Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.
~ Delmore Schwartz, "Calmly We Walk through This April’s Day"
MMIXI? Wait, what?!?
That's right. Two thousand nineteen.
2019.
Where does the time go?
Actually, I know exactly where it went. Building dreams. Big dreams. And making pancakes.
Let's a take a step back. A few steps. In fact, let's use the Wayback Machine.
When my wife and I moved from Eldamar -- sorry, Finland -- to the good ol' US of A, we didn't know how long we'd stay or what we were going to do. When it became clear that a Finn, whose only experience with "big mountains" was a summer trip to Haltitunturi, was completely enchanted (See what I did there?) with
actual big mountains and loved country music more than a girl from that state over to the right of us, that big one...you know? Anyway, when it became clear that she loved it here and, despite an absence of what she called "actual green" (New Mexico's colours lacking a middle initial and simply going by ROY), wanted to stay longer than the expiration of her temporary permanent residence permit, we started to look at a place to live.
Simple stuff at first. We got an apartment.
Some time passed and things happened.
We decided to go big and started looking for land to build a house and have horses.
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| Southfork Ranch. The famous one. From that TV show (which my wife loved...) |
We immediately discovered two things. First, the Southfork Ranch was way out of our price range and in the wrong state. (Again, that one to the right of us...) Second, when you're looking for a country property it necessitates going to the country. Which is not in the city. And we both had city jobs and did city things that made that not so easy. Basically, it was not the right time for us to make the life choices that would legitimize the wearing of Ropers on a daily basis. (OK, we still wore the Ropers.)
So we stayed city mice.
We traded in our city apartment for a city house and even added a kid to mix things up.
Also, we got a horse.
 |
| Cody, our Morgan-Quarter Horse mix. |
Owning and riding a horse lends quite a lot of farm cred, even if you don't live on the Southfork Ranch.
More time passed. More things happened.
We looked around again at options, possibilities, and potential. But the peg was still square and the hole was still round. The myriad complications of a connected life, the things that make life worth living -- family and friends, relationships -- required hard choices.
We traded one city address for another. I don't think either of us regret making those choices and doing what we did. Taking care of family and being responsible adults meant we stayed city mice.
Life changed. Our family grew.
And we got chickens.
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| Backyard chickens |
Again, farm cred is earned by owning animals that are not dogs or cats or fish in a bowl or small fuzzy animals in a cage with a wheel.
We built a wonderful life in a beautiful house. We made what we had
ours. Life was good. But it was still city life. And that longing for what we both wanted was never far from our thoughts.
You didn't realise 20 years could go by so fast, did you? Yeah, neither did we.
Two thousand seventeen and 2018 were filled with changes. There was joy (much joy) and grief (much grief), gain and loss. And when the dust from raining debris settled we found ourselves with a much more round peg.
Again we wanted to go big. But
realistic big. No Southfork Ranch, perhaps, but no city either. Maybe a small farm property? A home on the range? Neither of us was tied by work to living in the city. The skein of threads connecting us to one place was much less complicated. Painful loss also brought a kind of freedom. It felt like it was time.
The excruciating, slow wait of two decades suddenly felt like a mad dash, out of control and dizzying at times because it seemed that if we did not grasp the chance it would somehow slip away and we'd be right back at the beginning.
We looked high and low (literally so, with elevations ranging from 4,000 to 8,000 feet). And we found possibilities. We got excited. We did adult-y things involving banks and real estate agents. We confidently told our horse, Cody, that soon he would live on the same side of the river as we did. We examined and evaluated and rejected. Because this wasn't going to be a temporary thing, this was forever.
After what felt like another 20 years we found property with the things we wanted and needed. Not perfect, but a start to perfect. And we did the hoop jumping and made an offer. It felt like champagne time.
You know where this is going.
Life can be complicated. And disappointing.
But sometimes, often times in fact, what you think you want is not actually what you want. You just feel that way because of circumstance or an incomplete picture or misapprehension or the passage of time. It becomes easy to think that just reaching
the stated words of a goal is what's important and you lose sight of the
why behind you trying to get there in the first place. The point, the purpose, was not actually to
move away from something. That's just what it began to feel like over so long of a time. The actual impetus, the inducement for us, was to
move toward something. Our aim was additive, not subtractive.
Big, deep breath.
We were not at square one. In the game of Shoots and Ladders (Yes, I know it is Chutes and Ladders, but think about it for a moment...) we actually only slid down a few levels. We talked about what we really wanted. What was important. And what we had learned in the latest attempt. Alexander Graham Bell said,
"When one door closes another door opens, but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us." We did spend perhaps a little more time than we should have looking at that closed door. But there were other doors. And we began examining all of them.
Sometimes waiting is a good thing. And sometimes when you are unwilling to wait the Universe steps in and makes you wait. God has a sense of humour, but always with our best interests at heart. Our
joy distraction in finding what was to turn out to be a not-the-right-fit sidetracked us enough to let time march on and circumstances to change. Enough time passed, in fact, to allow a previously locked barn door to quietly unlatch.
Step back in time again, just under a year when we had started our search. A drive to visit friends in the mountains and a quick trip past a property that looked intriguing, at least on paper (on screen). Iron fences and gates and a two storey house and lots of land. And a price tag that made us both choke.
Now step forward in time. That unattainable property? Still had the beautiful fences, still had the gorgeous house, still had all that land. But while we were distracted chasing a phantasmagoria, other circumstances changed. Dramatically so. And another, more serious visit out to the property revealed a beautiful horse barn, a coop, and a pond.
Disappointment turned into relief turned into elation turned into determination.
More adulting. More hoop jumping. Lots of creative thinking. And mucho help from family and friends.
Up a bumpy, private dirt road, on the slopes of the mountains my wife loves so dearly ...
Oh, give me a home where the buffalo roam,
And the deer and the antelope play,
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word
And the skies are not cloudy all day
Where the air is so pure, the zephyrs so free,
The breezes so balmy and light,
That I would not exchange my home on the range
For all of the cities so bright
How often at night when the heavens are bright
With the light from the glittering stars
Have I stood here amazed and asked as I gazed
If their glory exceeds that of ours
Oh, I love these wild prairies where I roam
The curlew I love to hear scream,
And I love the white rocks and the antelope flocks
That graze on the mountain-tops green
~Dr. Brewster M. Higley
Truly a home on the range.
What followed was hard work. There's been lots of it. In a year we've taken the incredible potential of this place and turned it into a reality. We've cleaned and repaired. We've built and torn down. We've shaped and sculpted and created. It's not without frustration. It's not without cost. But the rewards?
We traded in our city shoes for boots.
We kept our promise to Cody.
We got Cody a friend, Strider.
We increased the flock.
We got a hinny.
We got goats.
We got barn cats.
We got our dogs, Otso and AmiBrown, a new friend, Finn.
For every bit of effort we've put into this dream we've gotten so much more in return. We're blessed. We're truly blessed to have this opportunity.
So where does the time go?
Building dreams. Big dreams.
And making pancakes.
