The Farm - Part One

I've been thinking about writing a story about a farm we owned in Quakertown for years. Now that I have a blog site, I'm going to use this forum to write about it. This is part one of a multipart story. If you like it, please let me know. If you don't like it, there will be other posts you might find more interesting. This is a labor of love from when the kids were growing up. Enjoy.

I never set out to purchase a farm.  I was living the suburban life on a cul-de-sac in Pennsylvania, content in mowing my lawn, having a few beers, burgers on the grill with friends while raising three great kids and working as a sales engineer for a telecommunications company.

My daughter Aria was horse crazy.  She rode, took lessons, mucked stalls and loved animals more than any human could.  We were paying a ridiculous amount of money to board two horses (Cisco and Okie) at a local farm. I grew weary of driving to the farm every day only to see her basically laboring for the woman who owned the place. Aria didn’t see it at the time, but she was spending more time cleaning stalls than getting lessons. It got my Irish up watching it happen. 

I don’t remember exactly how we came across the place, but there was a property around the corner from that horse farm that came up for sale.  I fell in love immediately – it didn’t LOOK like a farm.  It was a white ranch house on about 10 acres of land with a small barn and an outbuilding that sat on a country road. It had a long driveway with mature oak trees lining both sides like stolid soldiers protecting a regal estate.  Of course it wasn’t a regal estate – truth be told, it wasn’t much of anything. 

The barn was small – 5 stalls and a tack room – decayed and in need of repair, but it had character.  It had a loft that ran the length of the barn with doors on both sides that would hold a few hundred bales of hay and the occasional sleeping bag or two for those nights when you just wanted to sleep outside…

It was cool – I can’t find a more superlative description for it than that.  It felt like home from the beginning and became more and more like home as the years went by.  It became our home.

This is the story of that farm – I used to call it a “Gentleman’s Farm” because it was so small and because it met the standards – by definition, a Gentleman’s farm is a property that is owned by a gentleman farmer (fair enough) who has a farm as part of his estate and who farms mainly for pleasure rather than profit or sustenance. 

That fact was absolutely true – it was never for profit or sustenance – it practically put me in the poor house. It was full of hidden expenses and never-ending repair issues. It wasn’t just part of my estate – it WAS my estate.

Yet, there were hidden treasures everywhere – mind blowing experiences, fascinating skills to be learned and mastered, events that would shape our lives forever. 

This story will be a collection of those events and happenings – some you’ll love, some you won’t be able to relate to and some that may change your way of thinking about life like nothing else could.

I was working at Verizon during this time. Every day a bunch of us would get together for lunch to play cards – the guys would always ask “what’s new at the farm?” and I would share stories of what happened that previous day or week and they’d laugh and laugh – they were all from upper middle class neighborhoods and had nothing like this in their lives – they lived vicariously through me and the stories of the farm became folklore as the years went by – even today, if I run into any of the lunch guys, they would bring up a story from the farm and retell it to their friends as if it were yesterday.

This collection of stories is dedicated to those guys, my kids and anyone who had to live through my stories now and in the past.  I hope you enjoy it!

Part two coming...