SHE'S GONE COUNTRY!

There’s an old saying: “Hindsight is 20-20.” Looking back on my family’s move to a fairytale-beautiful acreage in the country, I must agree that the view from four years on is not at all what we expected.

Four years ago, Chuck and I and Son 2 and his family moved onto four acres of woods and pasture thirty miles outside of Portland, Oregon. The property sits on a hillside overlooking a small valley in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. This is one of the most beautiful spots you could ever find!

The original plan was that Son 2 and his wife would finish college (both were returning students) and build a house on the property. Meanwhile they and their four kids would live with us in the big four-bedroom house. Son 2 worked for his dad in his home-based consulting business and attended classes at a nearby technical college. Our daughter-in-law commuted to PSU in downtown Portland.

Chuck was the only one of us with any livestock experience. Although he grew up in the city, as a teenager he had a horse and worked off  boarding fees cleaning stalls and doing odd jobs at the stables. He also worked in a nursery and was in Future Farmers of America in high school. Thank God for that!

I’d always wanted alpacas. Chuck bought me three for Mother’s Day. He and Son 2 built them a shed in the pasture during a week of pouring rain. (I’m sure it was an omen.) We rented a horse trailer and went to get them.

My first inkling that alpacas weren’t exactly the animals I thought they were came when the lady we bought them from put on a raincoat “because they won’t be happy about getting in the trailer, and when they’re not happy, they spit—a lot!” She wasn’t kidding! Suffice it to say it took four adults to get them into the trailer.

Alpacas look like friendly, cuddly animals. They are more like aloof cats. Sometimes crabby, seventy-pound cats that may kick or body-slam you when you least expect it!

FRONT OF OUR HOUSE

Soon we added free-range chickens and three baby goats to the livestock. The chickens were fun to watch and the eggs were wonderful, but they dug up the flowers and pooped all over the porch.

In fact, dealing with poop—alpaca, chicken and goat—occupied a lot of our time. It’s the hardest part of having livestock, in my opinion. The only thing harder for me was worrying about the livestock because to me, they were pets.

I worried about coyotes attacking the alpacas down in the pasture all the time. The only defense alpacas have is running away and bleating an alarm call. Put them in a pasture, and they can’t even run away. Luckily, the coyotes stayed away. But false “alarms” had me running down to the pasture every other day. They bleated at the neighbor using her walker to go down to her mailbox. They bleated at people walking and cycling on the main road. They bleated at the garbage truck. Never once did they bleat at anything dangerous!

I worried about the goats eating something poisonous, because the people who lived on the property before us had landscaped with trees, bushes and flowers that are poisonous to goats. At night, we kept the little goats in the barn in the woods above the house. The alpacas wouldn’t let them into their shed in the pasture. So every morning we had to walk the goats down to the pasture past all the tempting poisonous plants, and every evening we had to take them back up to the barn.

Galen’s family helped with chores, but he and his wife were gone most of the time and the kids soon tired of farm life. Before long they realized they are city folk at heart. They moved back to Portland.

VIEW DOWN TO PASTURE BY ROAD

Business took a downturn and we learned Chuck needed knee replacement surgery. Most of the livestock chores fell to me. I didn’t think we could hold onto the property financially, or that we could handle the work load. We sold the livestock and consulted a realtor. Our dream of life in the country was in tatters.

Luckily, we made it through the winter and Chuck recovered from surgery.

Then my disabled daughter and her husband and grown daughters moved out from Iowa. After a while, my daughter and her husband moved onto our property in their fifth-wheel trailer. They pay a little rent and our son-in-law helps a lot with chores. One of our granddaughters and her husband rented the basement from us for a year. We were able to refinance the house. We made it through!

Business is good again and we are even considering getting two goats to help clear out the brush in the woods. This time we will know what we are getting into! They will live and ‘work’ on the same area of the property. I true country fashion, we’ll re-purpose a playhouse to be their goat shed.

VIEW OF BARN AND TREE HOUSE 

Since “going country”, so much has happened that we never expected! We were city slickers for sure. But we have wonderful helpful neighbors, friends and family to support us as we learn to “live country.”

Have you ever moved from the city to the country, or visa-versa? What did you find most surprising?

I'm Sarah Raplee, Paranormal Romantic Suspense Author of Blindsight,Psychic Agents Book 1.