What do You Want to do, Marty?

I have a friend who tells me he will never retire.  When I ask him why he says “What would I do with myself?  I'd be bored stiff just sitting around and watching my hairline recede.”  I just can't understand that.  Since I retired I am so busy that I wonder how I managed to find the time to work.  Most of my retired friends tell me that they have had the same experience. 

I admit that I haven't done many of the things that I thought I would do in retirement.  For example, both my wife and I expected to do a lot of traveling when we retired, but we really haven't traveled any more than we did when we were working full time.  There are lots of other things to do though.  Here are a few of them:

• take up a hobby or spend more time on an existing one,
• go back to school,
• pursue new business opportunities,
• take advantage of volunteer opportunities,
• engage in health and fitness activities,
• travel,
• socialize,

and lots more things that I haven't mentioned here.

Most of the retired people that I know who had hobbies before retirement have been able to increase the time they spend on them when they are no longer working full time.  For example, we have some friends who are into antique cars.  They spend a lot of time working on their cars and touring with their car club.  Another hobby that many retirees get into is genealogy.  There are many resources on the Internet devoted to this hobby, some of them free and some of them fee services.  All of them make it easier than ever to trace your roots and connect with distant relatives.  Other hobbies that retirees often engage in are reading and arts and crafts.  My favorite hobby has always been gardening.  When I first retired my wife and I moved to a small place in the country where I was finally able to have that big garden I had always wanted.  We moved back to the burbs after a few years and I have a relatively small garden these days, but I still spend a lot of time working in the yard and garden.   The extra time I have these days gives me time to network with other gardeners in order to trade tips and plants.  This year I have enrolled in my county's master gardener program. 

Retirement is a great time to take classes, whether it be with the objective of obtaining a degree, acquiring a new skill or just exercising your mind by learning something new.  Classes don't have to be traditional school subjects.  Many retirees take art lessons, learn to play an instrument or take dancing classes.  It is often the case that community colleges offer classes specifically oriented toward seniors.

The time and, at least in some cases, financial security that retirement brings make it a great time to pursue new business opportunities.  Some people don't really retire but rather exchange their current employment for something that they always wanted to do.  In this case it's really more of a career change than retirement but my experience has been that, once you are retired from a lifelong career, you can often take a position that pays less than your previous career but provides more personal satisfaction.  For example, after retiring from a career in high tech with a large company I went to work for a small startup where I was able not only to learn a few new things myself but also to mentor younger employees with less business experience.  When you are retired it is also easier to start a home-based business.  My wife retired while I was still working full time.  To fill her days she started a small home-based service-oriented business that not only gave her something to do but also provided some additional income.  We have some friends who have always loved dogs.  They retired to a place in the country where they opened a boarding kennel.  Another friend made a business out of buying used goods at thrift stores and estate sales and selling them through ebay.  Another place where I often see retirees who have home-based businesses is at the local farmer's markets.  Many of the folks who sell fresh fruits and vegetables there have retired to a small piece of land and have turned their gardening hobby into a business.  For those who don't want a second career or a home-based business but just want to work part time there are many big box retailers, fast food restaurants and home improvement stores that hire retirees as part time employees.

There are many volunteer opportunities that offer a way for retirees to give back to the community.  Meals On Wheels ( http://www.mowaa.org ) is one organization that retirees often support.  If you enjoy gardening and your state has a master gardener program, that will provide volunteer opportunities.  Master gardeners volunteer their time to help their local agriculture office respond to requests for speakers and help in establishing gardens and gardening programs in a variety of places such as churches, schools and non-profit organizations.  There are many other organizations that need volunteers, including Habitat for Humanity ( http://www.habitat.org/getinv/volunteer_programs.aspx ), local food banks and thrift stores.  There are even Internet sites such as http://www.volunteermatch.org and  http://national.unitedway.org/volunteer/  that list opportunities for volunteering.

Retirement offers plenty of time to get into, or back into, shape in order to make those golden years more healthy and enjoyable, assuming your doctor agrees that you are in good enough health to exercise.  If you've got the money to join and you like exercising with like-minded people you can join a health club, gym, country club or your local YMCA.  Many of these facilities will have someone on staff who can help you put a program together that will accomplish what you want to do and take into account any restrictions you might have.  You don't have to spend a lot of money to get exercise though.  A home treadmill, exercise bike or other workout device is a great way to get some cardiovascular exercise and use up excess calories.  It isn't uncommon for people to buy exercise equipment and quickly tire of it.  So you can often pick up used equipment at garage sales or on Craig's List ( http://www.craigslist.org/about/sites ) for much less than the going retail rate.  If you want absolutely free exercise, all you have to do is walk around the block or, if you live in an area like I do where there are lots of parks with cycling, running and walking trails, you can get free exercise there.

One of the things my wife and I like best about retirement is being able to travel. We aren't world travelers and we go on a lot more day trips and long weekends than we do long vacations.  We always try to travel at off peak times when most adults are working and children are in school.  By not traveling during prime vacation time we avoid the crowds and often are able to take advantage of reduced rates.  We have also found that, while the shops in many tourist areas are often closed in the early part of the week, they usually open by Thursday and stay open through the weekend.  So we try to take day trips on Thursday or Friday when there are fewer people shopping or sight-seeing and most of those who are out and about are older adults.

We get to socialize with folks we meet on our day trips and long weekends and also with retired friends who, like us, like to get out when most folks are at work.  Retirement offers plenty of time to socialize, whether it be meeting friends for lunch or visiting each other's house to play cards or board games.

So, unlike my friend who doesn't want to retire, my wife and I find lots of things to do these days.  In upcoming posts I'll cover many of them in more detail.

We Go BOGO

Last week my old girl and I stopped at a local chain restaurant for a quick lunch on our way to an appointment.  We were kind of shocked at the price, but then we realized that it was the first time that we had paid full price for a lunch in the last three months.  Usually we only eat lunch at places where we have a “buy one, get one” (BOGO) coupon.  There are a variety of ways to get BOGO coupons, but we get most of ours from coupon books.

The schools in our area sell coupon books as a fund raiser.  They usually cost ten or twenty bucks and we buy one or two a year from the neighborhood kids just to help out the schools.  In the past we often forgot that we had them until they expired or maybe we used them once or twice to get a sundae at Baskin-Robbins or something like that, but mostly we just considered them to be a donation to the school.  We happened to discuss this subject with a couple of friends last year who told us that every year they send away for a coupon book that is filled with BOGO coupons and other discounts for businesses in our area and that they keep track of what they save.  We were surprised to learn that they had saved several hundred dollars with the coupon book over the last six months.  A few days after we had that discussion our grandson called to ask if we would buy a coupon book from his school for $20.  We did that and decided that we would be conscientious about using it and keeping track of the money we saved. 

We got the book in the middle of November. About two weeks after we got it we took a couple of our grandkids to a miniature golf course and, using a pair of BOGO coupons, we saved ten dollars.  That was half the cost of the coupon book.  By the end of the year we had saved over $50, or two and a half times what we paid for the book.

My wife and I liked the savings that we got from the coupon book our grandson sold us so much that we decided to buy the book that our friends use.  We ordered that one over the Internet for $45 and got it in mid-April of this year.  In the first four months we've had it we've saved $137 over and above the cost of the book, and we have only used it for lunches and an occasional frozen yogurt.  We would have saved even more if we had used it for any of the other goods and services that are available.

We like using the coupon books for more than the ability to save money though.  One of the things we like to do is to eat lunch at one-off cafes and mom and pop restaurants.  A lot of the coupons in our books are for places like that.  Because we have the coupons, we try restaurants that we wouldn't even have known existed if it weren't for the books.  Some of them have been disappointments, but a lot of them have turned out to be great places, and the best thing is that it costs us very little to try them.

Coupon books aren't the only place to get good BOGO coupons.  For example, there is an advertising service in our area that sends out coupons about once a month.  Ninety percent of them are for things that don't interest us, but there are always a few good restaurant coupons in the packet.  We save those and use them before they expire in a month or six weeks from the time we receive the packet.

Another good source of coupons is local papers, especially those that are basically advertising vehicles that are offered for free.  There is a monthly paper like that in our area which publishes different editions for each section of the large metropolitan area in which we live.  The back section of the paper is nothing but ads and coupons.  Each edition contains coupons for the section of the metro area that it covers.  We get the paper for the section in which we live, so we get coupons for local businesses from there.  To get coupons for businesses in other sections of the metro area, we go to libraries in those sections.  Most of them have copies of the paper which anyone is free to take.  We pick up one for the section where the library lives and get the coupons for the businesses in that section. 

When you are living on a fixed income, any kind of discount is a good one.   You have to be careful, however, to read the fine print, especially when using coupon books that require you to register or fill out an application.  E.g., I have heard rumors of coupon providers that sell the first year's subscription for one of their books for a low price and then automatically renew the user for the next year at a much higher price.  It is also possible that online coupons can be used to gather personal information for identity theft.  I am personally very leery of coupon offers that arrive in email, even those forwarded by friends.  To date my wife and I have experienced no problems with the coupon books we have used except for businesses that have turned belly up before we got around to using the coupon, and in a couple of cases even before the coupon book arrived.  Two of the books we have used can be found at http://www.entertainment.com and http://www.diningandshopping.net . 

Retiring to the Country: What a Ride

Our three year sojourn in the country was a learning experience that was full of surprises, some good and some not so good.

I had expected the drive to and from work to be one of the negative things about living beyond the sidewalks but it turned out to be just the opposite.  I found that the long drive into work in the morning gave me time to organize my thoughts and plan my day.  In the evening, as I drove from freeway to highway to back road to the dirt road where we lived, I found that the cares of the day gradually slipped away and by the time I turned into our lane I felt calm and refreshed.

Most mornings and evenings in the country we had spectacular sunrises and sunsets that were more colorful than any painting could ever be.  It was a great feeling to sit on the back porch in the morning, sipping a cup of coffee, watching the sun rise over the oaks in the back woods and realizing that we owned everything that we could see.  It was also a terrific feeling of freedom to be able to tramp and drive over the fields with no one to tell us that we had to keep to someone else's path.

Simple pleasures delighted us when we lived in the country.  I enjoyed working in the garden I had carved out of the back pasture.  My wife loved to get on the riding mower and mow the walking path around the property.  We liked picking the wild dewberries and mustang grapes that grew in the creek bottoms and along the fences and making syrups, jellies and pies from them. 

Birds were abundant in our area and we never tired of seeing them, especially those that were rare sights.  The year that a pair of painted buntings built a nest in a hackberry near the compost heap we couldn't wait to catch a glimpse of them as they shuttled back and forth to feed their brood.  We were used to seeing bluejays in the burbs, but we had never seen bluebirds until we moved to the country.  One day we we awoke to a raucous sound in the garden and discovered that a flock of guineas had stopped there to feed.  In the early morning of the first day of the new millennium I went up the hill to the top of our lane with a camera to record the first sunrise of the 2000's and was rewarded by some terrific shots of a pair of great blue herons crossing the path of the moon on their way to feed at someone's stock pond.

Some of the things we experienced in the country were not so pleasant though.  We had always thought that living beyond the burbs meant that we would have peace and quiet.  Sometimes it was tranquil and peaceful.  At other times it was noisier than life in the suburbs.  Ranchers and farmers get up early.  Many mornings we awoke at dawn to the sound of a tractor or backhoe in a nearby field.  Other times it was the bellowing of bulls on opposite sides of the fence that announced the arrival of another day.  Often that was after a night spent trying to sleep through the yapping and howling of coyotes in the dry creek bed fifty feet from our bedroom window or the barking of guard dogs across the back creek.  The evening quiet was frequently shattered by the roar of a dune buggy from a neighboring property.  So much for peace and quiet in the country.

In sparsely populated rural areas it is often the case that many of the local residents are related to each other and come from families that have lived in the area for many generations.  While a lot of the folks are friendly, they also are somewhat clannish and suspicious of outsiders.  It seemed as though every time we met someone new their first question was “Why did you move here?”  Over time we did meet many of the local residents and socialized with them at public functions like the VFD garage sale and the mutual insurance company yearly fish fry, but the local folks considered anyone whose family hadn't lived there for several generations to be “new people” and not part of the local population.  One of the reasons for this is that a lot of “new people” such as ourselves didn't stay for more than a few years.  We did discover that new people who lived in the area on a permanent basis as we did were treated better than week-enders who went out to “the land” a couple of times a month to play rancher.  Weekend places were targets for break-ins and other mischief, but that seldom happened to new people who lived on the land on a permanent basis.  Once we went away for a three-week vacation and discovered when we returned that we had neglected to lock the door before we left.  To our surprise our place was untouched.  I don't think that would have happened if we had done the same thing while living in the burbs.

Another thing that caught us by surprise in the country was the large number of animals wandering through the place and along the back roads.  We expected to have wild animals such as coyotes, skunks, feral hogs and the like taking up residence or passing through our woods and fields.  What we hadn't anticipated was the large number of dogs running loose.  Several neighbors had guard dogs of one kind or another that didn't understand where their territory ended and ours began.  It was pretty common to see German shepherds or great Pyrenees roaming through our property.  Once I was treed in our back woods by two great Danes that decided that I was trespassing there.  While many of these dogs belonged to neighbors, a fair number of them were strays that had been dropped off by folks from the city or suburbs.  I have heard people say that farmers will adopt stray dogs.  While that does sometimes happen, more often the dogs come to a bad end.  Stray dogs tend to chase cattle and other livestock and a rancher who has a nursing cow that's had her udders torn by being run into a barbed wire fence by stray dogs is going to treat the dogs just like he would coyotes or other varmints.

After living in the country for three years we had a different kind of adjustment to make when we moved back to the suburbs.  For one thing, we no longer owned everything we saw from our porch.  In fact, the view from our house is pretty much a view of our neighbors' houses and yards.  No more beautiful sunrises and sunsets.  The burbs can be pretty noisy too.  We thought that the sound of coyotes yammering in the creek bed was annoying until the first time our next-door neighbors had a hot tub party in their backyard thirty feet from our bedroom window.

Of course, suburban subdivisions have home owner associations to deal with neighborhood nuisances.  That was another adjustment problem however.  My wife loves to hang sheets outside to dry in nice weather but that's a no-no in our subdivision.

There certainly are  advantages to living closer to town of course.  We're only two miles from a decent supermarket instead of thirty and we no longer have to drive an hour to our dentist or  doctor.  That is a real blessing when you have to have a colonoscopy at 7:00 in the morning.  We are also closer to those of our kids who live in the area.  That makes it easier to attend the grandkids' school events.  We are pretty close to our friends from our old neighborhood too, so we can socialize with them again.  And we like having broadband access.  So we are generally glad that we are back in the burbs but we wouldn't have missed our country experiences for anything.  We have a lot of fond memories of that time.  If we had it to do over, however, we would have done some things differently.

If we were considering retiring to the country today we would try do more effective research about the reality of country life.  While reading books and articles written by people who have made the move to the country is useful, it is important to understand that many of the authors focus on only the positive experiences they have had.  If you are considering retiring to the country, my advice is to talk to people who can give you a balanced view of living in the area in which you are interested.  One good place to start is with the agriculture agent in the county of your choice.  He or she can tell you a lot about the area, including not only agricultural information, such as the ability of the land to support gardening or hobby ranching, and the cost of obtaining adequate water and power, but also information on the people who already live there, such as whether there are already a lot of newcomers or whether the place you are interested in is currently populated mostly by people whose families have lived there for generations.  Definitely do not try to obtain information about the area from realtors, builders or others who profit by encouraging people to move into the area.

Take a long, hard look at your personality, skills and abilities and financial situation.  Do you require frequent social interaction or can you stand to be isolated for long periods?  Do you have the money and/or strength and skills to do the work that is required or to hire someone to do the things that you cannot do?  For example, most small places that are carved out of larger farms or ranches will need to be fenced on two or more sides.  Can you do the work or will you have to hire someone to fence your property?  If you need to hire someone, can you afford to do that?  If your place isn't fenced, it will not only make it impossible for you to raise livestock, but you will also be troubled by loose livestock, stray dogs and feral animals.

It is useful to write out a list of the things you want to do with the property when you get it.  This will help you to determine the work that must be done as well as the amount and type of property you will need.  If you want to keep horses on your property, you probably don't want one that is fenced with barbed wire or field fencing.  You would more likely want to use slick wire or a hot wire.  If you do that, however, it will not keep strays and other animals off the property.

If you plan to supplement your retirement income by working either full or part time then decide whether you can work from home at your country place or whether you will have to commute to your job.  If you work from home, can you get the quality of service you require for phone and Internet connections?  If you commute, can you get out of your place and back in a reasonable time if there are snows, heavy rains, flooding or bridge construction across your path?

You should also consider your needs for medical and dental support.  Is there sufficient support available locally or will you have to drive for some distance to visit a doctor or dentist?  Is there emergency medical support available locally?

These are some of the things you should consider if you plan to retire to the country.  Even though my wife and I didn't research the answers to most of these questions before we moved, and we eventually decided that we weren't really cut out for country life, we enjoyed the experience of retiring to the country and wouldn't have missed it for the world.  We met a lot of interesting people, learned a lot about life and ourselves and, on balance, we had a heck of a ride.  Just don't ask us to do it again.

Retiring to the Country: Back to the Burbs

After several years in the country we still had not solved the grasshopper problem.  Nearly everyone that we talked to told us that what we needed to do was to get some guineas, which are something like little chickens on steroids that practically live on grasshoppers.  It turned out that one of Lester and Twila's many kin raised guineas and would sell us a half dozen babies (called keets), and a chicken to mother them, for a nominal fee.  We asked why we needed the chicken and were told that guineas make terrible mothers, so it is necessary to have the eggs hatched by a chicken, which then thinks that it is the keets' mother and does all the things that chicken mothers do.  Keets don't look a whole lot like baby chickens, so it wasn't real clear to us how the hen manages to convince the rooster that the keets are his, but apparently he doesn't pay any support so he doesn't really give a rat's behind.  In any case, we cut the deal and set about building a chicken coop and a covered chicken yard. 

A couple of days after we finished the chicken yard, Lester and Twila's kin, Wanda,  showed up with four keets, a white hen and two poults, which are baby turkeys.  It turns out that the hen wasn't such a hot mother either and had stepped on two of the keets and trampled them into the mud soon after they pecked their way out of the shell.  So Wanda brought the poults in their place.  She assured us that turkeys are even better at eating grasshoppers than guineas.  After she was in her truck and about to pull out of our lane Wanda told us that, oh by the way, the hen would see the poults as threats to the keets and would try to kill them, so we had to keep them separated.  She also told us that we should make sure that the turkeys stayed inside out of the rain until they were fully grown because they didn't have enough sense to do that on their own and the chill would kill them.  In addition, she told us to be sure to give worming medicine to the poults because otherwise they would get worms and die.  Wanda said that she got her worming medicine, and other poultry supplies at the Dually Feed Store, one of two feed stores in Dually, the closest town to where we lived. So we kept the turkeys in a cage in a corner of the chicken yard that night and spent the next day subdividing the chicken space and building a coop for the poults, while trying hard not to step on any keets in the process.  Soon they were all snug in their little chicken wire beds.

The next morning we drove into Dually and stopped at the Dually Feed Store to get some poultry feed and worming medicine for the poults.  The man at the feed store told us that he didn't stock worming medicine because no one in the county used it.  We were a little worried about that, but the poults looked fine, and we were real busy that week, so we just blew off the worming medicine.

That night was a chilly one.  We had a VFD meeting after supper.  It was dark when we left the meeting and it had started to rain.  We mentioned that we had just gotten the turkeys and guineas and one of the folks at the meeting asked us if we had locked the poults in their house because, if they got wet, they would die.  So we rushed home and, sure enough, the poults were out cavorting in the rain.  By the light of a flashlight we gathered up the poults, wrapped them in dry towels and ran through the downpour to the dog kennel where we dried off the poults and put them in a box in the kennel house with a heat lamp to keep them warm.  We were soaked to the skin, but the turkeys were still alive the next morning.

It was about a week later when we learned that, while chicken wire keeps the birds in, it doesn't necessarily keep the varmints out.  My wife had gone out at first light to feed the poultry and noticed that one keet was missing, and the hen had herded the other three into the corner of the pen farthest from the coop.  My wife yelled for me to come out to see what the problem was, but from her description I was pretty sure that I already knew the answer.  After taking a quick look at the situation I sent my old girl into the house to get my trusty .22 and then I managed to get into the guineas' side of the poultry yard without letting the hen and keets out.  That was a trick because the hen kept trying to herd her little brood out the door whenever I opened it a crack to try to squeeze in.  When my wife returned I lifted up the coop and, sure enough, there was a big old chicken snake coiled up under it with a keet-sized lump in his belly.  When the hen saw him she went nuclear and tried to attack the snake and me too.  Meantime the remaining keets ran all over the pen flapping their wings and kicking up a fuss.  All that confusion made it easier for my wife to slip the varmint rifle to me but the birds kept getting in the way while I tried to get a bead on the snake.  Eventually, however, they all ended up at my side of the pen for a few seconds and I got a chance to turn the snake into a hatband.  The sound of the gun going off startled the hen and keets and it was ten minutes before I could get them on the far side of the pen again so that I could throw the snake out the door.  It was a heck of a way to start the day and we spent most of the rest of that day grumbling about all the things that could go wrong in the country.

To be honest, after three years of living beyond the sidewalks we were getting a little tired of country life.  It seemed like nothing had worked out the way we had planned.  We had had this vision of our kids and grandkids traveling over the river and through the woods to our country paradise for holiday dinners and get togethers.  That rarely happened though.    Although we were only around an hour or so away from one of our kids and an hour and a half from another, they seldom came out.  Whether it was because they had business out of state or other commitments or the country air had a bad effect on their allergies, or the ride was too long to make with young grandkids or whatever, it seemed like more often than not we ended up driving the two to three hour round trip to town to see them.  Those trips seemed to get longer every time we did it.  In fact, it was a long distance from our place to anywhere.  The closest store that was more than just a gas station was twelve miles away.  The closest real supermarket was 30 miles and it was that far to a hospital as well.

My old girl felt pretty isolated because she didn't have any friends nearby and she had to call long distance to talk to the friends she had made in the burbs over the many years we had lived there.  The phone service was not real reliable and the cell phones only worked if we drove a mile up the road to the top of a small hill.  If my wife wanted to meet her friends for lunch or to attend a club meeting, she had to drive a 100 mile round trip to do it.  Although I was officially retired, I was doing contract work much of the time we lived in the country and had to drive that 100 mile round trip to work as well.  After a year and a half I cut a deal to work part time from home with only one trip into town per week, but that didn't work out too well either because there was no broadband service available in our area, so all of my work over the Internet had to be done over a serial phone line.  TV reception was OK most of the time, using a small satellite dish, but at that time we couldn't get local channels over the satellite.  We couldn't get them with an antenna either because there was a hill between our house and most of the local TV stations.

We did a lot of grumbling that third spring and wondered whether we were really cut out for country life.  I put the garden in, though, and now that we had the poultry we looked forward to a summer without grasshoppers, although we were down to one turkey by that time.  We had noticed that one of them had started to make green droppings, which Wanda had told us was a sign of worms.  So we called her to ask what to do and she asked us if we had been giving them the worm medicine.  When we explained that we had talked to the man at the Dually Feed Store and he told us that we didn't need to worm the turkeys, Wanda snorted in disgust and told us that we had gone to the wrong feed store.  She meant the one in downtown Dually, which isn't called “The Dually Feed Store”.  So we went to that feed store and got some worm medicine and gave it to the turkeys on a regular basis, but one of them died anyway.  We still had the hen and the remaining guineas, though, and I started letting them out of the pen during the day so that they could eat the bugs in the garden as our neighbors had told us to do. That worked OK for a couple of days but by the third day the hen refused to go back in the pen and she and the guineas began roosting in the woods in the creek bottoms.  About once a week we would hear some squawking and the next morning there would be one less guinea in the garden.

By midsummer of that year we decided that Green Acres wasn't really the place to be, at least not for us.  So we called in a realtor and put our country dream home up for sale.  The realtor told us that it usually takes a long time to sell a place in the country so she talked us into signing a six month contract.  We thought that was OK because it would give us more time to look for a house in the suburbs.  My wife wanted to move back to the subdivision we had lived in before, but I wanted to be on the edge of the burbs because I had gotten used to not having neighbors close to the house.  So we started looking, with the expectation that we would have months to find a place.

One afternoon, less than a week after we had put the country place on the market, a young woman with a couple of kids came out to see it.  We sort of staged things by strewing ranch cubes along the fence to draw the cattle up where the prospective buyer could see them and my wife put a pie in the oven to give the house that homey aroma. We showed the woman the house and I took her and the kids on a tour of the barn and what was left of the orchard.  Then, after making sure that the cattle had moved into the field near Lester and Twila's place, I took our prospective buyer out to see the woods and back pasture.  As we returned to the house we walked past the poultry pen.  When I told the woman that we had some guineas and a turkey I wondered why my wife, who was carrying a paper bag, kept shaking her head behind the woman's back.  The reason became clear when we came abreast of the turkey pen and I saw that it was empty.  It turned out that the remaining turkey had picked that exact moment to go to that great meat-packing plant in the sky and my wife had the corpus delecti in the bag.

We only had three sets of prospective buyers come out to look at the place the first month it was on the market, but that was enough because the last couple bought it.  We even managed to sell them most of the equipment we had accumulated.  So the good news was that our country home was sold.  The bad news is that we didn't yet have a place to move into. 

We had spent the last month looking at houses in the burbs and had put a deposit on a lot in a subdivision on the fringes of the suburban area we had moved from three years before, but it would take six months to build a house on it.  About the time that it appeared that we had a buyer that was serious about buying our country place we stopped by the subdivision where our lot was located and noticed that there were several spec houses for sale.  We talked to a realtor about them and she showed us one which was partially finished when the buyer had backed out of the sale.  The realtor told us that we could put a deposit down on that house and, since it wasn't yet completed, we could make some changes to personalize it.  She said that if the contract on our country house didn't close by the time the suburban house was ready for move in, we could back out of the deal without losing our deposit.  So we signed an agreement to buy that house just a few days before the firm offer came in on the country place.

When the sale of the country place closed our suburban house was still six weeks from completion.  That worked out in our favor, though, because the buyers weren't able to move into the country house for another month.  So we ended up renting the place back from them for a month and then moving all of our stuff to a storage facility and bunking with one of our kids for two weeks before moving into the suburban house.  During the month we rented the country place from the new owners we had many changes of heart and “What the heck were we thinking?” moments, but before long we were back in the burbs and the country place was just a memory.

Retiring to the Country: It Takes a Village

Neighbors were all around us in the country, but meeting them required some effort, especially since the county we lived in had only 25,000 people in it, most of whom seemed to be related by blood or marriage or both.  We found that the best way to meet people was to join one of the organizations that most of the folks living in the area belonged to.  When we lived in the burbs my wife was a member of  the local chapter of a club run by the state extension service for women who live in rural or suburban areas.  While she retained that membership, she also joined the local chapter in the area near our country place.  Her hope was that the local club would offer opportunities to socialize with some of the other women in the area.  That's the way it worked in the club in the burbs.  She soon found, however, that the women in the country chapter of the club stuck to business at club meetings.  Since most of them were related to each other, they did their socializing on their own time and they rarely included newcomers in that activity.

It didn't take long for us to discover that one of the best organizations to join for folks who want to meet their neighbors in the country is the volunteer fire department.  Our VFD was always shorthanded and welcomed any new members, especially those who were willing to take calls at any time of the day or night.  We first joined as sort of provisional members who mostly just contribute money to keep the fire department running.  Before long, though, we were full-fledged members.  I went out on fire calls and helped with the maintenance of the fire station and equipment and my old girl eventually became the department's secretary.  This gave us a good opportunity to socialize because there were quite a few VFD members whose families hadn't lived in the area for five or six generations and, being outsiders themselves, they accepted us into the community. 

Our fire department was a pretty poor one in several ways.  We didn't have much money for equipment so the trucks and gear we had were mostly hand-me-downs from more prosperous fire departments.  Some of our stuff worked and some of it we worked on in an attempt to get it to work.  In addition, many of the VFD members had jobs in town, so if a fire sprang up in the daytime, there weren't many folks available to fight it.  Those who showed up for daytime fires were either full time farmers or ranchers or older retired folks like my wife and me.  There were very few respondents so both men and women went out on fire calls.

Nearly all of the fires that we fought were grass fires.  That seemed like a simple thing to me when I first joined the VFD, but on my very first fire call I found out that grass fires can be very dangerous if you don't know what you are doing.  We only had a couple of working water trucks so the first two people that got to the fire station drove out on the first truck.  The next two took the second truck, and everyone else drove their own vehicle to the site of the fire.   I was one of those tail end Charlies on the first fire that I helped to fight.  It was a grass fire in a large pasture.  When I got there I could only see one of the trucks out in the field.  The smoke was too thick to see the other one.  I pulled a shovel out of my pickup and ran across the field toward the firetruck.  Before I got there the wind shifted and the fire cut me off from the truck.  Fortunately there was a lot of burned out area to one side of me and I was able to reach it before the fire reached me.  Before long I was able to make it to the truck, which was spraying water on the fire while a group of folks tried to dig a firebreak to keep the fire from spreading to another field nearby.  We were all heads down digging when someone yelled that the wind had shifted again.  All we could see was smoke and flames in all directions.  So we all jumped on the truck and the driver tried to get us and the truck to safety.  There were some pretty scary times before she managed to find a path that would get us beyond the flames without broiling the entire crew in the process, but she did it and we all survived to spend the next two hours containing the blaze and saving a house and barn that were in the path.  After the fire was more or less out we spent another forty-five minutes putting out spot fires that sprang up from smoldering cow dung.  Yep, it works just like you see in the old cowboy movies.  The Indians burned buffalo chips because they make really good fuel and when you have a grass fire in a pasture where cows have been converting grass into cow patties all summer... well, you get the picture.

Another organization that we joined was the local chapter of the state wildlife association.   The basic idea here was that you would set aside some of your land as natural habitat for native plants and animals so that they wouldn't be pushed off the land.  We only had a few acres, but one of the creeks on our property cut us off from about two acres along the back during wet weather, so we hadn't done anything with that part of the property and it had gone back to nature all on its own.  We figured that that qualified us to join the wildlife association.  Except for attending meetings every month or so, the only wildlife association activity I engaged in was the annual deer count.  The objective was to see whether the county deer population was holding steady.  Since deer generally don't like to be out in broad daylight, the deer count was done at night.  On the appointed evening about twenty of us met up at the VFD and piled into two pickups to cruise the back roads of our part of the county, shining flashlights into the fields and counting deer.  It was a hot, dusty and moonless fall evening.  We hadn't had any rain for weeks and there was a burn ban in effect.  Ranchers and farmers often burn brush piles or even entire fields in order to clear them for planting hay or other crops.  During a drought, however, outdoor burning is banned.  Well, except for barbecues, of course.  This is Texas we're talking about, after all.

In any case, we crept as silently as we could over dirt roads so narrow that the brush along the road scraped both sides of the truck at the same time.  We talked in low voices and tried not to scare the deer.  Those that smoked cupped their hands around their cigarettes to try to keep the deer from seeing the glow.  Several of the smokers flipped their butts into the road.  I asked one of my neighbors if that was a good idea, considering the drought and burn ban.  He thought about it a minute and then replied that we probably would be OK because all but two of the people in the truck were VFD members.  I pointed out that while that was true, the truck, and its tank of water was back at the station.  He said that wouldn't matter because we had enough people and cold drinks to stamp out and drown the fire before it spread, although we might want to run the liquid through our kidneys first.  That sounded like a plan to me. 

We strained our eyes peering through the brush as we drove deeper and deeper into the bowels of the county.  When we thought we had reached a field where we could see well enough to tell if there were deer there, we would quickly turn on a hand-held lantern with a beam about as bright as a landing light.  That would stun the deer for a second or two while we all tried to count them.  Then we would turn out the light and argue about how many we had seen.  As the night wore on and the cooler got emptier we had more and more trouble agreeing on the count, but being country boys, we forged on.

A lot of the people who live in rural areas are there because they don't want any contact with other people.  They get really nervous when they see a truck full of suspicious-looking characters driving past their place with no lights on in the dead of night.  More than once our deer-stunning arc light revealed a shotgun-toting figure on the front porch.  Mostly, though, we ran into dogs.  Nearly everyone who lives in the country has at least one.  Most people have several.  So almost every time we passed a house we were met by baying, barking and growling hounds, pets and guard dogs.  Most of them were running loose and many of them chased the truck down the road.  We finally decided to call it quits when a monstrous hellhound of undetermined origin managed to get his front legs and a slavering mouthful of ginormous teeth over the tailgate.  We had to throw the last of the cooler contents at him to get him to back down.  That brought the deer count to an end for another year.

While we got to meet a lot of people through the wildlife association, none of them lived near us.  Over time, though we met most of the neighbors who lived on our road.  The property on Lester and Twila's side of our place was owned by their daughter, Wanda, and her husband, Jed, who lived a few miles away.  We met them through Lester and Twila.  Jed and Wanda raised cattle on the acreage next to our place as well as on several other small places around the county.  Eventually we came to an agreement with them to let them harvest our front hayfield and run cattle in our creek bottoms and back pasture.  They cut a hole in the fence between our property and theirs and strung a hot wire along the top of the near creek bottom to keep the cattle out of the hayfield and our garden and orchard.  That allowed us to keep our ag exemption and also relieved us of the burden of maintaining that part of the property and the fence that enclosed it.  I liked getting a constant supply of organic fertilizer for the garden, and the grandkids liked feeding ranch cubes to the cattle, but I sort of missed being able to tramp around in the wooded area along the creek bottoms.

We learned pretty quickly that the fence only kept the cattle in the creek bottoms if they really wanted to stay there.  It happened that the barbed wire fence between our property and Jed and Wanda's had been constructed with the wire on our side of the posts.  That worked OK for keeping cattle on our side of the fence, but one time when the cattle on Jed and Wanda's side decided that the hay in our front field was a lot more tasty than the grass on their side, they just pushed against the wire until the staples popped out and two cows were soon grazing contentedly on our hay and working their way toward the orchard.  I managed to repair the fence before any more cattle pushed through, and my wife and son  shooed the two errant cows down the field toward the gate in the hot wire so that they could get them into the creek bottom before the rest of the herd made it to the gate.  My son was just about to open the gate when both of the cows jumped right over the hot wire. We just stood there with our mouths open.  We had had no idea that cows could jump.  I just hoped they couldn't fly.

Retiring to the country: Running into Reality

During the years my wife and I yearned for a simpler life in the country we pictured waking up to the sound of birds singing and cattle lowing while the sun rose majestically over a misty meadow.  Then we moved beyond the sidewalks and reality smacked us in the face.

To be sure, the sunrises and sunsets were spectacular, but the peace and quiet we had anticipated was only a sometime thing.  Farmers and ranchers get up early because they have a lot of work to do, often before going into town to their day jobs.  So it was not at all unusual to wake up to the sound of mowers in the hayfield across the fence.  Night time wasn't so quiet either.  Coyotes use dry creeks as highways, so many nights they would wake us up by fighting over a kill in the creek bottom fifty feet from our bedroom window.  When the coyotes weren't yapping and howling, the guard dogs in the neighboring fields were barking at them all night.  So the peace and quiet didn't quite live up to our expectations.

Still, we got more comfortable as time went on, and we felt more secure after the entire property was fenced.  It didn't take long, however, for us to realize that the fence just gave the illusion of security.  By the time it was a month old we had coyotes and dogs walking through it like it wasn't there, deer jumping over it and cattle pushing through it from the outside. 

The incident that finally made us understand that the fence didn't provide security involved some disappearing hay bales.  In our state you can get a tax break if your land is used for agricultural purposes.  So we had cut a deal to sell the hay from our fields to a local rancher who mowed, baled and hauled it away.  There were several large round bales in our front hayfield waiting for pickup one morning when we left to run some errands in town, so we were careful to lock the gate behind us on our way out.  When we returned that afternoon I got out of the truck to unlock the gate and noticed that the hay was gone. I checked the lock but it was just as we had left it.  We were sure that someone had stolen the hay, but we couldn't understand how that had happened because the fence had not been cut and the lock wasn't damaged.  We called the rancher who bought our hay to report the theft and he told us that he had picked it up while we were out.  I asked him how he got in the gate and he told me that he just unbolted the hinges and put them back when he left.  So much for security.

At least the barn was secure.  All of the doors locked and they couldn't be removed from the outside. The barn was really a 30x50 metal pole building that was divided into five 10x30 bays.  One of those had a concrete floor so I could use it for a shop.  That was great because I finally had room to work on big projects as well as a place to store them out of sight until they were finished.  The downside of the metal pole barn was that it leaked and water also condensed on the underside of the roof and dripped down on the equipment and tools stored below.  So we had to cover everything with tarps to keep them dry.  We had planned to use part of the barn as a garage, but that didn't work out well either.  It turned out that the ten-foot doors we had installed were about three inches too short to accommodate our travel trailer.  So we decided that we would park it in back of the barn and put the car and truck inside.  Unfortunately, mice and other critters soon took up residence in the barn and gnawed the insulation off the pipes on the SUV engine, so we ended up just parking the cars in the drive. 

The pole barn was great for storing equipment, though, and that was good because we began to accumulate a lot of it.  We didn't have a hobby farm tractor, but we had a heavy duty riding mower for mowing the yard and some paths around the hayfields.  We also had a DR field and brush mower, which is the only machine I have ever bought that more than lived up to its advertising hype.  It was essential for clearing out the creek bottoms and the rough back part of the property.  Without it we couldn't have used those areas.  We also bought a large tiller for the acre and a half vegetable garden that I put in the first year on the land.

My wife loved to use the riding mower.  That was a good thing because it took two days of mowing to do the yard and walking paths.  We had to keep them clear because there are a lot of fire ants in our area  and a fair number of rattlers and copperheads as well.  We wanted to be able to spot them before stepping on them and you can't do that when the grass is high.  The riding mower almost caused our first major accident though.  My wife was mowing the newly planted orchard one day when the left front wheel dropped in a gopher hole and she nearly went over the hood and under the mowing deck.  She managed to hold on, though, and just ended up with a strained back.

Gophers were a big problem at our place.  They dug holes in the hayfields, garden and yard.  We tried everything to get rid of them including gopher traps loaned to us by Lester and Twila and gopher poison, which we were reluctant to use at first, but tried as a last resort.  Finally one of our neighbors, who was having similar problems, told us that he was going to borrow a gopher machine from his son and would treat our hayfield for twenty-five dollars.  We gladly said yes.  A gopher machine, by the way, is something that is pulled behind a tractor like a corn drill except that instead of putting corn seeds in the ground, it inserts pellets of gopher poison about six inches below the surface.  While the neighbor started an initial pass with the machine just inside the front hayfield fence out by the road,  I went down to the orchard to water the trees.  I turned on the valve and was surprised to see that no water came out.  About that time I heard the neighbor shouting to me from across the field.  It seems that our water line, which was just pvc, was less than six inches under the surface out by the road fence and the gopher machine had broken the line.  We shut off the water at the meter out by the road and set to work repairing the line.  After two hours and a twenty-five mile round trip to the closest hardware store for supplies, we got it fixed.  Then we had to flush the entire water system for two hours to make sure that we got all the contamination out.  We never did get the hayfield treated for gophers.  We just learned to live with them.

Gophers weren't the only varmints we had to deal with though.  The snakes and coyotes caused some problems too, but I think the worst pests were the grasshoppers.  Every summer they hit the property in droves of biblical proportions.  There must have been five or six different varieties and they were all huge, voracious and evil to the core.  When we walked across the fields they jumped up and hit us in the face so hard it almost knocked us down.  They got in the tops of our boots when we walked up the lane to get the mail or newspaper.  But the worst thing of all was that they devoured anything that was green and growing.  They ate the silk out of the corn so that the ears only had about half as many kernels as they should.  They ate the tops off of all the onions and garlic.   They even ate the bark off the apple trees.  We tried everything to get rid of them.  We made sure to cut all the grass back from fence lines so they wouldn't have a place to breed.  We used grasshopper-specific bacteria to try to kill the little munchers organically.  We even resorted to using pesticides on the garden and ornamental plants.  None of that really worked.  One day, after I had replanted a photina hedge for the third time in as many years, and after I had dug out the one remaining tree in the orchard, I sat on the back porch and cracked open a beer to drown my sorrows and damn if there wasn't a pair of grasshoppers fornicating on our back porch railing!  I guess I lost it about that time because I picked up a BB gun that was leaning against the wall and shot the damn grasshoppers with it. That felt so good that I spent the next hour drinking beer and shooting grasshoppers off the porch railing.  It didn't save any plants, but it kept a new generation of grasshoppers from being made.

Dealing with varmints was a learning experience, but we learned lots of other things when we moved out beyond the burbs.  One of them was that trips into town are usually an all day affair.  That can be a problem if you have inside pets.  By the time we had been in the country about a year and a half we had lost both of the old labs that had moved there from the suburbs with us.  Before they were gone, however, we acquired a hand-me-up mongrel that had been our daughter's dog before she was married but wasn't able to get along with the grandkids when they got old enough to toddle after her.  The mongrel had only been with us about six months when my wife bought me a brand new lab puppy for my birthday.  The puppy and the old dog got along well when we were home with them, but they wreaked havoc on the house when we were gone.  The mongrel had separation anxiety and the lab puppy was ... well, it was a lab puppy.  Enough said.  We weren't comfortable about leaving either of the dogs outside when we were gone because the mongrel was really a house dog and the puppy was too young to leave in the yard by himself.  So we decided to build a kennel to keep them in when we were away from the property. 

We needed something that would be strong enough to keep the dogs in and predators out and we wanted to build it such that we could separate the dogs because the puppy pestered the older dog to death.  Also, since the older dog was a house dog, we decided that the kennel needed to be heated and air conditioned.  In addition, I wanted to be able to clean the dog's facilities without crawling inside of a doghouse to do it.  We ended up building a 10x10 building with a covered 10x5 porch on a 10x15 concrete slab.  The building was so large that my wife insisted that it match the house.  So we made it out of rough-sawn cedar siding with a metal roof.  The run was 20x30 with a divider that gave each dog its own 10x30 foot run, if we chose to close the gate between them.  We located the kennel next to the barn so that we could run electricity from there to the kennel building.  The first time we left the dogs alone in the kennel we opened the gate between the runs so they could be together.  We were only gone an hour but by the time we got back the mongrel had injured herself trying to get through the chain link fence and the lab had torn off a $75 dog door and had dug a hole in the soft sand next to the fence so deep that we couldn't see him at first when we drove up to the barn.  So we added an electrified fence both inside and outside the kennel and buried chain link under the fence to keep the dogs from digging out and the coyotes from digging in.  The kennel started out as a small project but the cost kept going up.  By the time it was finished it had ballooned into a $6000 money pit that had all the neighbors shaking their heads.   Of course, they did that a lot.

Retiring to the Country: Rancho Deluxe

After years of dreaming about it we had bitten the bullet and retired to a place beyond the sidewalks.

Our new country home stood in the middle of a coastal bermuda hay field that had been part of a ranch.  There were no outbuildings on the property and no trees near the house.  The front of the property was fenced with barbed wire except for a gap where our driveway joined the road.  Another barbed wire fence separated one side of our ten acres from a neighboring pasture with about thirty head of cattle on it.  The back property line ran down the middle of a crooked, and usually dry, creek bed.  There was a barbed wire fence on the far side of the creek.  It was in bad shape, but we didn't know that at the time we bought the place because the brush was too thick to get back there.  The remaining side of the property, which was nearly a quarter of a mile long, adjoined another ten-acre property with a new house on it.  The back two-thirds of that side ran along and across a dry creek bed and through a patch of woods.  None of that side was fenced. 

When we moved into the place the phones had not yet been connected to the land line.  That wouldn't have been a big problem except that we had to drive a mile down the road in order to get cell phone reception.  So we pressured the phone company to get a connection as soon as possible.  Sure enough, one day we came home to find that the phone line had been installed... sort of.  The installer had run what looked like an indoor phone cord from a box a quarter mile away, along and across the dirt road in front of our house and 500 feet down our drive, then across the end of the hayfield to the far side of our house.  And there it stayed for three weeks until a crew finally came out to bury it.  That should have given us a clue that things were going to be a little bit different from what we were used to, but the honey moon was still shining so we just smiled and hummed a few bars from the “Green Acres” theme.

The phone line wasn't the only reminder that we weren't living in the burbs anymore.  In the area where our country place was located it was common for the mailman to require all of the people living near each other to put their mailboxes up in a cluster in front of the property at the nearest intersection to their place.  In our case that meant that our box was in front of the house occupied by Lester and Twila, the retired farmers who had owned the property from which our ten acres of independence were carved.

Lester and Twila loved to talk, and at first we were delighted that we lived next to them because they filled us in on a lot of local history.  The downside of having our mailbox in front of Lester and Twila's place soon became apparent though.  They spent most of the day on their front porch.  If they saw you stop to get your mail, they expected you to sit and talk with them awhile.  That was OK if you had the time, but when you were on your way home after a hard day at work, and you had a long list of things to get done before turning in for the night, it wasn't such a good thing.  So even though we liked Lester and Twila, and we understood that they loved having company, we soon found ourselves swooping in to grab the mail and heading back out again without looking in the direction of their porch.  Of course, the next time we did stop to talk to them, they'd say “We saw you pick up your mail yesterday.  Didn't you hear us holler howdy?”  And we'd say. “Well, you know, that doggone truck makes so much noise we can't hear ourselves think when we're in it.”  I don't think they bought it, but they were too polite to tell us we were blowing smoke.

The neighbors on the other side of our property were a young couple who, like us, had never lived in the country before.  They had lots of big plans for their place that were pretty much at odds with our dreams of country life.  The first time they told us that they were going to dam the creek that ran from their property to ours and cover the bottom with concrete so they could use it for a koi pond, we were about ready to call out the cavalry.  It didn't take long, however, for us to realize that they were more into talk than action. 

At the time we bought the property I was doing contract work that required me to make a two-hour round trip into the city every day.  My wife was home all day, but most of the things we planned to do with the place were too much for her to do alone.  So we cut our list of must have items down to two things that we could work on in the evenings and on weekends when I was home.  The first thing we did was put up a shed to house the mower and other outside tools.  That only took a weekend, but for a couple of office workers like us, it was hard work.  The other item we needed right away was a yard fence.  We had two dogs that weren't used to roaming all over the country and we knew that the woods and fields were frequented by coyotes and feral hogs.  So we decided to fence three-quarters of an acre around the house in order to keep the dogs from becoming a meal for the local wild life.  For nearly two weeks we worked on  that fence every evening after I came home from the office and every night I was so exhausted that I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.  I didn't really realize how worn out I was until a couple of friends stopped by for a visit one evening about two weeks after we had moved in and I fell asleep on the couch in mid-conversation.  I never did that again, but it was probably three months before I got used to all of the physical work involved in owning a country place.

We didn't do all the work ourselves though.  There were several things that we just couldn't tackle.  One job that we contracted out was the construction of a 30x50-foot pole barn to store the stuff that wouldn't fit into the shed. Another was the addition of a back porch.  When we bought the house it had a divided porch on the front and a small one on the side closest to the driveway.  Those porches were on the southwest and northwest sides so they were were sunny and uncomfortable by late afternoon.  We decided that we had to have a place where we could sit in the shade in the evening so we cut a deal with the builder of our house to add a covered porch across the entire back wall.  It took a couple of weeks for the construction crew to show up, but when they did, my old girl got quite a surprise.  She had become used to the privacy of country living by then and was happily mopping the kitchen floor in her skivvies when she looked up to see the builder's crew at the door, ready to tear the roof off and add the back porch.  That's when my wife started lobbying for some fencing and a locked gate at the top of the driveway.

I dragged my feet on the fencing, though, because I was busily engaged in tending an acre and a half garden and a small orchard.  However, a couple of incidents soon convinced me that my wife was right about the fence.  The first thing was that a bull got loose from an adjoining ranch and wandered into our front hayfield.  By the time we spotted him he was grazing his way across the field and moving toward our infantile, and unfenced, orchard.  I was not going to stand by and watch a ton of steak on the hoof bulldoze the newly planted fruit trees that I had spent hours carefully tending and watering in the midsummer heat.  So I walked out in the field and waving my new cowboy hat, and probably looking like the dudes in “City Slickers”, I tried to drive the bull away.  He just gave me a haughty glance over his shoulder and kept on munching and moving closer to the apple trees.  So I drove the pickup into the field and tried to intimidate him with that.  No luck.  Finally I took out my 12-gauge and fired off a 3-inch magnum buckshot round about ten feet behind the bull.  That got his attention.  It didn't scare him though.  He just looked back over his shoulder again and slowly ambled over to our neighbors' field.  Mission accomplished; but now I understood the need for fencing.  So, even though the temperature got up to about 103 degrees in the afternoon that week,  the very next day my wife and I began to build a fence down the long side of the property, over the front creek and through the woods to the back creek.

We were in the process of finishing a stretch of fence from the road to the near side of the front creek, just about dying from the heat and wondering if we should give it up until cooler weather, when another incident happened that made it clear that we needed to fence the entire property right away.  I was tightening a strand of barbed wire when I heard the sound of hooves on the packed dirt of the driveway.  I looked up and saw five horses trotting down the drive, headed straight for the garden that I had spent much of the last three months carving out of the back hayfield.  I dropped my fencing tools and ran down the other side of the yard fence to try to head them off.  Believe it or not, the horses outran me.  By the time I reached them they had pulled up short of the woods and were milling around right in the middle of the garden.  I did my “City Slickers” number again and managed to get them headed back up the drive toward the front hayfield.  The bad news was that they trampled half of the garden before I could turn them. The good news was that my wife, who was in the house at the time, had seen the herd run down the drive and had called a neighbor who kept horses to ask for help.  By the time I got the horses back in the front field the neighbor was already there with a bridle in hand to take control of the lead horse.  Even better, she knew who they belonged to and was able to lead them back home. 

Most of the trampled plants sprang back up again by the next morning.  So we kept the garden damage to a minimum, and got some good organic fertilizer as well, but the incident made us redouble our fencing effort.  Before long we had the entire property fenced.  We also built a 50-foot chute with a locked gate at the end of the drive so that we could pull up to the road with a trailer on the back of the truck and lock the gate to keep wandering stock off our land. 

We finally felt like we were settled into the country life; but that just goes to show how naive we were.

Retiring to the Country: The Egg and Us

Even though I was raised in the city and my wife grew up in the burbs, we always had this fantasy of retiring to the country.  I think my wife was seduced by Martha Stewart and movies like “The Egg and I”.  She thought it would be great to buy a piece of property with an old farmhouse, fix it up and decorate it in today's idea of country style, with all the modern conveniences of course.  I've always been a gardener, so I liked the idea of having unlimited gardening space.  I also liked the idea of wandering across my own fields when the spirit moved me instead of walking a path laid out by someone else.  I don't think we ever seriously believed we would move to the country.  We just dreamed about it  while we looked at country decorating magazines, read books like “Five Acres and Independence” and visited places like Malabar Farm, which Louis Bromfield wrote about in “Pleasant Valley”.

Although we pretty much considered retiring to the country to be a warm and cozy dream, as I look back I realize that we had been working toward that move from early in our marriage.  From the time in the early sixties when we got our hands on the inaugural copy of “The Mother Earth News”  we talked often about “getting back to the land” and tried to be more self-sufficient.  During most of the sixties and early seventies we grew a lot of our own vegetables, filling the pantry with canned, frozen and dried goodies from the garden.  We had some pretty big gardens during much of that time, but I still dreamed about having enough space to plant corn or put in a proper bed of asparagus.  When I had about four years to go before my first retirement, my wife's brother, who was living in an old farmhouse on 150 acres in southeastern Ohio, offered to sell us his place for $60,000.  We knew we could afford that, but the mineral rights for all of the farms in that area had been sold during the depression and a coal company was strip mining a farm half a mile from my brother-in-law's place, so we were reluctant to buy land in that area.  Also, we didn't want to buy a place and then rent it out for four years before we could live in it.  So we decided to pass.

We kept dreaming about retiring beyond the sidewalks, though, and as we neared retirement age we decided that we had to live out our dream and trade our suburban house for a place in the country.  We thought we were probably too old to try homesteading by that time, but the idea of living in the country had appealed to us for so long that we felt that we just had to give it a try. 

Three years passed before we were in a position to act on our decision.  During that time we realized that we weren't sure how to turn our dream into reality.  In the end we just read a lot of books written by folks who had actually made the move to the country and talked a lot about the place we would buy and how we would fix it up and live the good life.  When I had only a year and a half to go until I could retire we started actively looking.  Our initial plan was to look for a place in Ohio where the Bromfields had had such a pleasant experience.  The first thing we discovered was that Ohio land prices had gone up considerably since my wife's brother had tried to sell us his place.  We were looking for 100 acres and it seemed as though that was not going to be affordable.  We looked for land in other states too but couldn't find anything that would work for us.  When I reached the point where retirement was only about six months away my company offered a buyout package that I could not refuse.  So my wife and I decided that, ready or not, it was time to make the move.  I took the early retirement buyout and, after a couple of months to spruce up the house we had lived in for almost twenty years, we put our home in the burbs on the market.

During the time our suburban house was up for sale, we decided that we should try to find a place close to our kids rather than moving out of state.  We wanted to be out far enough that we really were in the country and not just on the edge of the burbs, but we also wanted to be within an hour's drive of our kids.  It didn't take much searching for us to realize that land in our preferred area was too expensive to allow us to afford the hundred acres that we wanted to buy.  We agreed that we would settle for less land if the house and property had the features we wanted.

When the house in the burbs had been on the market for about three months, my wife found an ad for an open house at a country place that sounded just right to her.  It was in the next county from the one we lived in and the price was in our range.  So we got directions from the realtor and headed out to the country for a look.  The drive out to the property almost sold us before we had even seen the house.  We drove on progressively smaller, hillier and windier roads until we turned off a two-lane paved road onto what looked like someone's private ranch road.  I was sure that my wife had gotten the directions wrong because the track was so narrow that the bushes lining the sides scraped our truck as we drove.  After pushing on for about a mile and a half we came to an even narrower dirt driveway with a “For Sale” sign out front.  We knew there was supposed to be a house on the property, but we couldn't see it from the top of the drive because it sat back five hundred feet from the road, with a low hill between the road and the house.

When we got to the house there were several pickups parked in front.  The house itself was kind of a disappointment at first.  We had had this dream of buying an “If Walls Could Talk” place.  We pictured an old farm or ranch house with a barn, smokehouse and all the buildings you typically find on a working farm or ranch from the early part of the last century.    The house we were looking at wasn't quite like that.  It was a new limestone and cedar story and a half that sat in the middle of a coastal Bermuda hay field with no outbuildings in sight.   It was on a pretty piece of property though.  There was a sometime creek down one side of the property and another across the back.  Most of the trees on the property were along those creeks.  Although the house only had ten acres of land with it, and only 350 feet of frontage on the road, the property line ran a quarter of a mile from the road to the back creek.  A little over half of the property was hay fields and the rest was wooded.  The house was one of several similar houses on the road.  It turned out that a small builder had bought about 150 acres, divided it up into tracts of 10 to 30 acres each and then built custom limestone and cedar houses on them.  Although most of the houses were built under contract to the prospective owner, the one we looked at was a spec house. 

My wife was ready to buy the house on the spot, but there was the little matter of selling our current home in the suburbs first.  Besides, I don't like to rush into anything and I was disappointed in the size of the property and the fact that it had deed restrictions.  We talked to the builder at length, however, and discovered that the restrictions weren't onerous.  Our chat with the builder made us realize that we would definitely have to sell our current house before buying because he wasn't interested in a contingency deal.  We also discovered that most of the 150 acres had been sold.  After thinking things over for , oh like a minute, we decided to buy an option on another ten acres a quarter mile down the road, just in case the spec house was gone and we didn't find anything more to our liking by the time the house we were living in was sold.  It was really the spec house that interested us though.  We talked about it all the way home.  My wife was convinced it was our dream house, but I wasn't so sure.

After nearly a month we finally got a firm offer on our suburban place so we called the builder and found out that the spec house hadn't been sold yet.  We told him that we were about to close on the sale of our existing home and that we wanted to buy the spec house.  After some negotiation we cut a deal to put some money down on the country place in order to hold it, but the builder wouldn't close the deal until we had completed the sale of our existing house.  That was a problem because we had to turn over the keys to the suburban house at closing, which meant that we had to have all of our stuff out by that time.  We managed to convince the builder to let us move our stuff into the spec house before we actually closed on it, but he continued to show it to prospective buyers right up until we signed on the dotted line.  That made me pretty nervous but everything worked out OK and we were soon the proud owners of a home in the country.  Then the real fun began ...

What's it All About?

When I reached the age where I began thinking about retirement I saw myself as sort of a cross between Ozzie Nelson and Grandpa Walton, sitting in front of a roaring fireplace, smoking a pipe and wearing a cardigan sweater, maybe with snow falling softly outside, reading “The Wind in the Willows” to the grandchildren sitting on my knee.  That was in between traveling with my old girl to exotic corners of the country in an RV like Charles Kuralt.  Of course that was when I wasn't tending my acre and a half victory garden or painting folk art masterpieces or making one of a kind furniture in my New Yankee Workshop or raking in scads of money with my part time home-based consulting business.  That's what I saw in my mind as I moved from my forties into my early fifties.  Then I took advantage of an early retirement offer at the company I had worked for for nearly thirty years and ran headlong into reality.

So right up front I've got to say that my retirement hasn't matched my dream, and from conversations I have had with other folks in my age group, I think that's pretty typical.  There are several reasons for that. 

For one thing our grandkids are so busy with school and extracurricular activities that they rarely come over to Grandpa and Grandma's house these days.  They're old enough now that, when they do come for a visit, they don't spend a lot of time interacting.  They're more interested in texting their friends and watching old reruns of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” on hulu.  I'm not sure why I had that Grandpa Walton picture in my head because, now that I think of it, when I was a kid and my family visited my grandparents we kids were pretty bored and didn't spend too much time interacting with them.  I think we spent most of our time there watching “The Cisco Kid” and “The Range Rider” because Grandpa was a big fan of westerns.

If you remember those TV shows then you've probably guessed that I'm in that pre-baby-boomer group of people that was born during World War II.  We're not part of “The Greatest Generation”  and we're not really baby boomers.  We're sort of “the Cusp Generation”; the result of that last weekend in Paris, Texas before a quick train trip to the coast and an all expenses paid cruise to Omaha Beach courtesy of Uncle Sam.  Most of us grew up with that 1950's “work at one company until you're used up and then collect your pension for a few years before you kickoff” mentality.   As we all know, times have gotten hard, most companies have scrapped pensions for 401K's, and the bottom line is that most of us don't have the retirement income we thought we would have.  Goodbye to the RV and New Yankee Workshop.

Following that “work until you're about ready to kick the bucket” logic, I had always planned to work until I was 65 or so, but when my company started offering buyouts to folks who took an early retirement leave of absence I jumped right on it.  I applied for the buyout several times but was always turned down because I was a “critical” employee.  Eventually the company altered the early retirement benefit so that it was much lower than the initial plan and then they decided that I wasn't critical anymore.  So I was able to get out early, albeit with a lot less cash than I had expected and with no other source of income.  Even when the pension eventually kicked in it wasn't enough to live on, so I went back to work four or five times before I finally retired for good a few years ago.  At least I think I'm retired for good this time.  From time to time I still get the urge to jump back into the job pool again, but then I sober up and the feeling passes.

All of the on again, off again retirement activity I've had in the last decade has allowed me to accumulate a lot of retirement and semi-retirement experience.  I've put time in both the private and public sector.  I've worked for large companies and startups founded by people younger than some of my clothes.  Some of my retirement work experience was full-time and some was part-time. I worked some of that time from home and some at offices.  During that time I've retired to the country and lived in the burbs.  I've weathered a couple of economic cycles and made a lot of mistakes and learned a lot in the process. 

Eventually it occurred to me that there are probably a lot of other folks out there who are thinking hard about retirement, or who are just beginning to deal with the reality of living on a fixed income, who might benefit from hearing about some of the things my wife and I have experienced.  So that's really the main focus of this blog.

What I plan to do here is to deal with all of the things that I wish I had thought of before I retired as well as to offer some suggestions on what to do during retirement.  I intend to address the problem of living on a fixed income, although I am by no means qualified to advise anyone on financial matters.  I'll just detail things that my old girl and I and our retired friends are doing to stretch our budgets and enjoy life on a lot less income than we used to have.  In addition, since I have a background in the high tech industry and I know from talking to friends of my age group that many of them have had a difficult time dealing with all the neat high tech gadgets and software that are available these days, I'll devote some space to that subject as well.

If these things don't interest you, there's no use reading any further.  If you are interested in any of these things, well then, set a bookmark and watch this space.