Our Past
I was born and raised in a Texas suburb, by no means a “country boy”. But, through, the years I gained enough country and outdoors experience to prevent me from being considered a complete neophyte. To start with, my parents were born and raised in the country as well as my grandparents on both sides and all of my aunts and uncles. We spent a considerable amount of time visiting some of the more popular ones and, while there, my uncles and cousins would usually show me around and tell me “how things worked” on the farm. An humble beginning, but I learned a lot about country life. Spending much of the summer with my grandmother after my Grandad died also added to my education in country ways. Some of the gardening basics were learned in the early years of my life from having to work in the large family garden for my allowance or to work off a punishment for some adolescent misdeed. I also learned a lot about the outdoors hunting, camping and fishing with my parents, my brothers and one of my favorite uncles.
Fast forward a bit to my early twenties when my Dad retired from a life in the suburbs working a busy job and a decision to buy a piece of property and raise Holstein heifers and replacement cows for dairies. When my parents asked me to move back from out of state and help with the farm, I jumped at the chance. Time on the farm taught me to build fence, plow and cultivate, cut and bale hay, feed and care for cattle and horses, give vaccinations, boluses, de-horn and, in general, punch cattle. I also worked at my uncle’s livestock auction one day a week learning to pregnancy check heifers, milk, treat problems like mastitis, hardware, wire cuts and other maladies. I even got the chance to help a vet during a ceasarian birth. “Pulling” calves became as common as scratching my nose. After a few short years, though, a failing cattle market caused my Dad to sell the farm and it was back to the city for me.
Although I absolutely hated the idea of going back to town, I was being drawn to find my own way in life. Eventually , marriage, the military and a career in Information Technology and kids prevented me from considering going back to the country. At least it did until an airline that I was working for filed for bankruptcy and caused my wife Virginia and I to reconsider our careers and our family’s future. We found an classified advertisement in Organic Gardening magazine for wanting a family to live in upstate New York remodeling a huge old house into a bed and breakfast and returning the 420 acre farm, that the house was part of, into a productive organic farm with a store. We wrote the owner and after a couple of months, we had put our house on the market and headed from Arizona to New York with four kids in tow.
We spent only a year there, but in that time, we were introduced to remodeling a historic house (on a large scale), buying farm equipment for virtually a whole farm, organic gardening, building board fences, raising pigs and sheep, preserving, canning and drying fruits and vegetables, maintenance and restoration of tractors and equipment and other “necessary skills” for family farming and country living. With a one year initial contract, we had completed three years of work in that time and sadly left after a falling out with the owner who was manic depressive.
Back in Arizona, my wife, kids and I all missed the long days and hard physical work but settled back into the grind of suburban life, with me even returning to the same bankrupt airline I had been trying to leave behind. Our careers, now enhanced by our country experiences, skyrocketed. My wife, an Information Technology consultant, settled into a steady contract and after eventually leaving the bankrupt airline, accepting a CIO position with a state agency which gave us both a pretty good income and stability to start preparing for eventual retirement to the country.
On the morning of June 29th, 2007, all was going pretty well, with only six years to retirement and a real estate market that had increased the value of our home by almost 300% in seven years. Then, in the evening, my boss, with a particularly large political bias, decided that I wasn’t performing my job to her satisfaction and forced me to retire prematurely. In other words, she fired me. This being the first time I had been fired or even informed that the job I was performing was in any way not exceeding expectations, I came home a mess. At fifty five years old it was not going to be easy finding another job within state government that would allow me to continue on with my retirement program. And if that wasn’t stacking up to be hard enough, I had pretty much decided that I didn’t want anything else to do with state politics.
Fast forward again to June of 2010. The country in an economic shambles and an uncertainty of what was in store for us, we decided to start looking for a place in the country. For several reasons that I won’t bore you with right now, we decided that we wanted to move to the Ozarks. After a couple of trips to the southwest Missouri, we put in a contract on a 10 acre property just north of Branson, Missouri, contingent on the sale of our home in Arizona. Despite the terrible real estate market, the second family that looked at it bought it. We moved at the end of August, 2010. And here is where our journal begins……
This Country Journal is a part of BestOfTheCountry.com , a website devoted to everything country. While the main website focuses on all kinds of information about country life, small farms, farming, antique tractors and equipment, and virtually anything related to country life and small farming.
This blog, however, will serve as a personal journal of our family’s journey from the chaos of the city to a 10 acre hobby farm in the Ozarks of Missouri.