The beginning of country loving

Both of my grandparents lived on farms. So I have always visited country life. When I was 14 years old, my cousin broke her arm and needed help taking care of her new baby. She lived on a dairy farm. I liked babies well enough and I tried to help out as much as I could in the house. But I was really drawn to the cows and the barn. By the time I left that summer, I was letting the cows in the barn, locking their stanchions, feeding them, putting the milkers together and then waking up my cousin. I helped with milking and cleaned the barn. I loved every minute of it.

In 1990-1991 I had a good friend who worked on a dairy farm. I was invited to visit many times and when I finally did I was hooked again. I started going down to Red Wing every weekend and helping with chores. By the time I stopped helping, I was milking 40 cows by myself and feeding them and the calves and cleaning the barn, washing the milkers etc. My friend and I had a huge fight mostly about how some of the animals were being treated. I missed the country so bad!

I finally convinced my husband we needed to move to a farm. He wanted nothing to do with cows etc. But he was interested in having his own pole barn/shop and maybe a 4 wheeler. We lived in the Twin Cities in a small house with a good sized yard and a park behind it in a really quiet nice neighborhood. I bought the house 20 years earlier and never refinanced. My husband and I were both working and not too far in debt. So we started looking for a farm...

Our original wish list was 80 acres in Minnesota or Wisconsin with an old farm house (preferably an American 4 square or a Prairie L design), a barn for my animals, a pole barn for Tom and maybe a garage, chicken coop etc. I would scour the Internet and the newspaper for properties and on Saturday or Sunday we would take the lists and Atlas map books and go out for breakfast and map out our itinerary. We packed a cooler and a lunch and usually a good book on tape and off we went. We did drive bys and took notes. If we liked what we saw, I would follow up the next week with phone calls and a few times we did a walk through. It became apparent our wish list was a tough one and 80 acres was going to be impossible to find in Minnesota and expensive in either state.