The Big Bang Chapter 1

We started our country living on the 4th of July.  But back up a bit to the previous January.  I was reading the local  Sunday morning newspaper when I came across an article about baby boomers buying up the Texas Hill Country.  Wow, did that ever peek my interest.  I thought we better hurry before all those acres were bought up by the baby boomers who would certainly be waiting in line to buy acreage the next morning.  It was as if I needed to run stand in line before dawn at a real estate office like I once did at Toys R Us which I felt compelled  to do in order to  get my daughter a much sought after "Cabbage Patch Baby" many years ago....something only a good mother would do.

Back up a bit more.  Every time we would take a family road trip I always wanted to stay on vacation.  In other words I wanted to buy a home and live in every national forest we visited...become a park host or a ranger.  I wanted every house on the hill in the distance that I saw.  I wanted that life!  I did not want to go back home to the city.  So back to the kitchen table that Sunday morning with the newspaper in hand.  I knew I had to handle this right or it would never happen.  My husband was already retired but I was still working.  We had three grown children but there was still one little glitch...our "bonus baby" who was only 13 at the time and about to enter high school.  That was it, that was the key.  What a perfect time to get our child out of the gang infested city, into the hills where surely he would become a "kicker" instead of a "skater".

I related all this to my husband and to my surprise, he agreed to take a look.  I don't recall how long it took to  make the trip to the hills, but I'm sure it was very soon after that Sunday, maybe even the next weekend.  We found a real estate agent and began to take weekend trips to the country looking for that perfect spot.

At first we were thinking of raising goats.  What did we know about goats?  Absolutely nothing.  I began learning about goats, reading everything I could find.  Wow, there were more than one kind of goats.  We were thinking of milking our goats and making yogurt and cheese, maybe even selling it someday.  I soon learned that boar goats were meat goats, not milking goats.  My husband wanted goat land, rocky with hills and valleys because goats are suppose to graze on the side of hills and mountains, right?  This determined what kind of land we would purchase.

We looked at land with houses, empty land, unrestricted land, and restricted land.  For some reason we thought we needed to stay reasonably close to the city, within an hour drive.  We saw many properties before we found what we thought at the time was the perfect piece of land.  Buying land is like building a house...after it is built and you live in it you realize what you could have done differently.  We knew we wanted a view and to be off the main highway.  We needed a school for our child that had reasonably good ratings, which by the way we learned after four years really don't mean much.

I began using the computer to find that perfect acreage.. far removed from a settler in a covered wagon.  We contacted our realtor and made arrangements to see it the following weekend.  It was love at first sight, beautiful hills and valleys with awesome views in a gated neighborhood but very rural.  It didn't seem being so far in the country we would ever have to worry about any problems with restrictions but it was restricted enough to prevent anyone from starting a junk yard or set up a mechanic shop next door to us.  We bought it and we couldn't wait to live on it.  We signed in October and spent Thanksgiving weekend in a tent.  We actually cooked a turkey on a campfire.  I felt like a settler of 200 years ago.  I tried to imagine how they would have felt finding that perfect land to begin a new life.

Unlike the settlers, I purchased my turkey from the local HEB.  However there were plenty of wild turkeys around but thank goodness we didn't have to kill one.  I can only imagine how hard life was for them.  I have read that many starved from lack of food, little rain and rocky dry soil.  We didn't have to worry about being scalped by Indians that once lived on this land.  As I looked over the hills I could just imagine an Indian on his pony riding into the oaks and cedar...I could almost feel his spirit and think of how he was forced from his land.

Back to the city to put our house on the market, the place we had called home for 30 years...where we had raised 3 1/2 kids.  It took us only three months to sell that house...almost a miracle.  I use to drive up the street and sit and watch the prospective buyers from my vehicle so on the day they viewed our house I knew it was a sale!  I could tell by their reactions as they were leaving the house and chatting with the realtor in the front yard before they got in their vehicles.  I knew "this" was the one.....and it was.  By May of that year I turned in my resignation and we "closed" on our house in the city.  We packed all our belongings collected over the last 30 years and arrived at our new home site on July 4.