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Where do I begin? Perhaps with the Jimmy Crater regime, when my wife and I decided the big city (Dallas) was a good place to be a LONG way from. We began our search for a suitable place to hibernate, sold our 3-yr-old house in Mesquite, and moved in with her mother. Needless to say, we found a place to our liking pretty shortly thereafter.
The search took us to northeast Texas, where we chased down an ad for some acreage on the G.I. Bill. After a couple of hours of driving, we arrived there only to find the place had just been sold. We continued our trek eastward until we found a realtor within smelling distance of Arkansas and Louisiana. We told him we wanted 35 to 50 acres in the middle of nowhere, and he met our request beyond our wildest dreams. We went back a week later and closed the deal on 35 acres of mixed pine and hardwood, and we've been here for 37 years now. We were both working in Dallas for DISD, and at the end of the school year my wife said, "I'm going to the farm. You come when you can." She left her cushy (yeah, right!) job as a teacher aide and became a full-time farmer. One of us was going to have to have an outside job, but none was available in this part of the world to someone of my qualifications. I ran back and forth for 9 years, staying with her mother during the week and coming home on weekends, until the sheriff's office here had an opening.
Over the years we've raised rabbits, chickens, goats, turkeys, geese, ducks and calves. Currently we're down to 8 chickens, 7 goats, 6.5 cats and a dog. We've discovered the joys of living on an unpaved county road, at the dead end of the electric line, and with a phone line that goes out every time it rains. We built a barn, cleared and planted a garden, and did all the homesteady things one might expect.
Well, that's the Reader's Digest version of our story.
The search took us to northeast Texas, where we chased down an ad for some acreage on the G.I. Bill. After a couple of hours of driving, we arrived there only to find the place had just been sold. We continued our trek eastward until we found a realtor within smelling distance of Arkansas and Louisiana. We told him we wanted 35 to 50 acres in the middle of nowhere, and he met our request beyond our wildest dreams. We went back a week later and closed the deal on 35 acres of mixed pine and hardwood, and we've been here for 37 years now. We were both working in Dallas for DISD, and at the end of the school year my wife said, "I'm going to the farm. You come when you can." She left her cushy (yeah, right!) job as a teacher aide and became a full-time farmer. One of us was going to have to have an outside job, but none was available in this part of the world to someone of my qualifications. I ran back and forth for 9 years, staying with her mother during the week and coming home on weekends, until the sheriff's office here had an opening.
Over the years we've raised rabbits, chickens, goats, turkeys, geese, ducks and calves. Currently we're down to 8 chickens, 7 goats, 6.5 cats and a dog. We've discovered the joys of living on an unpaved county road, at the dead end of the electric line, and with a phone line that goes out every time it rains. We built a barn, cleared and planted a garden, and did all the homesteady things one might expect.
Well, that's the Reader's Digest version of our story.
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