Hay Ya!

After enduring months of fields of grass so high that it was, quite frankly, scary to walk around in them, our new friend Wesley the Farmer came by and finally mowed them down. Something interesting that I've learned since buying this property is that if you actually farm the land in some manner- in this instance harvesting it for hay- you get a farm assessment and withit, a tax break. I hope that Tim doesn't yell at me for sharing that but I don't know why he would. It's government 101 but alas, I didn't know...

This is Wesley and his tractor.

Wesley is a character to say the least.

Really nice guy but could possibly be a contender for Chattiest Man in the World. You better pencil in at least an hour before seeing Wesley, even if it's just to have him sign a simple document.

The good thing about that is in three (not so brief) encounters with Wesley we learned about:

1. Kingwood Township: Old vs. New

2. Farmer Steve's Suicide and Moldy $$$

3. You might get a touch of the Lyme's

4. Deer are rats

1. Kingwood Township: Old vs. New

We are the "new Kingwood" according to Wesley which means we're the city folk who recently discovered this sleepy little farm town and have thus begun infiltrating. It's

sort of like rural gentrification I suppose. The good news is that even though we are part of the "new" faction, Wesley said we seem like good people and that he's okay with us. He explained that it's probably because, despite the fact that we live in Manhattan most of the week, it's because we're from small towns and we "get it."

2. Farmer Steve's Suicide and Moldy $$$

We have heard many a rumor about Steve the Farmer who owned the property before us. We knew he hung himself and that he was having some sort of personal/ financial issues, but Wesley's version of the story was different than most of the others. He (and his father who came by with him one day) told us that Steve DEFINITELY buried money on the property and that all the locals have gone rooting around the farm looking for it. Alle

gedly his ex-wife knew where most of it was and found 100K in moldy bills from the eighties in the barn under the o

ld front loader tractor but there is still more to be found. I really hope that rumor is true.

3. You might get a touch of the Lyme's

Speaking of the barn with the front loader in it, we have spring buck living in there. Initially it was just this guy:

But apparently he found a girlfriend. And then his girlfriend brought some of her extended family along and then they reproduced, all of them, and now there is a giant deer family living in there. This ties into topic #4. Deer are rats because when I was like, aww, that is so cute, Wesley was like "just you wait. You live out here for a few more years, you're gonna want them all dead." Naturally, I was appalled but then Wesley's father told us this awful story of how his daughter was on track to become a veterinarian when suddenly,

in her junior year of college, she started showing symptoms of Lyme's disease and eventually completely lost her faculties and had to drop out of school. Apparently, Lyme's is so common around these parts that people throw it around as the explanation for everything. And you have to throw "the" in before you say it.

Example: "I saw Wesley down at the market in his bath robe"

"Oh my, he must have the Lyme's"

Naturally, Tim and I have been throwing that around for an explanation for everything now. Like when we were putting a tarp over the scissor lift and I inexplicably (and in painful slow motion) fell off the side of the building into a pile of mud, Tim was like "I think you might have a touch of the Lyme's." Speaking of a touch of the Lyme's...

Back to deer as rats. As I was saying tha

t I thought they were cute and I would never want to kill them, Wesley assured me that they carry more ticks and diseases than rats in the city and that in due time, I would consider them vermin. I still doubt that, but I guess only time will tell.

So, these are the bullet points of some of the finer things we learned from Farmer Wes. I didn't go into his belief that he is a ladies man who stole his neighbor's wife away or some of the other fun stuff because quite frankly, I don't have all day and it's 10am and we didn't even drive to the farm yet. Slackers!

hay, ya!