Thursday, May 27, 2010
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Meredith & Rodeo...
I never actually had a horse growing up. I did ride some in high school, but I never feed, brushed, and worked a horse out daily...
So here we were last November, going to purchase two cows when we are offered a horse. FREE!
Rodeo. Yes Rodeo. We did not name him. The last place he would ever actually be is a rodeo. He is approx 18 years old give or take 3 to 5 years. He has been know to stumble from time to time. He looks like Mr Ed mumbling. He "talks" all the time.
As this photo shows, he is as easy as a slow rain on a hot day! Meredith gives him "spa" treatments all the time. He loves it. She brushes, scrapes, cleans, wipes him all the time. She braids his mane. She sings to him. He just mumbles....
His best friend is a stubborn donkey we refer to as the "Noble Steed" (Shrek). Honestly, if he could talk, I think he would sound just like Eddie Murphey. Yoder is certainly not noble, but he does run the farm and Rodeo is his soul mate. They freak out if they are out of sight of one another. Yoder "hee-haws" and Rodeo "whinnies". They start running back and forth in the pasture until reunited.
Their friendship reminds me that perhaps we should all do that when we can't see our dearest friends. Maybe we should only surround ourselves with those worth crying out for when they are not with us.
Note- Shout out to my sis, Caren, for making the blog header featured on this page. Thanks!
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Welcome to Mar-Be-Me Farm
This is my attempt to introduce our little farm to the world wide web via blogging. Over the past eight years, my husband Mark, daughter Meredith, and I have taken a pasture with a house and turned it into a farm complete with cows, guineas, chickens, minature donkey, horse and a cat family living in the chicken coop.
Growing up on an acre lot in a neighborhood as a kid, going to Montrose, GA to visit my grandparents farm was a treat. Well, unless it was summer. They NEVER used A/C. Their farm just had goats and chickens and a massive garden. It was on family land that had been in the family for generations. I spent more time with my grandparents shelling peas than any other activity.
My husband always wanted to be a farmer, so his extensive career with Gold Kist/Southern States was way of realizing part of his dream. Unless a person is born into a farm family business it is near impossible to up start a farm and make a living. This reality caused him to be creative. He helped farmers professionally by becoming a nationally certified crop advisor. He dreamed about barns and fencing he would have at his own personal utopia some day. His doodling on napkins and scrap paper began to inspire me.
Although my dream at 17 was to live in a loft high above a city and buy unbelievable art that would eventually be priceless, my dream at 27 was totally different. I was blessed to have life experience that taught me that home is where the one's you love are, not a geographical place. It also taught me that some of the best dreams are not the one's the world tells you to have, but the one's you draw up with your true love as you wait for the power to come back on after an ice storm. It is the dream you have as you feel the rain fall on your back as you pick tomatoes to make homemade salsa. It is the dream that is born when our child lights up at a neighbor's farm...
So, December 2001, we made an offer on a nine acre property with a house (we affectionately still refer to the house as the "Money Pit"). It was a house we saw a year earlier that listed way higher than we could afford, but as fate would have it, the price was lowered about the time we got a contract to sell our house in a subdivision. We made a deal and moved in February 2002.
So, flash forward eight years... I get such a kick out of the every day comedy that I see at our little nine acre utopia. I thought you may, too.
Growing up on an acre lot in a neighborhood as a kid, going to Montrose, GA to visit my grandparents farm was a treat. Well, unless it was summer. They NEVER used A/C. Their farm just had goats and chickens and a massive garden. It was on family land that had been in the family for generations. I spent more time with my grandparents shelling peas than any other activity.
My husband always wanted to be a farmer, so his extensive career with Gold Kist/Southern States was way of realizing part of his dream. Unless a person is born into a farm family business it is near impossible to up start a farm and make a living. This reality caused him to be creative. He helped farmers professionally by becoming a nationally certified crop advisor. He dreamed about barns and fencing he would have at his own personal utopia some day. His doodling on napkins and scrap paper began to inspire me.
Although my dream at 17 was to live in a loft high above a city and buy unbelievable art that would eventually be priceless, my dream at 27 was totally different. I was blessed to have life experience that taught me that home is where the one's you love are, not a geographical place. It also taught me that some of the best dreams are not the one's the world tells you to have, but the one's you draw up with your true love as you wait for the power to come back on after an ice storm. It is the dream you have as you feel the rain fall on your back as you pick tomatoes to make homemade salsa. It is the dream that is born when our child lights up at a neighbor's farm...
So, December 2001, we made an offer on a nine acre property with a house (we affectionately still refer to the house as the "Money Pit"). It was a house we saw a year earlier that listed way higher than we could afford, but as fate would have it, the price was lowered about the time we got a contract to sell our house in a subdivision. We made a deal and moved in February 2002.
So, flash forward eight years... I get such a kick out of the every day comedy that I see at our little nine acre utopia. I thought you may, too.
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