Maybe it's my fault. I was always jealous of kids who got to go visit their grandparents on the farm. Not that I actually knew any friends who had farm-owning grandparents, but Dick and Jane did, and so did all those other children on TV and the other children's books. Clearly, grandparents were meant to live bucolic lives with tractors, baby chicks, and apple pies. The fact that all of my grandparents were city people who had reached these shores from Europe as youngsters didn't impress me. And growing up in Los Alamos, a weird but beloved little mountain town with no farmland within fifty miles, lent the idea of farms a touch of the exotic, too, even though trips to the valley tended to show farmers as relatively poor people with weathered faces. The closest thing to a food garden was the little corn plot tended by a neighbor lady down the street, an oddity in a community of lawns and mixed borders. At least it was the first inkling that food wasn't just something that magically showed up at the grocery stores.
Mom had a nice garden (tulips, forsythia, columbines, sweet peas, delphiniums, and the like), but we kids never really took to it, and we were encouraged to go into professions that were'nt involved with the land. So I spent a decade or so in California being a Medical Technologist, something worthwhile one could do with a Bachelor's in Biology, and Wendy, also from Los Alamos, ended up as a statistical analyst. But that's where I discovered Horticulture, taking courses at the community college in Monterey. And more courses. I was a course or two shy of a degree in horticulture when we decided we'd had enough of California and wanted to come home to New Mexico, trading the ocean and fog for mountains and snow and summer thunderstorms. And I discovered I had to relearn everything I thought I knew about growing things--this is dry hardscrabble land which has to be irrigated, and if the frosts don't get you, the grasshoppers will. But you learn, and you can still grow things. I kept working in various medical labs for another decade and a half, but the more automated Med Techery became, the more high-pressure and the more boring it became. So when it dawned on me that I was avoiding continuing education in the lab field but was still taking every horticulture course coming down the pike (and look at my library--two books on laboratory technology, and four shelves on gardening, composting, plant propagation, and landscape design), I finally decided it was time for a major life change.
Wendy, meanwhile, had been teaching statistics and other math and science courses at two of the colleges in Santa Fe, so it didn't seem that dangerous from a financial point of view when I tried making a living as a gardener. But I have to say that the profession of gardening is for young men, or at least somebody with a large crew of young men, and that wasn't me. So when Wendy decided that her jobs were driving her crazy and suggested we buy a farm and try that, I was game.
Of course the land around Santa Fe, expensive as it is, isn't really suitable for farming, and the best farms were already taken anyway. We kept looking farther and farther from Santa Fe in hopes of finding some land that was in our budget (i.e., cheap). It wasn't until we looked at the prairie around Stanley that we found it--25 acres of grassland which had once upon a time been part of a homestead and still had use of a nearby well. I wasn't keen on it at first. Too open, too flat, too windy. Too many cows. Too windy. Too cold, too hot, too windy. But we could afford it, and we took a deep breath and put down all our money. And had a farm. There we were, two single middle-aged ladies on the verge of being dirt-poor and just beginning to learn what farming is all about. But still, it's our farm!
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