Welcome to the Funny Farm

Hello all, and welcome to my blog.

So here's the story - I am an otherwise sane and rational woman of a certain age with a decent job who really ought to know better. But this particular insanity goes back a long ways. When I was about seven, we had just bought a new 1960 ranch house in a subdivision, with no grass and no flowers. We (my parents, brother and I) spent an uncomfortably long time picking up rocks in the dirt that was the backyard so my dad could plant grass. When it finally looked like a yard, my dad had the fence built. Ah, the fence. While all our neighbors who had fences had chosen the standard chain link of the day, my dad ordered - split rails. I have never really been given an explanation for this choice, but to me the reason was clear. I was finally getting a horse.

See, all the pictures I had seen in my romantic horse-crazy girlhood showed horses with their heads hanging artfully over a split-rail fence. I had been begging for a horse since I could say the word. Knowing my dad's reluctance to break my heart, I knew the day had come. That fence was a thinly coded message - the horse was finally to be mine. Soooooo wrong. Sigh. I never really got over that.

I finally got a horse when I was 43. He was an Arab with an asthmatic condition, so the price was right. But that was the best horse I have ever had - willing, fast enough, devoted to my kids, and smart. Smart enough to run away from me in the pasture, his one bad habit. But it was a serious love relationship from the start. A month or so into my horse-owning experience, I called my husband from the barn where I boarded him (the horse, not my husband - that must be something like a dangling participle or some other cardinal sin of grammar). Anyway, I said "You know how sometimes you dream of something for soooo long and when you finally get it there is no way the reality can live up to your expectations?" I could hear the panic in my husband's silence. But then I said "This is NOT one of those things! This is even better than I could have ever imagined!" I think he knew even then the die was cast.

When we were first married, we moved to a 17 acre farm. Nothing was actually farmed on it, the owners lived in town with dreams of moving out there once their kids were out of school. One couple rented the house, and we rented a garage apartment. The rest of the place was just fields of weeds. I asked if I could have a garden, and the landlord was so delighted to have a kindred spirit he came out and plowed up a garden for me - about 2 acres worth. My husband was amused and alarmed in equal measures - amused at watching my trying to figure out what to do with all those rows of dirt, and alarmed that this might be a pattern which could repeat. He grew up sort of in the country, I was a city kid who always wanted to live in the country. He knew considerably  more than I did about all of this, and I was in over my head. Needless to say, that garden was a bust. But I did learn that I breathe easier when surrounded by land, rather than houses ten feet apart. I learned what it meant to disk something up, and that a bush-hog was a mower on steroids. It was a beginning.

It was also a long time ago. Other than that brief interlude on the 17 acres, and my boarded horses, we lived a city life, in a succession of cities, pursuing work and education. But over time, my husband learned something too. Never ever underestimate the determination of his wife to achieve her dreams, no matter how ill considered.

Fast forward to the last few years. I have spent the last umpteen years in education and training in order to pursue one of those possibly ill-considered dreams, in this case being a physician. I was 46 years old with five children when I started medical school. I am here to tell you it has to be easier at 25 than at 46. One of my coping mechanisms to get through a decidedly unpleasant residency training experience was to promise myself - and my youngest daughter - that when it was all over we would live in the country and she could have whatever animals she wanted. Besides the usual (horses) she particularly wanted a llama. She had no valid explanation for why she wanted a llama, but want it she did. And I said Of Course, Sure, Whatever You Want.

When I finally finished residency I planned to return to my native Baton Rouge, Louisiana to practice. In the course of residency, however, there was this little thing called Hurricane Katrina which effectively changed the landscape of medical practices across south Louisiana such that there were no jobs. My best friend lived in Oregon, my husband always wanted to live there, so there you go. I ended up in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, in my opinion the most stunningly gorgeous farmland on the planet.

After almost three years in a rental house - a very nice one, in a very nice subdivision that I felt ungrateful for wanting to leave - an opportunity presented itself. A friend and fellow physician planned to move his family back across the country and needed to sell his farm. EVERYONE knew I wanted to move to acreage, and at least five different people kept asking me if I had looked at this place, so finally I did. I tromped over all 40 or 50 acres of it, climbed to the top of the upper pasture where you can look west and see the Coast Range and look east and see the Cascades, and decided there was no way I could ever manage to get this place. Or that my husband would hate it. Or that he would remember that awful first garden and think I was getting in seriously over my head. Or that he would be right.

So finally, I screwed up my courage and suggested he go look at it. The Gods of Farm Fools were smiling on me that day, because the weather was gorgeous - in, like, April. In Oregon. I think when my husband saw that it was possible to see Mt. Hood from the top of the upper fields he was down with the plan. My friends made it impossibly possible.

So that is how we have come to be the incipient occupants of a farm in the Pacific Northwest. We don't even have a stick of furniture moved into the place yet, and we already feel at home there. We have spent the last 2 weeks painting (Farmhouse. 4 children. BIG dog. Definitely painting.) My husband was given a crash course in tractor and mower operation by our friend before their departure back East, and has been out there mowing daily. Along the way, over the course of the last couple weeks, I have come to realize that we are going to screw up A LOT. And it is going to be a bit amusing. Perhaps not to us immediately, but to a lot of other people almost certainly. I have also learned that if you can keep your sense of humor, you can even cope with a runaway llama. Oh yes, there is a llama involved. Long after my daughter stopped wanting one, she got one anyway. Talk about ill-considered dreams! Stay tuned.