Stumbling Into Paradise

When I was a teenager, I remember very clearly telling myself (and anyone unfortunate enough to be within earshot) that I would NEVER live ANYWHERE but a large, glamorous metropolis. Preferably Paris, although I was willing to settle for San Francisco. This was clearly due to my reading way too many Judith Krantz novels, and also due to my being spectacularly self-UN-aware. The truth is, I was a horse-crazy kid who loved animals. All of them. But horse-crazy geeks were not considered cool, especially in the 80's, when we didn't even have the Internet; they were considered bumpkins and hayseeds, and I wanted to be cool. High-profile lawyers were cool. Department store buyers and fashion designers and CIA agents were cool. Women who married millionaires and drove sports cars and vacationed on yachts were cool.

Alas, I was cut out to be none of those things. Lawyering requires a kind of passion for the law, and competition, and well-tailored suits, that I sorely lack. Department store buyers and fashion designers aren't allowed to wear last season's favorite clearance boots or have bad hair days or adult acne. CIA agents have to be able to blend in anywhere, have lightning reflexes, and lie professionally, or at least convincingly, and I have all the reflexes of a tree sloth and am a terrible liar. My ears get red, and my eyes get all squinty and darty. Finally, I was simply not ever going to marry a millionaire, mainly because I seemed to fall in love with the biggest loser in any given crowd (*before I met my husband, who is not in any way a loser), and also because I didn't really have the work ethic to be a trophy wife. There's just way too much personal grooming required.

Twelve years ago, my husband (we'll call him Mr. Rogers) bought us a beautiful house in Las Vegas. It had a grand kitchen, and a pool, and a huge yard, and many, many bathrooms. We got engaged. We got married. We had a baby boy (who shall be known here as Badger, and who is now 6 years old). We made memories there, in that house. All the while, we dreamed of something different. Through a lot of trial and error, I gradually re-discovered that at the core of me, I was still a horse-crazy girl who wanted to live in the country. The city, even the suburbs, was not the place for me; I yearned for space and quiet, and old things - weathered barns, creaky wooden floors, dusty attics, houses with generations of lives imprinted within their walls - held far more appeal to me than the trendsetting, the modern, and the new. I would be lost in coolly elegant, monochromatic rooms, spotlit with a single splash of color; persimmon, perhaps...or is persimmon so fifteen seconds ago? It's so hard to keep up. I'm terrified of shiny, edgy furnishings that demand their own showcase lighting and daily dusting.

Then, the bottom fell out of the economy, and Las Vegas, which had previously enjoyed record growth, became a ghost town. I won't bore you with the details of every crappy thing that happened, but there was first worry, which gradually became despair, and finally, terror. So we said goodbye to the beautiful house and we literally stumbled into Pennsylvania, through some lucky combination of fate and providence, I suppose. My husband moved three months before we joined him, which was the last, most difficult thing to endure. Separated by a continent, we tried to arrange our new lives. We looked at stunning houses with outrageous rents, we looked at okay houses with cheap rents but no bathtubs (don't ask), we looked at houses with commutes as long as 40 miles from my husband's new employer. Nothing grabbed me and screamed "this is it", but our credit was shot and we had to live somewhere, so we were finally "accepted" by the owners of a well-maintained property with highway robbery rent and move-in fees. We considered our options, of which there were next to none, and glumly resigned ourselves to living in a home owned by two of the most picky landlords on earth.  Seriously, one of their stipulations was that the carpet had to be professionally cleaned every other month. I could sense unannounced inspections and a lot of passive-aggressive remarks about my son's grubby little hand prints in my future.

Then, a few days before we were to sign the lease, my husband sent me some pictures of another place. The house was on a farm. A real farm, not some HOA with a two-hen limit.

"It's small," he warned me, "It needs work, it's an old house." But it was on 80 acres. There were goats, cows, chickens, and geese. There was a big red barn. The landlord didn't want a DNA sample, a kidney or $10K to move in, pets were welcome, rent was half of what the Carpet Overlords wanted, it was close to Mr. Rogers' job...and there was no carpet.

"I want it," I told him, "That's the one."

"Should I give the guy like $200 and we'll think about it -" my husband mused, but I cut him off.

"No! This is it. I want it. Give him whatever he wants up front and get the keys." I was all but shouting, sure that ten other people were waiting to snare my dream farm away from us.

It was pure gut instinct that led me to latch on to this neglected beauty, abused by her former tenants, but now well-loved by us, and I'm so glad I listened to my guts about something other than how delicious bacon is. The house was built in 1812. The wide plank floors creak most satisfyingly, the attic is full of gentle ghosts, welcoming rather than seeking to frighten, and the walls whisper of a time when they watched history drive by here in carriages. The woods spread out behind the corn fields, hiding deer, foxes, Red Tails, and dappled clearings where magic seems possible. Sometimes the wood stove furnace doesn't work right, sometimes the power kicks off, sometimes I find spiders where I do not want them...but these are trivial nuisances. A year later, we own a llama and 10 chickens of our own, and we've found a family in our landlord, Mr. A, and his lovely wife, Mrs. G. I've found joy in learning how farming works, or ought to work, at least, and how to do more and make more myself, rather than relying on a supermarket or store for everything. I hope you'll travel along with me here on Sin City Farm Girl, as I talk llamas, chickens, gardening, local foods, canning, quilting, and whatever else I happen to stumble over. Welcome!