You may have heard the humorous saying, “Whoever said that money can’t buy happiness never bought a horse.” I did buy a horse, my husband did too. And I was pretty happy. But I thought I could be even happier if I had my own horse property! Getting out from under the limitations and challenges of boarding situations, having our own acreage on which to keep our horses and make our home sounded like it would seal the deal for happiness with horses. No more long commutes, no more public ranch peer pressure or irritation. Just peace and quiet to enjoy our horses from the convenience of home.
That we could even consider acquisition of horses, let alone a property of acreage on which to live with them was only even possible by the affluence we seemed to have achieved. I was included in this wealth by marriage and my agreement to partner with my husband in his construction business. He came up with the idea just as he had landed a steady gig at a condominium complex on track to repair years of deferred maintenance.
He made an offer for me to join him as the office manager. Since he would have to hire someone for the position anyway, why not keep it in the family? Really, it was a good idea, though I was reluctant because the position was not in line with my work experience or my skills. I had never worked in an office, let alone managed one. Bureaucracy was my nemesis. It was counterintuitive that I would professionally engage in regular paper work and record keeping. However, since my work as an artist and related work in that field were at a low, demanding a reinvigoration of some kind that I had not yet visualized, I decided to accept this opportunity.
This job turned out to reveal two sides of one coin. One side of the coin was that I had enough money to participate in the equestrian world. The other side of the coin was that the job was well enough out of my character that it ate at me from the inside [I felt out of sorts doing it], driving me to find an identity that felt “right” since my artist identity seemed to have perished. Until this writing I don’t think I ever pinpointed it like this, but in my quest to know myself I’ve learned how not following your nature can have consequences that undermine the supposed rewards.
Conversely, with Self-knowledge, I also understand now that had I been a more mature person then, I may have embraced the financial opportunity, leaned into learning what needed to be done (which wasn’t that hard, honestly, only that I didn’t like it), and see it as simply a means to and not an end of my creative life. Unfortunately, I was confused about how things work, and took myself way too seriously in one way and not seriously enough in another.
The thing about the two sides of a coin is that both are true to the whole coin. The coin supports both heads and tails, not just either one or the other.
So here I was, affluently chewing my way through the world, collecting trophies, enjoying the food of material success. And the horse property, as the real estate tear sheets would describe our desirable home to be, was the next big acquisition. The eighteen acres we chose had a compound of buildings, typical of ranch and farm parcels. There was a house, a barn and two other outbuildings that would be claimed respectively as a wood shop for my husband and studio for me (I had been without one since we left our rented flat to buy our own home, which didn’t have the square footage to accommodate studio space too.)
There were stately oaks and some established fruit and nut trees as well as several olive trees surrounding the house, barn and my studio, nicknamed the cottage. A seasonal creek with a wild wooded edge of cottonwood, oak , California black walnut and more made up the south side of the property. The rest of the acreage spread out as three fenced pastures, connected to a large central paddock hub. The woodshop formed an edge of the hub paddock and the front of the barn, the house and the cottage sat within the yard.
Owning two properties felt luxurious. Keeping horses felt luxurious. Having money felt luxurious. A sense of security had taken hold of me. The plan had been to make necessary improvements and repairs on the ranch house so that when we made it our primary home it would be ready and comfortable.
After we closed escrow at the end of June we went up on weekends to keep the landscaping alive and renovate the house interior and get to know the place. We thought it would take about a year at least, maybe longer, if I remember correctly our imagined timeline for having the initial renovations done. However, the wheel of life turned hard before we were ready. The steadiness of the construction job began to wane. Would we put our heads down and seek more of the same, or would we take this as an opening to move entirely to the country? My husband was exhausted and ready to semi-retire from contracting. His optimism about real estate opportunities in our new neighborhood supplied some confidence for keeping ourselves in the money.
Generating new contracting work was out of my bailiwick and expertise in flipping real estate was non-existent for me, not to mention out of my comfort zone. I didn’t really have any idea what I would do to earn money otherwise, but it seemed like I had time to discover it. With a modest cushion of savings that gave us some breathing room to navigate a transition we decided to move to the ranch, even though it wasn’t ready to receive us the way I had thought it would be.
Moving was as disruptive an affair as it typically tends to be. And as much as we expected to accomplish at the ranch, I must admit I had no idea how much work it entailed. Nor did I figure on any of the obstacles unrelated to horses that would slow my desire’s progress to a trickle.
When all of our stuff had been set into the house and otherwise stashed in the various outbuildings we were ready to bring up the horses. With the help of our friends who had horse trailers Vegas, my husband’s horse Gwarek (who eventually got the nickname Robert), and a thoroughbred mare called Casey, who belonged to a friend of ours were transported to the newly christened Star Farm Ranch. Casey needed some recuperation that was difficult at the boarding facility, so we gladly brought her to round out the group.
There were none of the amenities of the boarding facility such as arenas or pasture trails. The barn was actually fitted for sheep and goats so the horses had no shelter there. Their arrival was in the midst of winter when the grass is green here with plenty of rain.
While we had assumed a kind of “town and country” life between our location in the agricultural northern Sacramento Valley and the city, San Francisco didn’t draw us back as much as we thought it would. In no time two mortgages were heavier than we wanted to carry and we reversed our weekend warrior commute to finalize some unfinished remodeling of that place so we could put it on the market.
The real estate bubble was full blown at that time and we sold the city house in a short time for a decent profit. Our attention was turned fully to acclimating to rural life as horse keeping householders and the results were more often than not, unexpected. My dream had come true, but like the dream world of our sleep, things weren’t as I thought they would be.
Note: Within this post, and others to come, it is unavoidable that the “we” of my husband and me is described. While he certainly had his dreams and life goals at play in our move, and as a married couple there is a mutual and intermingled aspect to our experience, as I’m exposing and investigating my individual experience, his motivations are not mine to analyze here. My apparent speaking for him is a necessity of telling my story, but, dear reader, that we were operating from the exact same page is unlikely. Everyone perceives in a way only he or she can know, and everyone is working out his or her own karma.