We bought a farm in Vermont. Well, it’s not a farm quite yet, but it could be. It was once a farm, with various animals and crops. But at this moment, it’s a house on a bunch of land.
What kind of land? I’m not really qualified to say. Most of it is meadow with a good chunk that is forested. A stream runs through the forest. It’s beautiful. My wife and I have some ideas of stuff we’d like to do with it, but we know we’ll have to update those goals after we learn more about what the land itself can actually do.
The toddler with his PopPop
The question of why we bought farm-type land to live on without knowing how we would live on it is a valid one. The fact is, we were never sure we wanted a farm at all, and even now, are not entirely certain farming is in our future beyond having a nice garden and probably some egg-laying hens. We wanted to experience four seasons, to raise our son in nature, and practice adapting to strange conditions.
Well, so far it’s been pretty damn strange, and it’s not even winter (though it is approaching fast).
Our story so far is one of privilege, so let’s just stipulate that now. If you think a couple with their three-year-old son moving from San Francisco to rural Vermont is just clichéd and not relatable, I get it. But I suspect just as many folks, even those for whom certain expensive options we’ve had available to us are not possible, might find the details of our journey from urban to rural living useful, either as motivation or caution.
I was checking the “master doc” I’d put together on May 8th, and am struck by how we accelerated the timeline from its original formula. The last update was on July 24th and it included the following —
Milestones:
September 2021: Escape fire season and embed in representative future home region
September 2021: Search for house and land
October 2021: Buy house and land
March 2022: move to new house
As of this writing, it is only October of 2021, and we’ve been on the new property for a couple of weeks. Why did things speed up so much? I think the irony is that we, as Bay Areans, are just hard-wired for fast motion. Even when planning to slow down our lifestyle, we do it at a frenetic pace.
This is especially true for my wife. The decision overload of her work is grinding her down and she wants to do something else, but the idea of doing anything that would lower our income feels risky when you live in a town where the median home price just passed $1.5 million. She wants out for those reasons and moving to a place like Vermont while keeping our San Francisco salaries affords us the financial and psychological space to orchestrate an escape.
We knew SF’s real estate market was and is a deformity of the human mind and spirit, but what we didn’t know is that buying a home anywhere in the country, even rural areas, has come to resemble SF to a nauseating degree.
While online, looking at available properties, we kept seeing the ones we were drawn to sell quickly after above-list bids and apparent all-cash offers. Inventory was falling everywhere and we thought we might not have many options if we waited until next year to buy. This felt very familiar to the process of buying our SF home in 2016. We were dismayed, both by the fact alone, and that we were reacting the way we’d been programmed — see what you want and grab it.
And on the other side of the Redfin/Zillow coin is that you really can get a strong sense that you know what it’s like to live in places you’ve never visited. So, after a single FaceTime walk-through of an 11.6-acre plot with a charming house on it, I booked a flight for the next day, Friday, to see it in person. The day after, I saw it. The next day I flew home and we made an offer. The day after that, it was accepted — that was on Monday.
Definitely a twisted way to buy a rural home. Further adding to the surrealism of the process was that we had not sold our SF home. It was under contract to be renovated and we were in a rented condo in an adjacent neighborhood while the work was being done. But, as per the Master Doc, we only planned to be there for eight weeks until peak fire season, when we would bug out to another rental in Vermont, and according the plan, only then would we start looking at properties. Didn’t quite turn out that way.
This entitled nomadism was to be our family’s first taste of adaptation to strange conditions, in particular, trying to keep alive a fun, truthful, yet confidence-inspiring narrative for our toddler. We always warn in advance about a forthcoming move, and we gave the different houses names: The Old House in SF, the Condo House in SF, the Dover House in VT, the Putney House in VT, and finally, the New House.
His toys have varying statuses based on whether we’d packed them to bring along or they were “on the truck” that would show up at the New House (which are finally available for him to play with). We took lots of pictures to review of him in various rooms in the various houses, so he can learn to treasure his memories.
Did we do this right? Again, who knows. Adaptation to strangeness, by definition, has no playbook. He seems to be rolling with it nicely, for now. But he starts preschool soon and that will be yet another seismic shift in his daily life. Is he learning that rapid change can be a source of joy, or is he collecting grievances that will fuel his adult therapy sessions? It’s a risk we have taken, and I guess I’ll devote a bit of space, here and now, to offer an apology to him if all this is having a negative unintended consequence.
Sorry, Buddy. There is a vision, I promise. And you may decide to reject that vision when you can understand it. I just hope you get a sense along the way that you are helping steer this ship, to the degree that ships like this can be steered at all. That we, your parents, are open to what is emerging, not just plowing ahead with some arbitrary, ill-fated set of norms and expectations. And that that is the vision, at least for now: we can have no way of knowing what comes next, we are responding to that uncertainty by heading into it, and maybe, just maybe, there will be another side to break through to.