The economy is constantly in the national news.  We feel it every time we buy groceries or visit the pump at the gas station.  No doubt, we have all given up a few luxuries to make ends meet every month.   This is one of the big reasons that my husband and I chose to return to our roots, the farm.  My husband was the first generation off the farm in his fifth generation Kansas ancestry and I am the second in my similar 5th generation Kansas family history.  

My husband’s family and my family were among the many Europeans who migrated when the Kansas Territory was officially opened to homesteading in 1854.  His tremendously large family came in the early days to farm and to build the towns that now make up Mitchell County, Kansas.  His grandmother loves to relate the story of one of her uncles who rode a carriage everyday some 30 miles to help with the magnificent masonry that is now the Catholic Church in Beloit, Kansas.  Many churches here were approached with much the same initial energy that European monasteries were:  built and fashioned by master masons out of the local rock with many fine adornments, such as stained glass and finials.  This is not necessarily noteworthy, except that the region literally had no railroad (until the 1870s) and no materials (Kansas is nearly bare of any lumber supplies.)  Nothing but determination and brawn built these early settlements of the north central part of the state of Kansas.

My great grandmother was born on the Pottawatomie Indian Reservation, north of Topeka, in 1899.  Following her birth, she was fashioned with a beaded naval ring, traditional in Indian culture, by her Indian midwife.  There she stayed until her mid adult life, enduring the brutal elements of farm life and coexisting with the transplanted Indian tribe.  (The Pottawatomie, as well as many other displaced tribes, were moved to Kansas before some were ultimately moved to the Oklahoma Territory, due to railroad and homesteading pressures.  Kansas was considered the highway for opening the American West.  The Santa Fe trail begins in Kansas as did the Oregon Trail.)  My great grandmother Esther and her husband farmed cattle and grain as she raised two children, one daughter  (my grandmother, Fay) by her first husband  who was shot over a land dispute when she was 19 and one daughter by her second husband, a cousin of her baby’s father who came to her rescue.  My family, like so many in Kansas, has its roots in Native American, English and German ancestry.  So does my husband’s:  it has been part of the strong family camaraderie and values that we have shared from the very beginning of our relationship.

Kansas has never been a particularly popular place to live, although many enthusiastically came when the territory opened with farm land virtually for the taking.  Many also enthusiastically left, especially after the grasshopper invasion of the summer of 1874, which left the state devastated of all crops and also during the Dust Bowl crisis of the 1930s with similar devastation.  Furthermore, there is really not much here in the way of geographical interest - no mountains, few natural water bodies, virtually no trees.  The winters are brutally windy and cold and the summers are frightfully filled with thunderstorms and the tornadoes that often accompany them.  The weather vacillates constantly.  There is a joke in Kansas that “if you do not like the weather, wait 20 minutes.”  Our winters are notorious for their ice storms, when we will get a heavy rain in the middle of winter and by nightfall, it will have frozen solid to everything in sight, with more coming down.   This is devastating to any trees one has managed to start and happens about every 10 years.  These days, ice storms such as this are quite the ordeal for electricity workers and families in isolated areas can be without power for many days.   

Here is a fine example of the unstable weather I write about:  yesterday, we had our first delivery of livestock feed.  We have worked our way up to having about 25 laying hens  and are getting close to our home being more like a farm than since we moved in 3 years ago.  Albeit, being a hobby farm is nothing even close to being a larger self-sustaining and crop producing farm (which the place we now call home once was with chickens, cattle and wheat), we are slowly working toward this end.  We have planted fruit trees, strawberries, blackberries and grow a very large vegetable garden, with plans to work out growing much of our own food.  Last year, for example, we grew enough potatoes to last all the way until past Christmas.  We plan to grow quite a bit of grain to supplement, even replace, purchasing feed for our chickens.

When the nice fellow came with our month’s supply of chicken and wild bird feed, I showed him where to unload it.  Having studied the weather reports that very morning, I was quite certain that this first time of delivery it was okay to lay it right outside the small outbuilding I use as a “flower shop” (the former kitchen where I make floral designs, fresh, dried and silk (click the Toad Hill Market button above) and keep all of my gardening and chicken supplies.  I told him that the next time he came, we would fix up some pallets in a larger outbuilding and he could deliver there to protect the 50 pound bags from the weather.  The very next morning, with the feed stacked neatly outside our little shop, it rained.   Fortunately, it had merely sprinkled a scant amount, not very much at all (which is so common for us:  it is quite dry here compared to what we are used to in the eastern part of the state.)  By afternoon, in the warm October sun, the bags were all dry when we moved them inside.  Not a chance of rain the Weather Station had said, for nearly 10 days.

We apparently have a large bull snake on the property.  He did, in fact, terrify me a couple of weeks ago.  A local fellow that I visited with laughed when I described my fear, assured me that bull snakes are not poisonous and pointed out that having such a large snake on a farm is actually a good thing.  Well, when we store these feed bags in the building on our property formerly known as “the grainery,” I have decided that, indeed, a large snake to keep the rat and mice population down might be quite a good thing, as long as I don’t see him or the rats either.  Found a dead one of those after the accompanying rain storm on Monday which left us with a half an inch of rain.

We chose to purchase our feed this way, and the bonus is that the local elevator will deliver it for us to save money (buying in bulk is cheaper by about $1/bag) and for convenience.  Funny how, we cannot get human food delivered, no grocery or pizza delivery has left me adapting.  But having to run here and there looking for a good price on laying feed (and the milo, corn and sunflower seed that we supplement with) costs money too.  So we are quite happy with the arrangement of dinner delivery for our animals.  We hope to add dog food for our 5 free ranging canine friends.  I plan to call about that possibility next week.  Otherwise, I drive well over 2 hours to get the best price at Wal-Mart, who still has a 40 pound bag of food our dogs like for under $20.00.

Saving money is a big deal to us these days.  That is initially why we moved to this farm.  Let me explain the logic.  When the gas prices took their first big leap in 1999, we immediately traded a pickup truck which was getting about 8 miles to the gallon for a Chevy Prism, which gets nearly 40 miles to the gallon.  Our 26 year old daughter is still driving that car.  

When the economy began to take its first spiral downward in 2007, I was a brand new real estate agent.  I had switched to this field because I always felt more comfortable, more energized, when I used my psychology background to read potential buyers and not those in the middle of mental health crisis.  I had just spent 5 years in the mental health field and was exhausted, emotionally and physically.  I looked forward with anticipation to making the “big bucks” that are associated with becoming a good real estate agent.  I timed my class perfectly, in the dead of winter, to hit the real estate market with a smile and a song at its magical moment in the early spring, when folks turned their attention to a new home for their transfer or promotion and their desire to move their children to a new school district in the summer, when school was out.

I sold my first house within a month.  I had had several other sales that slipped through the cracks at the last minute due to financing issues or another, more experienced agent’s aggression.  However, at the beginning of June, our weekly sales meeting began to be about the news of the downturning economy and particularly the slump of home sales causing this.  Bad loans made to people who should not have qualified were beginning to make the national news.   By the end of that summer, all my Saturdays and Sundays had been taken away by running around placing and removing “Open House” signs, flags and balloons and smiling endlessly to often less than nice big-time realtors, homeowners and sales prospects.   I decided to get a real job and went back to a corporate world that I hated with its endless meetings and teleconferencing with important federal contractors.  I now had for a boss a former, younger co-worker, who was directing the entire department I worked in.  He asked me to work the second shift at a pay increase.  If I declined, he said, as added incentive, I might be let go.  I accepted and began to eat my dinner at midnight, even though I had eaten during my dinner break at 8:00PM.  I still could not shake the 30 some year habit of having a beer and a meal after work.  In fact, I could not sleep at all when I tried.   I gained 20 pounds.

I now had leftovers alone in the dark, as my husband needed his sleep to prepare for another day of making pizzas.  He had been hired as “Vice President of Marketing” for a large, expanding pizza franchise, but due to the economy was not allowed to promote the business as he was directed by his job description.   Instead, he was stuck in one of the franchises where the manager was undergoing rehab.  He often took various manger’s places, making pizzas and filling in for the college students who  called in “hung over.”  We were both gaining weight and miserable.

When we climbed this hill in Northwestern Kansas in January that winter of 2008, while visiting Troy’s family (a member of his family had caught wind of a nice, older Victorian home about to go on the market), I did not expect too much.  The road was atrocious, filled with ruts and not much gravel, hard to maneuver.  When we pulled up, I sighed inside, because I saw that all the wiring for the house was contained in an ancient looking box on the exterior of the second floor.   Then we walked into a large, sparkling country kitchen, with seating for 10 or more (or one writer, with all her books, magazines, files and tablets.)   The beautiful, pristine woodwork glistened floor to ceiling.  The windows, doors and hardware were mostly original.  There was a bona fide dining room!  (This was on my list of “must haves.”  There are not too many of them anymore.  Most architects consider dining rooms a waste of space, since they are not used but once or twice a year at best.  Even in older homes, they have often been converted to a family room or office for better utilization of the floor plan.)  The living room seemed like a parlor of old, with its bay windows and ornate carpet.  The master bedroom was on the main floor (well before its time!), so that every bit of the living space that Troy and I needed was on this first floor.  The décor was impeccable Victorian, with a chandelier, lovely old-thyme accents and an exquisite palette of colors, burgundy, gold, green and beige.

The upstairs was a unique chronicle of the 16 children that have grown up in this home.  There was a classic navy blue boys’ room, which I came to find out was where all the boys in this house grew up.  Closets had boxes of old books, ice skates and stuffed toys.  The spaces were filled with exquisite antiques and the areas with the most light had huge sprawling plants.  There was, as could be predicted, a pink room, with classic Victorian pink carpet (original to the house), pink walls and pink roses adorning everything.  I smiled inside, as I had chosen to do my youngest daughter’s room, when she was growing up, with pink roses and a Classic Winnie the Pooh theme(A. A. Milne style, not Disney.)  This was where we used most of the antique bedroom furniture that we had.  This furniture had been handed down from my great-grandmother Esther, when she married the first time in 1916 in Dehlia, Kansas.  It would look perfect here, with all the other many things I had collected to create the antique Winnie the Pooh room.  

I asked many, many questions, as we walked around the house for well over 2 hours.  The historian in me would not be quiet with her questions and curiosities.  When we went to the basement, there were nice, large storage areas and a fine, uncompromised, hand-carved and laid stone foundation, several feet thick.  I had no idea that this may have been where the family lived while the house was being constructed in 1908.  As these dugouts, as they are referred to, were often first homes for families since there was virtually no lumber in the region and homes were very well thought out before building them commenced.  This one surely was.

We made our way to the small outbuilding, just behind the house and the deal was sealed.  I walked into a fully certified commercial kitchen with huge worktables, storage and a large commercial size sink and dishwasher.  My husband and I love to cook and entertain.  And I have made huge messes in our previous homes, trying to find a workspace to craft the floral work I love to do.  Feathers, silk flowers and ribbons would be quite at home in this wonderful, shut the door and walk into a clean home, work space.

We walked a little further and viewed with awe the huge cavernous, 100 year old barn, with its second level to store hay and entertain farm children for hours.  It was beginning to fall down really, but no one could have the heart to just remove it, not even us 3 years later, as it lays tattered from some vicious 80 mile per hour straight winds we had the first summer.  This storm also devoured the trampoline that had been left on the property.  Troy claims he saw a white barn owl in the old barn several times that first summer.  I, unfortunately, never witnessed him, but did hear him on occasion.  The sound of an owl was also on my list “must haves” in real estate.  There is something about an owl hooting at nightfall and daybreak that is literally soul soothing and healing.  This I needed, as did my husband.  We looked around and calculated how long it would take to mow the property on our riding mower.  We sat again at the huge built-in kitchen table and the deal was done, especially given the price that was being asked for this fine, old, only owned by one family, 100 year old farm.  

Prices for real estate in Kansas are well below the national average.  I had had the magnificent idea to move to San Francisco for adventure and opportunity once upon a time, only to return 6 months later with major sticker shock on the prices of properties in the Bay area.  And prices for real estate in the western part of Kansas are about 1/3 to ¼ of what one finds even in eastern Kansas.  The “wild and scenic” landscape will hook you.  It is appealing to anyone who enjoys the minimalist subtlety of various watercolor-like shades of pink, blue, green, brown and gold on the never-ending horizons, shifting daily with the light and the seasons.  So, suffice it to say, one can live here in a very nice, large home for a fraction of what it costs elsewhere.  One can easily learn some self sufficiency in gardening, raising livestock and even building or purchasing a wind turbine to provide your electricity.  Troy sells them now.  

And the peace is incomparable.   Children still ride their bikes to the grocery store to buy a popsicle in the summer and there is the romance of the small town celebrations for every holiday…car shows, barbeques, chili cook-offs and parades.  Kansas has much to offer families struggling with the reality of a crumbling economy…and I could even recommend a good real estate agent.