Transcript
Hi, I'm Dan Slone.
This is Dan's Tiki Bar. Welcome to another episode of Bits & Peaces.
First, I should open with an explanation of Technology again. I was planning on moving back to the camera for this one. In fact, I did. I recorded three more stories, and one of them the audio didn't come through it all. The other two, as you'll hear, the audio is really pretty bad. The first one I'm remaking, so this is a remake of it. The other two, I've cleaned the audio up as best I can. I apologize for the audio. Those will have it right soon, but this is a continuation of the exploration of technologies. I'm using a Pivo today with my iPhone. So theoretically it follows me around as I as I move around behind the bar here. So we'll see. I don't know what the sound quality is going to be on this. The technical one was pretty good, but I was holding that a little closer, so we’ll see.
I hope you're doing well today.
Today, I'm going to talk to you about buying the farm.
So this episode is called “Bought the Farm,” and you'll see why when you hear the following episodes. This is around 1984.
My wife and I had been renting a house and decided we wanted to buy our first house. We were about a year out of school, and we didn't have much money. We were looking for an older house, maybe a house on 5 acres. We decided we wanted to try out living on 5 acres. No real clear reason why. We’d both grown up in the suburbs. We certainly weren't urban but we weren't rural either, but we decided a house and 5 acres.
So we went looking. We talked to brokers and this one broker says I have just what you're looking for. It's a little further out from the city, but I think it will be what you're looking for. So they took us out to this house. The house was a classic Virginia farmhouse: white asphalt shingles with a green roof, just a kind of two-story box. The house was built about a hundred years ago, and I don't think it was built that well when it was built. You know how you hear people talk about how oh my house is, you know, two hundred years old, and it means that it was built great and that's why it survived this long. This house was kind of sagging at the top. You could see where they shored the roof up when you went up in the attic, and they'd added onto it a couple of times. It was actually much smaller when it had first been built and it was okay, but I know it wasn't the house that my wife was looking for.
The farmer had 43 and a half acres but they'd had a lot of trouble selling it. The bank really wouldn't give you financing for more than 5 acres, and so they had divided it up. So they were selling the house and five acres, and then they were going to sell the remaining 38 acres separately. We came and looked at it and my wife was instantly not in love with the house, but I was instantly in love with the land. Unfortunately, it was the 38 acres, not the 5 acres that went with the house. We walked around on this land. In the first place, you should understand, I just thought it was amazing that you could own a tree.
I know that sounds really stupid, but trees are often so old, and it's just amazing to me that you can be responsible for and own a tree. But this property, when you walked on it, we were walking along and a skunk came out of the woods. The farmer told us that there were foxes and possums, raccoons and deer, lots of black snakes. That's a story for another day, but I just I fell in love with the place.
So afterwards, when my wife and I were talking about it, she said well, of course, we wouldn't buy this place and I began trying to pitch it. My wife, who's the most wonderful person you can imagine, ultimately agreed to my pitch. The only thing she asked was, she'd always wanted a yellow house and this house was painted white and green. We were such newbies, we didn't really even understand that that's what country houses were. They were white with green roofs, but she wanted a yellow house and I said, of course.
So I wrote this contract. This contract, you'd need to understand, was a hideous thing. It was way too long and the poor farmer who got it was, you know, so eager to sell. I don't think he read anything in this contract except how much we were paying and when we’d close, and he agreed to sell. We signed all the
contracts.
We came over a week or so after we put the contract in place. We were coming by, walking on the land, sort of getting to know it and dreaming about it. There was a neat house site in the side of a hill overlooking a stream and we thought well, maybe we'll build a house there at some point. In fact, Martha would probably say I promised to build a house there, which is part of the way I got her to agree to this old house. But we were there at the house, and the farmer Jim said something about having the house painted soon. And I said well, how are you going to do that? We haven't even talked about a color yet. We haven't picked a shade of yellow. He said what are you talking about? You’re going to paint it white. That's what you do. This is a white house. It would be very expensive to paint it another color and you know, it probably wouldn't go with a green roof, and the roof is terribly expensive to paint another color. I said, well Jim you signed a contract that said you'd paint it yellow, and he got that sort of farmer obstinate look on his face and said, well, I'm not going to. I'm not going to do it.
So he and I had walked outside to talk about this this and I looked up, and there in the field in front of us was a horse and a pony running around. I knew that Jim had told me separately that he was going to sell that horse as part of selling the farm. He told me a little bit of backstory on the pony. The pony wasn't his. Someone had left it there, and she was supposed to come back and pick it up. But she hadn’t yet and the pony had been abused, and so Jim just took it in. The horse and the pony liked hanging out together. I knew that, as we talked about the farm, Martha talked about looking forward to horseback riding in the country. So the bright idea occurred to me that I could resolve this problem by doing some old-fashioned horse trading. So that's what I did. I said Jim I think we could solve this. I know you're trying to sell that horse. If you will go ahead and paint the place white, but in return for dropping the yellow requirement, you’ll give us that horse. He thought about it a moment. He's said sure that's fine but you get to take the pony too because this lady's going to come around sometime, and I may come back over and move the pony to my new farm, but if you’ll take care of it and the horse likes hanging out with it. I said sure no problem.
So we went in all happy and, on the way home, I explained to Martha what I'd done, and she was less than thrilled. It turned out that her idea of horseback riding was going to the stable that you paid to go horseback riding and having the horse already saddled and going for a ride on the horse and then coming back and handing the horse back to the stable folks. She didn't actually even know how to saddle a horse, and of course, I didn't know anything about horses.
Nonetheless, we went forward and closed the deal, moved into the house, and took over caring for a horse and pony. We learned how to kick hay out of the loft to feed the horse and the pony, and learned how to basically manage them. Martha learned to saddle and learned to ride. Our experience on the farm - some of you are too young to have ever seen the show Green Acres, but those of you who ever saw a Green Acres - it was a Green Acres experience. Those of you who don't know, Green Acres was a program about a couple of city folks who end up on a farm, and they're out of place and they don't know what they're doing. We didn't have a clue what we were doing. We had that Green Acres enthusiasm. We're very excited about being there and very excited about
learning the life, but we didn't know anything. We were so fortunate that we bought from Jim and his wife because we called them all the time.
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