Selling the Dream
When "Little Man" was 8 years old, the factory his dad worked at gave notice that they were shutting down within a year. My husband and I knew that we would never be able to keep up the big payments on the farm if he no longer had his job. He was offered an early retirement package, but it wasn't much - $50,000. We would at least get to keep his pension, our healthcare insurance and his life insurance.
We first tried to sell some acres off of the farm. Nobody was buying. Then we decided to just sell the whole thing, all 307 acres. I kept thinking of "Little Man" and how much he loved it there. It reminded me of the John Mellencamp song "Blood on the Scarecrow". I didn't want to leave our piece of Heaven on Earth, and neither did my husband, but we really had no choice.
We had a good offer on the farm, so we took it. Then we sold the cows, the horses, the farm equipment and the hay. Then we had a huge moving sale and sold the rest of our household things and other things we had acquired over the years. It was sad selling what felt like was our whole lives.
We found a small house and almost 12 acres nearby. I didn't like the house at all. In fact, I hated it! My husband didn't really care at all how I felt about it. At this point, I tried to talk him into buying two small houses with the intention of me moving into the other one. We hadn't gotten along in a very long time, and barely had any kind of relationship left at all. This happened after the incident's with my daughter. My husband wouldn't even consider buying 2 houses. He looked at me as if I was his property, like an old truck or a piece of furniture. He promised me that the little house was only temporary, and that we would build a pond and have a nice house built by it. Needless to say, that never happened. We did build the pond, but that was so that his family would have somewhere to fish. The sad part was, that he refused to invest in another house, so we ended up owing Uncle Sam over $40,000!
Lesson Learned: There is one thing you can count on in life no matter what - things will change.
#SellingTheFarm, #SellingOurLives, #HugeLoss, #LIVEWithDonna, #ThePhoenixRisingWoman
Comments
Post a Comment