I’d been waiting for the doctor to sign for about 15 minutes.  That’s typical in the life of a drug rep, standing in the back of the office hallway, waiting for the doctor to sign for samples.  That’s when I heard her voice: “You’re the drug rep that bought the Richardson farm, aren’t you?”  My head turned to the side – I saw a redhead in scrubs, a nurse I hadn’t met before.  I was confused for a couple of different reasons:  1) How does this stranger know we just “bought the Richardson farm”? and 2) see number one.   A handful of people knew we purchased the property.   It had been a total of 3 days since we’d closed.   “Um, yes, we did buy the Richardson farm.  How’d you know that?”, I responded.  The answer told me a lot about the place we were about to make our new life.

It turns out, there are a few family names in Unionville, Indiana.  Even though the land we bought is technically in Bloomington, for all practical purposes, we are in Unionville, a small little corner northeast of Bloomington.  Drive by any cemetery in Unionville, and you’ll notice a pattern pretty quickly – Richardson, Chitwood, Young, Fleener.  Those names grace most of the monuments.  They all know each other, too.  Most of them are related somehow.  And when 55 acres has sold, you better believe that word spreads quickly about who bought it.

“My cousin, Brooke, is married to Sam Fleener.  They live next door to the land you bought.   She told me a drug rep bought the land and that the last name is Brumley.  I see your name tag, so just figured that’s you.”  Yes, I said, I did buy the property with my husband and our two girls.  Word spreads fast, huh?  She nodded and smiled.

It was July at this point.  Joe and I were in nightly discussions about what to do next.  We live a 20 minute drive from the land we just bought, the land with no house. What to do next?  Stay in Sherwood Oaks and build while we live here?  Seemed reasonable to me, but Joe didn’t like the idea.  We’re too far away from what’s going on, he said.  If I am going to general contract the house, he continued, I want to be close by.  So logic took us to the next step – move there and live on the property while we build.  This brings me to a detail I skipped.  When we bought the land, there was a trailer on the property.  A grandson of the owner lived there, we heard.  So we made an assumption – we can live there if we need to when we move, short term of course.  You know what they say about assumptions.  Let me just offer a tip – if you buy a farm and there’s a dwelling on it you think you might be able to live in, go ahead and take a look at the inside before you sit down at the closing table.  I’ll just say we couldn’t live in it.  Raccoons were involved.  End of story.

So that trailer had to go.  But what do we do now?  Joe suggested we stay put, sock money away for 5 years, build in cash, and move then.  I countered with, a big part of this purchase was to raise the girls out there.  How can we wait 5 years?  What do you suggest then, Joe asked?  I looked at him.  “Buy a different trailer?”  I phrased it as a question to myself more than to him.  Living in a trailer didn’t sound appealing, but having this land and not being able to live on it sounded worse.   So I did what any smart woman looking to buy something she has no clue about does: look on Craigslist.

Thank you for coming back to visit.  More to come soon.

Blessings

Seja