Buying the Farm

The photograph on my computer’s desktop changes every few months. No, it’s not a cute picture of my kids standing next to each other on the sledding hill or our dog sitting on the couch with his ears perked up. It’s not even a picture from our trip to the Oregon Coast last summer. Nope. It’s a picture of my farm.

You have a farm? You might ask me. No silly, I don’t HAVE farm. I WANT a farm.

Yes, this is a little obsession of mine; dreaming about the farm that I’ll someday live on. Friends of mine who have actually lived on farms like to remind me that it is A LOT of hard work, to which I like to reply: “but I have my husband to do all that”. Poor Bryan, even in my imagination he gets stuck with all the grunt work.

It’s not really that I want a working farm. I don’t care so much about growing things. (This is a good thing coming from someone who ends up with a three zucchinis, one and a half tomatoes and a garden full of weeds by the end of the planting season.)

The thing that I dream of is the land. I want rolling hills and a stream that feeds into a little pond. I want to look out over pastures at a distant tree line. I want a long driveway lined with trees that I can walk down in the summer. And of course I want the animals: chickens and goats and horses and maybe even a pig.

Maybe my poor imagination has been filled with too many lovely images from James Taylor songs and books like “Gone with the Wind”, or maybe growing up down a little wooded lane by the river infused me with the desire to live surrounded by that kind of beauty.

I grew up playing in the stream by our house, dragging rocks through the cold water to build dams. I grew up clearing patches in the scrub oak that I turned into little rooms to live in. I dug holes and picked wild flowers and searched for treasure among the rocks.

The funny thing is, I really do love living in a neighborhood. Growing up I missed out on having friends next door, on sidewalks and being able to walk to school. I love that my kids have these things. But we also have a little gully at the end of the street where we like to take the kids sledding during the winter and whenever I go down there I get the itch for my farm. I want my own land, my own sledding hill, my own field of wild grass and milkweed.

So sometimes I waste hours looking at Land and Farm for the perfect place. I save properties in my favorites bar and go to visit them now and again.

Maybe someday I’ll buy the farm (ha ha won’t we all). But for now I’ll just keep dreaming.