Day: August 5, 2013

Maria and I went out to dinner tonight to celebrate Jamie Nash’s moving into Bedlam Farm. We  haven’t signed any papers yet, but we shook on a deal and it feels good to us. The future of Bedlam Farm has been a remarkable experience for Maria and for me. Maria loved the farm, but it was always a place she saw as mine,  not hers. Our new home is different, we are very much in it together. It is ours.

The sale of Bedlam Farm has altered our lives. It had a profound impact on our financial lives, one that will last in one form or another, for most if not all of the rest of my life. I told Maria at dinner tonight that I was so proud of her, of me, of us for the way we have dealt with this experience. I have struggled all of my life to know how to deal with money and now I know something about it. I am no longer afraid of money, no longer in panic about it, we are moving forward with our lives. I learned how to deal with a good and supportive bank (yes, in rural life there are still those). And I have often struggled to stay grounded, we never lost our footing, our confidence grew every day.

We always supported one another, never turned on each other or let the pressures in our life separate us. We have maintained a spiritual center in all of this, but never succumbed to the growing idea that what you imagine will come to be, nor did we really ever believe that all of the talismans, shrines, statues and positive thoughts would bring the right people to the farm. In the final analysis, I believe in a spiritual life, but it is the market that sells homes, not pendulums and statues of St. Joseph. Houses sell when they are ready, when someone wants to buy them.

I was surprised at my discomfort with the people who came to look at the farm, and stopped going to showings. I saw that most people are not like me, and that is something I just have to accept. We were sometimes frustrated with our realtor because it was taking so long, but we always pulled back from blaming her, we know better. It was hard to accept the realities of the new real estate market – waves of obnoxious people with their noses in the air – and the fact that it takes longer to sell houses than it used to.

The big idea behind Bedlam Farm it’s  beautiful old farmhouse and gracious barns and pastures was that it was not for everyone, it was for a very few. It would always take someone like Jamie Nash to buy it – so much energy, so many ideas, he can see all of the things a place like that makes possible, he didn’t come looking for reasons not to rent the farm and possibly buy it, he came wanting to know how he could buy it and love. And love it he does. In the final analysis, this means more to me than anything. Except this, Maria and I were strengthened so much by this as a couple. His feeling for the farm was so affirming to me, I had come to doubt what my own eyes saw and my own heart felt.

We stood in the Pig  Barn, where Maria held her art shows, and Jamie was stumped. The one building I don’t know quite what to do with, he said. Easy, I offered. How about an office. That’s what I had in mind when we restored it. I wanted to write a book there. Jamie, I said, you can hold open houses and seminars on farms there. Yes, he said, I get that, I like that. He could not know how much it lifted my heart to think of the Pig Barn being used that way again.

Maria and I are a couple now. We are partners, we trust one another, we stand by one another. We never criticized each other, undermined each other, blamed each other or argued. When we had to go and mow, we did. When we had to go and clean up and paint we did.

We were determined to stay even, to keep thinking of new ideas until we found the right one. We never stopped believing the right family was out there and that they would make their way to the farm. In the end, it was our decision to rent the farm that brought Jamie Nash to us. He will rent the farm for three years with an option to buy, he is a man whose word is bond, I feel that about him. I believe he will buy it somewhere along the line, he and his wife love it as I did, as Maria does. I trust in that, and if for some reason he does not, then someone else will appear.

From this experience, I take faith. I take a renewed understanding that fear and panic is a disease. I feel stronger, in myself, in Maria and I as an entity unto ourselves. Our love is strong, our support for one another enduring, our faith in each other steadfast. . A couple of years ago, we met and loved in panic, rushing from one crisis to another in our minds. We have come through to a better place, and that is yet another gift I can be grateful to Bedlam Farm for giving us.

The kitchen floor is coming to life. Joe is a nice guy, competent and fun. He put down the plywood, moved the old appliances around, and he and Maria sat on the floor and plotted some special patterns she has in mind – dark blue strip by the sink, a square pattern in the middle of the floor. We both love the blue feeling in the kitchen it was laid out in the early 1950’s, the kitchen is funky, the floor was ratty. Tomorrow Joe is coming early to put down the tile and reach a final agreement with Maria on how the squares are going to look. She and I are getting up early to try some different ideas. In my mind, this is the beginning of the slow move of the farmhouse from quaint to charming, it will take us a few years, maybe more, we will get there.

There is a baby swallow in the barn. In the morning, he and four or five of his siblings are sitting on the wire below their nest when we come into the barn. The others all fly away, but this one can’t seem to fly away, doesn’t know how, or is sick. I tried to get a clean photo of him in the rafters but I didn’t have a tripod and there was no light, yet I liked the double exposure, it somehow fits. I hope the baby bird figures out how to fly. I worry that something is wrong with him, he stares at us while we clean out the barn.

I have come across a new way of presenting some of my photos, especially the landscapes. I have a software program that I run some photos through and it strips the image down to its pure and original form and removes all of the softenings, colorations and changes that the camera makes to the photographs. It’s called detail extraction and it pulls up the original details at the very base of the photograph. These photos come close to art for me, they are not alternations in the photography, they are the purest form of the original photo, the original details. This is what the camera is seeing before it goes through the digital editing process, in camera and on the compute. I have been working on this for months, and am just figuring out, I think it is becoming a signature of mine, I want to work more with it.

I don’t know how many hundreds of hours I’ve spent doing this, but the response to it has been striking. I think I am bringing a kind of painting to the photograph, a different way of expressing an image. Tell me what you think.

We are very happy to report that Bedlam Farm is getting a new resident in September. Jamie Nash, owner of Grandam farm in Northern Washington County, Chemical Engineer, and the host of an upcoming PBS series on how make small farms work, has rented Bedlam Farm with an option to buy. Jamie and his wife Jan have one son and two dogs (she is a passionate dog lover) loved every inch of the farm in just the way we hoped the new owners would, they love the barns, saw the work there, loved the farmhouse, the view and the porch – they loved all of it.

This is the family we have been hoping for, someone who gets the farm and loves it and wants to use every bit of it. Jamie is leaving corporate life to farm full-time, he wants to do a lot of things – have some dairy cows, make yoghurt, plant some berries, experiment with bovine nutrition. He also wants a place suitable for his TV series on farming, especially aimed at small “lifestyle” farmers, young farmers, people who are interested in growing their own food and having a life with animals. He is also a lifelong hunter, and loved our acreage out in the woods.

Jamie wants to make all kinds of adjustments to the barn and some to the house, and is eager to maintain the property himself –  he loves caring for a farm, it is obvious. The farm has been on the market for more than a year, and it has been a long haul in many ways. The financial pressures are obvious, but especially dispiriting to me was the long string of people coming to the farm who had no interest in a farm, farm history, barns or the way of life here. People watch too many reality real estate shows and come in wanting a perfect home, and old farms are not like that. Jamie loves old farms that have character.

I remember one woman who wouldn’t buy the farm because it didn’t have an attached garage, another because she didn’t like the wallpaper in the downstairs bathroom. We wanted to sell the farm, but not too any of the people who came to look at it. So life works out in its own way. I am  happy beyond words that someone will be loving the farm and living there, using every one of its  barns and pastures, seeking a meaningful life in a meaningful place. Maria and I are heading out to dinner to celebrate.