Life Changes

   Well, it is not January 1st and time for new years resolutions but better late than never. I am about to embark on a new and exciting journey. I have worked almost exclusively 24/7 on one project for the past 3 1/2 years on a cenntennial farm preservation and restoration project but after much pain and many hurdles and obstacles it looks like the owner is no longer able to handle or maintain a vision and will not be able to continue at the pace due in much part to my hard work and financial investment. It is with great sadness that it has come down to this but I walk away knowing that I went above and beyond what any other will ever do. So I will say goodbye to what was going to be a lifelong endever and start focusing on myself and what I wish to have in my life. Funny thing was that I moved to Michigan a little over 4 years ago to essentially simplify my life and I invested more in a situation that had more baggage than a freightliner.
    So now as I recover from much heartache over the whole situation I am incredibly overjoyed at the direction that my life is about to take. I was born and raised in California with my parents having moved to a very rural area in SW Virginia when I was in my mid teens to a 165 acre farm. The work was hard and the meals plentiful. We always had farm animals even in California but now we were in Virginia with all this land and an incredible amount of work to do on a farm that had been allowed to fall into disrepair. But here was my father determined with a string of 5 children behind him (I was 15, next girl 12, twin girls 10 and the only boy only 6 years old), to set out to make this a beautiful productive farm again. The first summer we put up over 11 thousand bales of hay, and I don't mean those beautiful large round bales that are basically handled by a one man team. I mean the thousands of small square bales that my father would make as tight and heavy as possible cause loose ones took up more space and because he could. I essentially worked harder than any man I ever knew except for my father. I'm sure I had muscles coming out of my ears. I can still dig fence posts with the best of them. Boy does my dad love to tell stories of how many posthole diggers I busted and buried. He conviently forgets to tell that all digging tools had 3 ft marks on them so I understood how much farther that I had to go and oh, the other thing that he rarely mentions is that we put the coral right on top of an old river bed which required sometimes digging a hole three foot wide and then three foot deep just to get the bolders out! It was a very hard life for a California farm girl to move to such a rural area where even to this day, 33 years later there is still only one stoplight in the entire county.


    At 17 I graduated from high school and could not wait to get off that gosh awful farm. I went through a couple of marriges and many relationships searching for my place. Preferably as far away from that farm as earthly possible.

   Now 33 years later I find myself drawn back to that place that my father insisted that he bring us as children and young adults. My parents are now in their early 70's and I feel the need to be there just in case but also because it's really hard to go visit and see this farm that at one time with 5 children was so impeccably maintained (I'm convinced that it looked like that just because he was always looking to keep us busy and the boys at bay although looking back my parents must have had so much fun cause my father would intentionally set up work when the boys were set to come over so if the guys wanted to see us or go anywhere the chores had to be done first. Lots more help! Poor boys!), anyway, as I was saying, now when I go see this one time manicured farm with its areas overgrown and barns in need of paint, fences to fix and......I have this incredible urge to just stay and see what one 48yr old can do. I need that! I also would like to see the look on my parents face at what I know has to be a hard time watching a one time incredibly maintained farm not have the care and love that was once there come back to life.