Just life....,  Rural life

Life On the Farm

March 28, 2020 /

“Green Acres is the place to be, farm livin is the life for me….”

Anybody who watched US television in the ’60’s instantly knows the theme song to Green Acres, the sitcom about the lawyer city-slicker and his glamorous wife who decide to buy a run-down farm. The locals herebouts used to joke that this was my family, when we bought our farm in 1965. Although my father was a lawyer, the similarity ended there, as my mother was about as different from Zsa Zsa Gabor as you could get! (although she did clean up awfully well….)

This is actually my sister’s horse, and my feet won’t even reach the stirrups!

I did have the most idyllic childhood you could imagine, though, growing up with my own pony, the pet lambs that come from 800 ewes lambing each winter, playing in the creek and running barefoot all summer. There were also the challenges of a 200-yr-old house, such as going to bed with a hot-water bottle in the winter, learning to build fires in the nine fireplaces, and spiders the size of toads in the bathtub. Summertime entertainment was shucking corn, stringing beans and hulling strawberries on the front porch, listening to tales of “the olden days” from my grandmother and great-aunt. Whenever I complained about the work of preparing food from the garden, Aunt Virgie always shot back “it’ll taste better than snowballs this winter!” And she was right- bwahah!

I was not much of a fashionista back then (far more interested in my new rabbit) but my mother’s influence here is the sailor dress and red mary janes…

I moved to Germany after college and then lived in various states and countries for 20 years, returning in 2004 and coming back to live on the same farm, with two other households now occupied by my brother and sister and their families. So it’s one big commune, you could say, and we share the work and decisions of running the farm. Fortunately, I really LIKE my siblings as well as love them, and we all work together really well.

Here we are at a foxhunt ball about 15 years ago.

Our latest project has been repairing the fence on a 14-acre field that we board horses in. We’ve been working on it every week for several months, and – fingers crossed – it should be done tomorrow! It would’ve been done sooner, but we hit a snag as you can see below:

Digging a hole for a gate post, we hit a water line that was not where we thought it was. Three households were without water for the night and half the next day. Oops!

Most of the time, the beauty, peace and serenity of living on our own 360 acres makes all the work worth it. The back fields are planted in wildflowers as part of a government program to help the bees.

This is how it looks in late summer when the black-eyed susans are in bloom.
We celebrate with bonfires at the drop of a hat….

So we are doing lockdown together, our three households. We are so fortunate that there’s plenty of space to enjoy and the weather is finally warming up (although being Kentucky, we’re due another freeze, and probably a snow or ice storm, although it was 80 F today…And between us, we’ve got a pretty decent stash of toilet paper!

I wish peace and serenity to each of you as well, and a speedy deliverance from this pestilence. And I’ll write about fashion or something fun next time! Signing off from the farm…..

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