I’ll be jiggered. The new computer demands I enter a “product code” to use the copy of MicroSoft Word for Mac I have owned for years. I forgot the adapter for the camera, and can’t get access to the dozens of shots of the property I looked at yesterday.
I am down on the farm. I have been interested in checking out the 27-acre property that begins on the other side of my northern fence-line since I saw the ReMax sign in the gravel driveway last summer. Then The Process in Michigan diverted my attention. the place was still for sale when I got back to the farm after the uproar, and I decided to check it out.
I don’t know what I am thinking; maybe for only another the cost of a minor mortgage I might be able to put together a complex that could feature the desired flat space for an arena and gain another twenty acres of lush fields of Culpeper green grass.
The abundance of that rich green caused JEB Stuart to proclaim it was the best place to pasture his horses in Virginia, and hence, the world. I don’t know precisely what I would do with it, but it seems like it is at least something to check out.
I got out of town only to get smacked. There were ominous low cotton-wool clouds the color of cold ahead. The front and I collided at Haymarket, and I headed through and then south of a blast of ice and snow and fifty knot winds. It had been sunny and in the 40s when I left Arlington; it was frigid as I parked on the black gravel T of the rutted driveway. I climbed out of the Bluesmobile to greet Phil-the-Realtor. The temperature had dropped ten degrees and I wished I had snagged my gloves out of the trunk where they had been since I got back from Michigan.
Phil was a tall and not thin guy- I thought of him as tight end a little past prime, and all Country.
I was a couple minutes late due to the mini-blizzard, but he demurred, happy to have a prospect even if it was an uncertain one. The price has come down twenty grand on the place, and I had to wince at the consequences on the value of mine. We we shook hands outside the angular jumble of the 1910-era farmhouse.
As an aside, the Police Cruiser is now approaching 90,000 on the odometer, and I had been toying with ideas to replace it. I know the logical thing is to lean things down, but the swirl of life seems to argue that you should have fun where you find it. There is an eternity of time to do nothing at all.
The most logical replacement vehicle would be a Subaru Outback, America’s #1 alternate-lifestyle favorite vehicle, but I was really entranced with the Caddy SRX and the Merc GLK-350 I clocked up a couple thousand miles on each of which lately, the cause of which motoring is directly related to The Process.
I realized, as I always do when behind the wheel of that massive Ford that the Cruiser was the ultimate exemplar of its kind. There will not be a sedan of its utility and raw force to patrol the nation’s highways. Live with it a while longer, I thought, and turned on a buttonhook pattern with my guide to approach the house.
Phil demonstrated that new technology is coming to the industry- he had a CAC-Card-like device with a chip in it to access the key to the place.
“The lady who owns it is away,” He said with a plagematic look, and we walked the first floor. The floors were plank, painted, and you could see where the families that had lived in this place and farmed the red dirt had added on when and where they needed space. The was some dark polished wood in the parlor, for that is what the place had, and one bath in Pepto-Bismol pink.
Phil seemed to regret the color, but it represented an upgrade from whatever claw-footed porcelain tub and john had been there. Had there been an outhouse back in the day, I wondered? We climbed the solid stairs to the second deck. The art suggested the woman who lived there was
The three bedrooms were spacious, and two of the front rooms had yellow Post-It notes informing us these were “cat free” zones. There were no cats in evidence, and I wondered if this is the place to which Heckle the Feral Cat had decamped to for the winter.
“So, the place used to be larger,” said Phil, producing a plat of the land that runs up to Happy Acre Road and follows the stream back down to intersect with the foot of Refuge Farm. “The lady got divorced eight years ago, and she and her husband split the property.”
“Is the husband still here?” I said, marveling at the notion that you could split up a farm and live within sight of your Ex. People are connected to their land down here, and eventually return to it.
“I don’t know,” said Phil. “I just know what she tells me. She is staying here until the place sells, then she is moving to Colorado to be with her daughter.”
We walked the fields with the plat in hand, the chill wind cutting at my exposed hands. We looked at the detached shop, the original solid cement-block well building, and the ramshackle barn and run-in stalls. I took as many pictures as I could, and when we had walked the fence line in the crusting of white above the rich grass, I thanked Phil profusely.
“I gotta ask the question,” I said. “Would the lady consider fractional sales of a pasture or two?” Phil said he thought it might be possible, and would pass it along, a proposal to mutate the property to meet the requirements of the moment.
I waved farewell to Phil as he locked the place up again, and I bounced over the ruts at the end of the drive and turned left to get to my driveway and snag the mail that had piled up since my last trip.
It is so tranquil at the farm. I spent the hours of remaining daylight curled up on the couch, reading and listing to the radio. The new computer has a few glitches that will work out in time, and I read a note from a shipmate who has pulled the plug on the Mainland. I had not heard a lot from him, and I did not know if he was traveling, dealing with the passing of his parent’s generation like me.
Turned out it was something else- a vision thing- and I winced at his business-like description of what it is like to have the Quacks dive into his eye- the window of the soul, I am told. He is getting better, which is the good news, but it is part of something inexorable and vast as forever.
I marvel at The Process we have been so busily been experiencing of late, between friends and family, and the passing of a generation. We move up in the banana clip of life as the shell above us is stripped from the breech and discarded. I feel the sense of being chambered now, waiting for the next adventure..
This has been an interesting couple years, hasn’t it?
Balanced with it is the remarkable end of the process, the return to entropy. I will not be able to look at The Reaper quite the same way going forward. The Disintegration is so hard, but it appears there are choices and chances in the passage that verge on the miraculous.
Verge?
Hell, they are.
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com