My Work: City Mice Part 2

He's got this dream about buyin' some land
He's gonna give up the booze and the one night stands
And then he'll settle down in a quiet little town
And forget about everything
Gerry Rafferty, Baker Street

First we lived in Toronto on a lot fifteen feet wide and a hundred feet long. Then we moved to a suburban half-acre and our garden was bigger than the Toronto lot, plus we had twenty-five fruit trees. We also planted grapes, strawberries raspberries, and blueberries, then built a gambrel-roofed two-story shed and playhouse that looked like a real barn that had shrunk in the rain. Compared to our neighbors, we looked like farmers.

We had twenty bales of straw delivered one fall to cover the berries and mulch around the fruit trees. A neighbor wandered over and asked me what it was for. “The pigs,” I replied. He just walked away, then probably called the bylaw officer...

Our dream was to buy some land and build a solar-powered house. We wanted clean air, soil, and water so we could really raise our own animals. My parents measured success by having the money to buy from the store instead of relying on homemade. I measured success by having the time to grow and make my own. We wanted room to stretch out. We have all that, now that we live in Jack’s house, but if we had known how much work it would be, we might never have made the move.

Lots of people dream about moving to the country, but we found that the romantic notion of idyllic rural life and the gritty reality are as far apart as the earth and the stars. There are tremendous rewards from living in the country, especially the way we do, but they come at a price. The country has made me ten times more angry, discouraged, tired, and bug-bitten than I ever was before.

We looked at twenty or so properties over three years. The ones we could afford were too small or too close to highways and railroad tracks. Then we found some land north of Tamworth. No power or phone lines; just soil, rocks, and water. We knew we could make our own power from the sun and wind, but we thought a phone line would be nice until we heard the price for poles and wires - $25,000. We couldn’t buy the property unless we found others to share that cost, so we wrote to everyone living further up the road to se if they might be interested in phone lines, too.

The property fell through, but we received a reply to our letter. A man named Jack wrote back that he would normally be willing to share the cost, but he had put his property up for sale. So we went to look at it. Eighty acres, a good small barn, two ancient log shacks, a man-made pond, and a solar powered house with a foot-thick foundation. After a battery of soil and water tests that all came back clean, we bought Jack’s farm.

Of course, the house needed renovations to accommodate a four-fold population explosion, and we had big plans: another bedroom, a family room, a basement shop extension. We allowed four months and half the equity from our suburban house and we weren’t even close. It took a year and all our equity.

Welcome to the country.