The Craigslist farm of my dreams

I must tell you about the farm and how it came to be.

It's special.

A bit of background. I have always wanted to live on a farm. Dreamed of it and ached for it since I was old enough to know what one was. I have no idea why. I just wanted a small place where I could have a few horses and be happy. How hard is that? Is that too much to ask?

So I thought to myself, "Self.... what we will do is go to college and get a degree and get a good paying job and get a farm!" Great plan, eh?

So I went to college and majored in one of the most lucrative fields I could interest myself in (Computer Science) and graduated and got a good job. But then we moved to a wildlife management area which my husband had the job of managing, and suddenly the actually BUYING of a farm didn't seem important. We had a free house, free utilities, free tractors and all sorts of equipment and doodads, free truck, free phone, even free work clothing... and about 350 acres to enjoy! So buying a place was not a high priority. I was happy as a little clam on that wildlife management area with my then small children and a few horses. We bought a young mare we named "Tessa". A 3-yr old. My daughter was 4 and my sons were 2 at the time and the children and the mare all grew up together along with an older, WELL-loved Shetland pony named "Big Joe". Those kids went everywhere on that horse and pony. Those animals were priceless. Tessa neckreined beautifully.. was incredibly easy to steer and control for them and despite her size, she was gentle as a lamb with them and carried them everywhere on those 350 acres that they wished to go. Through woods, across creeks, perfectly obedient and under relaxed control for them at a walk, trot or lope. They had a blast with her. We trained her to pull an antique buckboard wagon and were seen all over the county plodding along the country roads, sometimes with one of Tessa's beautiful golden palomino colts tied to the back of the wagon. Good times.

A decade slipped by. A divorce came and went and life on the wildlife area was no more, and the horses were sold. I lost track of them but thought of them more often than I can count.

Another decade or so went by. The children were now grown and out on their own starting their own lives. I remarried and bought a little house in a subdivision. A little cape cod that I dearly loved with a beautiful big backyard.. but it wasn't a farm and there was no horse there. So we would make a relaxing hobby of checking real estate listings and classified ads regularly to see what property was for sale in hopes of finding a miracle farm that we could afford, knowing that would never happen. It became an almost-weekly event to head out into the countryside on a relaxing Sunday with map in hand and check out the farms in our price range and see what they looked like. Anything that we liked was about $150,000 more than we could ever afford and anything we could afford fell into one of two categories: it was either decent land with a gosh-aweful DUMP of a house on it.. or a decent little house sitting on a patch of rocks, or on a chunk of land straight up a mountainside and covered with trees. Never failed. But we kept looking mostly because it was fun to look and because it was fun to dream. We really knew we would never find anything we liked because every year that passed by, real estate became more expensive and larger tracts of land that were anywhere within a reasonable range of the city were scarcer and scarcer. But it was something to do, so we kept it up.

One day I found an ad on Craigslist. I love Craigslist. It's free. Every city has one online. Anyone can easily post to it. It's organized into handy categories. I just love it. The ad was for 12 acres and a small farm house. Said it was great for horses. New high-tensile electric horse fencing, cross-fenced, heated water troughs, new 3-stall horse barn with tack room, hay field, creek. And it was barely within our price range. But there were no pictures. Experience had taught me this was a dump. HAD to be a dump. But what the heck, I emailed.

The man emailed back with some photos. They were absolutely beautiful. I was stunned. But I had been stunned before and realized the "punch line" must be in the house, because there were NO photos of the interior of the house. I asked when we might come see the property since it was only about 10-15 minutes from our subdivision. The owner, with something quite less than enthusiasm, said perhaps Friday (this was on Monday). I assumed he must not be real excited to sell. It must be a dump. Had to be a dump. Had to be surrounded by dumps. So we didn't think much about it at all.

When Friday came, we drove over to look at it, honestly not expecting much at all. We had previously tried to find it a few days earlier by driving by, but it was not easily visible from the road at all and we were very frustrated and gave up. But when we drove up the long hidden driveway to the property and got to the end and saw the gorgeous 12 acres open up in front of us, we looked at each other and said, wow... this is neat. House must be a dump inside. Has to be a dump.

The man and his wife came out to greet us and we stepped up on the large, cool front porch (much like the one Andy and Aunt Bee are always sitting on snapping beans or playing the guitar on Andy Griffith). As we toured the little house, we knew this was it. This was the farm we had been looking for. It was not glamourous but it was perfect for us. Except for the fact that it had no garage for Timm (who loves cars), it was made for us. The house had a new roof, new plumbing, new electrical, new siding, completely gutted and remodeled inside and was small but just perfect for us. We loved it. And the barn.. oh my gosh. I was in heaven.

But we would have to sell our house. There was no way we would be able to sell our house. Real estate was really in a slump and not much was selling at all in our neighborhood or anywhere else. But heck, we had to try. So we put a contingent offer on the farm which they miraculously accepted and put a For Sale sign in our yard and set out to give it our best shot.

I really don't care for the realtor profession at all. I have had numerous unpleasant experiences with real estate agents and don't trust or respect them in the least. So I wanted to try to sell our home ourselves. ok that was stupid. Even REALTORS can't sell houses these days, so I'm not sure what made me think WE could. But I was going to show THEM. Fortunately, we had just remodeled the entire upstairs of the home and it looked fantastic. The downstairs, however badly needed paint. So we rushed to get the downstairs looking like the upstairs, and wrote up wonderful flyers with oodles of beautiful photos and impressive descriptions and stuck them in the For Sale sign box and on Craigslist and anywhere else a thumbtack or tape would stick. We found a retired real estate broker that sold us a no-strings-attached MLS listing for $40 and we put our house on the nationwide MLS listings. We had sprinklings of showing and then just at the end of our 3 month contingecy period... 2 offers!

We wound up selling the house for $5,000 more than we asked for it... and closed 2 hours before the closing on the farm. The farm was ours. It was a miracle.

Then we had an empty pasture. My thoughts went back to Tessa and I wondered where she was and if she were alive and how perfect life would be if she could be on our farm with us. She would be 23 years old and was probably dead. But I thought I'd try to find her. After a lot of talking to a lot of people who pointed me to other people and more talking, we finally located her! She looked fantastic! She was beautiful. She remembered me and all my weird voice commands. It was like meeting a very old friend again.. someone who had shared a lot of your secrets and pains and joys and who very tenderly shared your children's childhood and took care of them.

We bought her and brought her home.

In the months that have followed, we have learned that she is to have a foal in the spring. She is of course spoiled absolutely rotton and gets the very best vet care and very best food and is brought in every night and covered with a warm thick blanket for the cold. We bought a 2nd horse to keep her company and to go on short relaxing rides together and at Christmas, added a donkey to the little herd. It's complete now.

Life is good. Life doesn't get any better than this. My only hope in life now is that I never lose appreciation for what I have, how lucky I am.. and that I never take this life for granted.