Green Acres is the Place to be, Farm livin' is the Life for me...

Green Acres: Two City Slickers become Country Good Ole Boys

 

The Summer dragged on and I soon discovered, living out of a suitcase in Susan's Basement had it's clear disadvantages. Number one among them was what miniscule organizational skills I had were lost in a clutter of disarray and bad memory. I quickly misplaced such important things as my password to Google, who is the parent of this blog and thus the gate was barred to me for several months doing posts.

Finally in early October we were able to take possession of the property I hope to raise tomatoes next spring up at Nomad's Bluff, which is a ten acre, (mostly wooded) location.

Having practically no furniture made moving easy, but left Sean and I with little to recreate on, (including chairs) so that our farm house was more like a big hollow filled with a few pieces of camping equipment. I learned to use a painting pallet knife as a spatula and we drank out of two coffee cups, ate off of either a frying pan or a tin pie plate and did the laundry and the dishes in the same sink.

Fairly soon people began to donate their cast off dishes and soon I had an acceptable supply of cutlery, knives and forks and commemorative football glasses earned at Hardies during various promotional give-aways. We are still sleeping on army cots, have neither a couch nor a Television and trash we dispose of by making a large pile in the middle of the back yard and soaking it with barbeque starter fluid.

The previous tenants left us two moldy old couches that we disposed of in this way making a bon fire of them that lit up the night sky and smoldered as embers for several hours. I considered loading them down with russet potatoes first, thus creating a new way of preparing "couch potatoes". But since the couches were of suspect cleanliness (I found a snake and two field mice having a party in one) I decided to fry the potatoes up in my only salvaged cast iron skillet I brought with us from Virginia.

Sean's Smoker has come in handy quite a bit up here. He finished it at last and it can cook up meat finer than an old Whore can polish a door knob. We cooked on it so often we actually got tired of smoked meats and had to let it idle for a while till out pallets forgot the savory flavor over exposure.

This is our house, a prefabricated double wide trailer home combination on steel girders and cinderblock moorings. The only internet we get is so-o-o-o slow that the USPS can deliver mail faster than I can send out e-mails. Its an all electric house with well water that has so many energy saving features one has to argue with the light switches to keep a bulb on for more than 5 minutes. I ain't complaining and have lived in far worse, even in the city. We bug bombed the hell out of it when we moved in and I repainted the entire interior.

This is the back yard where many of the tomatoes will grow. Behind it is a short section of woods and a rather steep cliff that allows a view of several miles when the foliage is removed from the trees. At night the stars are so clear one can see the milk of galaxies and the faint features of dim stars one never sees in a light polluted cityscape. It is very quiet at night (except when a train passes at the bottom of the cliff) and one hears owls and coyotes hooting and howling on occasion to punctuate the stillness.

The green barn at the top of the page is also on the property. It was once used as a dungeon for SM sex parties by the local patrons of the Wiccan Church next door. I understand this is not part of the Wiccan routine, but merely a diversion of some of it's former members who have moved on to other dens of iniquity elsewhere. It currently holds a lot of broken appliances and dusty deteriorating furniture. No doubt there will be more bon fires in the back yard to clear if for livestock in the Spring.

The house also came with it's own feral cat, known to the locals as Critter . When I arrived she was thin and covered in ticks and fleas, but after some medication and a lot of cans of tuna and chicken she has fattened up and adopted me as her person. She shows her gratitude by once a week bringing me a dead mouse which she leaves on the front porch. She is small for a full grown cat but has a nice temperament, uses the litter box and likes to sleep on my bed now. I have been told before I arrived she refused to go indoors except for the coldest days of Winter. I suppose I arrived just in time for her to go into retirement and become a house cat.

Sean recently turned 21 and since I was broke and couldn't buy him a proper present, I acquiesced, allowing him to adopt his cousin's dog Kodiak who I had serious reservations about since if there was ever an evil Jinn in the form of a dog, it was in this one. But Sean's love quickly reformed him and he is turning out to be quite a good dog. Huskies have a reputation for being wild and Kodiak is no exception. But Sean has managed to bond with him and gotten him to respect our things with minimal destruction. He does like to dig up the yard going after burrowing moles, but otherwise is content to chew on chew toys and scraps of wood we give him.

We made him a doggie door to the back porch and a gate on the railing to keep him in. His romp on his own nearly got him shot by a local chicken farmer so we are working to get him to recognize that the ten acres we live on aught to be his boundaries. He looks a lot like a wolf which does not endear him to local owners of livestock.

I build him a bed which he sleeps on and he walks twice a day with Sean exploring the woods and sniffing all the interesting trails left by game. He even tolerates me, but Sean is his boy and there is no mistaking they belong to each other.

Critter of course found the dog to take some getting used to. She stayed alive this long by avoiding coyotes, and this looked like an especially large one of those. For a couple of weeks she refused to return to the house, but her love of home cooked meals finally strengthened her resolve and now we are one happy family with only an occasional hiss or growl.

I have been working odd jobs to pay the rent while Sean has largely been unemployed. Winter is now here and Christmas is close at hand. I designed my own card this year. Here is the cover.

I am hoping to soon recue the remainder of my furniture and art studio from Virginia. Sean is heading back there in two days and will return with a Budget rental Truck and our things (God willing). I have to work and stay here if we hope to keep the rent paid and the wolves from our front door.

In closing, here are a few shots of the surrounding countryside.

Our Barn at Sunset















The Oak Spirit Sanctuary (The Wiccan Church Next Door in a circa 1920's Farmhouse

The Bluffs on the Missouri River a mile or two from the house

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The main street of Wooldridge, (The closest town)