. My husband wanted to live on 5,000 acres in Montana or Wyoming. He would love to cross paths with bears on long walks, swing all day in a hammock, feed chickens, raise sheep, ride horses, plant gardens and muck stalls. He lives for slop. He owns boots of all shapes and styles, as do I, but, believe me, they couldn’t be more different. The scents of various manures evoke the same pleasure for him as entering a spa does for me. The sights and smells, to say nothing of the various roaming wildlife make our dog bark incessantly driving me to the internet to find solutions with sprays, collars, anything I can get my hands on to shut him up. My husband insists that, eventually, he will get used to it, but, in the meantime, every day at dawn, the dog stares out of my kitchen window at the same deer in the field, and begins his chorus.
My husband envisions grandkids here, riding ATV's and cross-country skiing and tooling around the fields on horses and something called a Polaris. I envision multiple trips to the local ER and bankruptcy court. He tells me we need to buy manure spreaders and some dragger thingy that I can’t recall the name of or what it does. We need a real farmer to hay the fields. I don’t care what he says, wearing Wranglers and Carhartt overalls doesn't make you a farmer, although it sure makes him feel like one. I don't want to buy tractors, or Polaris' (whatever they are for) or log splitters or even weed whackers. I want to buy vacations and river cruises, dinners out and Broadway show tickets. But, OMG, the weeds! There's a quarter mile of gravel driveway that is covered in them, and I’m certainly not getting out there for that job. There are trees that need pruning and no one, I repeat NO ONE related to me is getting their hands on a chainsaw. Poison ivy, and bugs, and spiders and ticks, oh my.
But here we are, in NJ and not Montana or Wyoming. Admittedly, it is peaceful, and very pretty and maybe I'll get binoculars and start watching the birds. Perhaps I'll consider a nap on the hammock and stop thinking about all the insects and the lyme disease just waiting to get me. I don't imagine there will be a day that I think the field mice are cute, but the hawks searching for them in the fields are pretty amazing. Perhaps, I'll become an ornithologist. That's a birdwatcher, right? In the meantime, when everyone says, we are just like the couple from “Green Acres,” I’ll say “Indeed.”