March 8, 2009 was the day I acknowledged I would never be in a position to achieve my lifelong dream of having a “place in the country.” For as long as I can remember, I’ve wished I had a few acres of land with a decent home, a place where I’d have a tractor and a barn and a workshop, a place where I could create a private oasis, a retreat.
That Sunday we drove from Dallas to Denison, Texas to indulge my pipe-dream. We looked at a house on four acres, a four-bedroom, three-bath house that needed work. One bedroom and one bath were poorly constructed add-ons and would need to be demolished. The place had a two-car garage, a huge concrete-floor workshop—easily big enough to store the Kubota tractor and assorted implements that came with the house—and a storm cellar. Two wells, one surface well about thirty feet deep and the other one deeper than five hundred feet, provided backup water service; the house was supplied by a county/rural water utility district. A mixture of mature oaks and pines, along with a scattering of smaller fruit trees, sheltered the waters of a small pond behind the house. The house, particularly, would have required some work. But I saw the potential in it. My wife was not so enthusiastic. She was the realist that day; even though the place was priced very low at $165,000, we didn’t have the money to buy it outright and we couldn’t simply sell our house and move there because we had a business to run, a business located almost ninety miles from this “place in the country.” The reality that my hopes for a place in the country was not a dream, but a fantasy, had been hidden behind my wishes for a long time, but that day it slammed me in the face, hard.
We drove home in silence. But after we got home, we talked about the future and our plans. We agreed we would curb our spending, dramatically, and we would sock away as much money as we could and then, in three years, we would sell everything we own, buy a roadworthy vehicle (maybe a camper) and hit the road. We would become gypsies, vagabonds. We would explore. We would stop when the mood struck and rent a house or an apartment, perhaps get a job to supplement our savings, and then move on again when the urge came on. We both were happy with the decision. It was a decision about the future we both wanted to make. In my case, it was a second best future, because my place in the country was not part of it; but it was a good alternative.
Somewhere along the line, those decisions got derailed, though. I blame myself for that. I just couldn’t wait the full three years. Two years into it, I stopped socking away money and curbing spending the way we had agreed we would do. And I was so unhappy with our clients that I reached the decision that I had to get out, to get away from them, the office, the work we were doing…everything. That’s when we made an alternative decision, a decision to take a one-year sabbatical. And that one-year sabbatical turned into two years, then into a decision to just retire and sell our house and move.
So, just shy of three years after we decided to retire in three years, we retired. I don’t have my “place in the country,” but the place we live feels a little like a place in the country. I don’t have acreage, nor a tractor, nor a barn, but at least I retired early, at fifty-eight, to a place with a slower pace and the illusion of rural seclusion. We haven’t hit the road much, but we still talk about doing shorter road trips than we had agreed on earlier, before plans changed, occasionally. My wife, who was never comfortable with the idea of a rural life, is satisfied that we are reasonably close to city amenities. She’s happy her sister moved close by; I’m happy with that, too.
All in all, I’d say I’m happy with how things have turned out thus far. But if I experienced the sudden windfall of winning the lottery (unlikely inasmuch as I don’t buy tickets), I’d buy my place in the country, which would be my retreat, not where I’d live full-time. There, I’d park my small, manageable RV, a RoadTrek RS Adventurous, when I was not on the road.
