If you've found your way here, welcome! Like any good little blog I'm gonna tell you a little bit about us here. It may be a slow, meandering tale but pour yourself a big tumbler of iced tea and enjoy.
I guess really this tale began back in 1999. Back when Brent and I were college students at the University of Kentucky and we had just started to date. He'd take me on long, back country drives and I'd have no clue where we were and we had no destination or time deadlines. If the weather was nice we'd have the windows rolled all the way down and sing along to Alan Jackson, Hank Jr and sometimes he'd let me pop in my new Dixie Chicks CD. Looking out the window while singing, or just looking without talking at all, the bluegrass rolling hills would go by. We'd see multi million dollar horse farms, farms that seemed to be carved into a hillside with a trailer that had boards for windows and you'd think "how does someone live there?" and yet they did, we'd also see wide, open farms with cute two story old farm houses perched right in the middle and all the barns right up next to it. There were times we'd go so deep and get good and lost that we'd have to turn around in the road because we'd gone as far as that road would take us. On those long drives we'd talk, or not talk, and yet no matter what we were comfortable and at ease with one another. The silence was easy.
After a couple of the these long drives, he was seeing if I checked off a list item for him I suppose, he said to me, "We're gonna have a horse farm one day. One where the neighbors aren't right on top of us and our kids can run in the yard." And I immediately changed all my dreams of going to Chicago (where I had NEVER been and I have no idea WHY I thought that is where I wanted to be) and wanted to be on that farm with him! I was hooked! I was hooked on him and on the farm and the little people we would have on that farm.
We had a typical college relationship from 1999 forward and then in 2003 I left him and Kentucky behind and went back to Florida. He wasn't moving fast enough for me in the getting married department. We stayed in contact, obviously, and in 2004 I told him I still wanted the farm and I wanted our first daughter to be named ViviAnne. He wasn't immediately sold but I won him over :)I came home to Kentucky and we were married.
We lived in a tiny, tiny house for starters. It was on as big as a lot as we could find and afford. Babies came fast, we moved for his work and to be closer to both of our moms. Our second house Brent bought it with me never laying eyes on it. We were living on his friends farm in the rental house on the property and I was so sleep deprived with two babies under age 2 that he could have told me anything and I would have agreed. So when he walked in after work and said "I found us a house. I looked through the windows and it goes for auction tomorrow." I said, "ok I'll see you after the auction and you can tell me if we have a house." We turned that house into a home. The neighborhood was fantastic. God had placed us in a great place and we needed it because 10 months later is when ViviAnne was diagnosed with Leukemia.
Our farm dream from our very early years was starting to go so distant into the back of our minds that we were resigning ourselves to thinking it was just that, childish dreams. The daily grind of chemo, kids, money troubles and work were taking their tolls. Then, probably because we were broke both money wise and marriage wise, we started taking drives in the country again. Only this time it was with two car seats in the back of a mini van and goldfish and juice was usually being passed around. Alan and Hank still played on the radio and bluegrass hills still rolled past our windows. And on those drives our dream started to come back to life. We started to find common grounds again. But how? How do we make the shift?
Years of struggle, doing finances different, me growing the garden in our side yard bigger and bigger each year went on. All in reaching for the dream. We listened to a podcast of a farmer who said they'd basically been doing the same thing and that his uncle, who was a farmer, had said "at some point you just have to jump". YES!!! I thought, its time to jump!
So we made an offer on a 20 acre farm that had nothing. I mean nothing. It was a field. They turned us down. So we drove around more, 1 year more people, and one day I saw this sign in another field on a tiny road I'd never been on and I snapped a picture of the sign. We called and were given permission to walk the field. Because it was just that, a large rectangular field with trees on 2 borders. Brent wasn't convinced but I told him I loved it. He said, "you love them all". And he was right! Up until that point in our lives I'd made houses that I didn't really like into homes and I loved them. I love the people inside of them is why. But I could SEE my son running through those fields, and shooting an arrow into a hay bale as his sister and I walk hand in hand chatting about whatever we want.
After a week Brent and I went back and walked it again. Unbeknownst to me he'd looked up the plot in public records and found out that through the trees, at the very back, was a creek. He'd always dreamed of a creek on his farm, after all these years I'd missed that part of his dream. So we walked all the way back through the trees to the creek and back out again. Once we hit the field he knew where I stood. He knew I loved it and that I was of the mindset of it's now or never. The kids are getting older and it won't make sense. We either pull the trigger on this dream or we never discuss it again. No more country drives dreaming of a life that we can't have. I'd felt we'd already lost so much with going through cancer and I couldn't keep living for a "someday" dream. So, he said "let's do it" We made the offer, without telling the kids or our parents or friends. It was a dream that he and I had initially all on our own and all on our own we were going to take the first step. The offer was accepted.
And so began Wild & Unruly Farm.
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