Warning: this will be long. And probably whiny.
I want a horse. I had a horse growing up, and until I was 24, I couldn't remember a time when there wasn't a horse around. That was just the way things were, and it felt right. Then, on April 15, 2003, my gelding died and things changed. I had another horse for about three years, but it didn't work out and I sold him. Since then, I've been on a horse for about 90 minutes, in Ireland, and spent most of my free time and pocket change on horse books, horse magazines, and a decent-sized collection of model horses (mostly from Breyer, but also cheezy Japanese china horses, metal horses, and one wooden horse with metal inlay). But it's not the same.
For the past fifteen years or so, I've been holding on to the dream that I'd have a horse again someday. The past couple of years, I thought it might be close to happening. DH and I have been married for six years, money's okay, and we've been looking, off and on, for a place. We've got the same goal in mind - 20 acres or so, enough room for a garden, some chickens, a horse, a couple of steers for the freezer. Trees. Lots of trees. The ability to look at the stars at night. We both grew up out in the country, and we'd like to get out of town now. I love my neighbors (most of them), but I feel crowded all the time.
I've been thinking lately about whether I should keep holding on to this horse-dream, or give up on it. Yes, I've been in a funk, but it really feels like this just isn't going to happen, at least while I'm young enough to be able to do it. I'm starting to think that it's all been a pipe dream, and that I should just stop deluding myself, suck it up, and get used to the idea that all we'll ever have is a boring cookie-cutter subdivision house with a yard the size of a shoebox. It just doesn't seem to be working out. I swore two years ago that I would sign up for the summer riding program at a local college, and surprise!, I ended up getting pregnant. The baby was due the month before the program started, so there went that. The rest of it seems to be similarly jinxed.
We started looking for a new place about 3 or 4 years ago, and we actually went out with a realtor and looked at a lot of houses. We've slacked off in the past two years, what with the being pregnant and all, and haven't been out realtoring in two years or so, although we keep looking at real estate ads and listings. We can't really take the baby house hunting with us, and while he does have grandparents who'd gladly keep him if they aren't busy, they're 20 minutes away (one way), and by the time we drive out, do the obligatory chit chat, and drive back, it takes an hour if not more. (They babysat while we went to a movie last month. Start to finish, it took 8 hours. Seriously.) Unless DH takes a day off work to go out realtoring, it has to be done on weekends, meaning Saturdays, which are already in short supply.
But, although we looked at a lot of places, we couldn't really find what we wanted at a price we could afford. More on that later. Now, with El Burrito working toward crawling, and this place being seriously not childproof or child friendly, we're running out of time. So, unless we get very lucky and find the Perfect Place soon, we're going to end up buying a house here in town, with the idea of living there for five years or so, and looking for Perfect in the meantime. The problem with that is that we tend to procrastinate. Hell, we've been living here for 6 years, and looking for a place for most of 5. We meant to be in the new place before I got pregnant. Then it was "before the baby's born," then "before he starts to crawl." You see the pattern here? I can easily see us staying in the interim house for 10 years, just out of inertia and apathy. And that alternately frustrates me and depresses me.
Part of the problem is that land prices around here are freaking insane, in my opinion. Land outside the city limits tends to start around $5,000 an acre, and go up from there. Much of it, even farmland 15 miles past the city edge, is priced so high that only a developer can even think of affording it. A few years ago, we looked at an empty lot about 25 miles away, about 7 acres, nothing special. $75,000. It had a creek along one edge, and was probably a flood plain. Not where I'd build a house, thanks very much. We've found two parcels of ground that had a lot of promise so far. One, while almost perfect, was expensive enough that we would have been pushing our limits just to buy it, never mind building a house on it. The other place turned into something of a joke. The guy who was trying to sell it gave us the impression that he'd owned it for 5 or 10 years. Come to find out, he didn't own it at all; he had an offer in to buy it from the current owner and the deal was supposed to have closed a few weeks before we looked at it. The deal hadn't gone through, so he wasn't the owner, and I don't know what the *&^% the realtor thought was going on.
And don't even get me started on the county's rule against selling land in chunks less than ten acres without special permission. You end up with a lot of houses with 9.5 acre lawns, and 90% of the ones I've seen don't even bother to plant a tree, much less do anything other than mow their huge lawn with a lawn tractor. It wouldn't bug me so much if the owners would just do something with the ground - a garden, a few flowers, a couple of trees, whatever. But 9.5 acres of wannabe-golf-course just gripes me unbelievably. Good grief, people, do something with it! A sundial, a hammock, bird house, even a couple of practice holes for the golf game. Go crazy, fence it in and buy a steer for dinner!
But, anyway, I've been wondering why I keep holding on to this dream. Because it'll never be the way I want it to be. My childhood is gone, and I can't get it back. I'll probably never find another horse like my old guy, and if I did, I couldn't afford him and I don't know that I deserve another horse like that anyway. It was different when I lived at home - Dad had a lot of land for his cattle, took care of the upkeep on fencing, raised his own hay. Having a horse on my own would be a whole different ball of wax, and I don't know if I'm capable of taking care of everything. Lord knows, I do a crappy enough job of housekeeping and everything right now, and that's without a full- or part-time job, just a little boy to take care of.
1 comment:
Oh, CK.
Here's what I think. I think there's more than one way to "do" horses. I think that if you really want to, you can look at houses with your baby along. I think you sound down, and like you also might want to take a good hard look at what postpartum depression looks like and consider whether that might be you.
You don't have to make a concrete decision about this right now. First of all, people raise babies in apartments all the time, so I don't believe getting into a house is essential RIGHT NOW. It's just something that's hanging over your head, and that sucks. You have control over that. You could simply stop that by declaring that right now you're not looking for a house. You'll start look for a house on X date. If that date is within a few months, make an appointment with a realtor. Then let it go until that date arrives.
As far as the horse thing ... take it one step at a time. Sign up for the community college program. Or call the nearest stable and ask what their lesson rates are and if you can work part of that off mucking stalls. That's all. Do some riding and see if you still love it. Then think about the next step after that. Maybe you'll never have horses at your very own house, but that doesn't mean you can't ride and even have a horse of your own.
And it's far too early to be giving up on the idea of EVER having land and pasture and livestock. Just think, in a few years, you could be giving lessons to El Burrito ...
Jan
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