Pasture-ized

My pasture, let me show you it. These pictures were taken in 2007, a few weeks before Evan was born.

It was actually kinda pretty back then, at the end of that summer. Now it’s just a mess. As if that’s not mess enough.

It’s not exactly a point of great pride with me that these 3 acres are so hideously overgrown. I’ve joked that anytime the International Space Station flies overhead, they call me collect to complain that my overgrown 3 acres of brush and bracken is scraping against the space station’s windows. I wish that was as funny to me as it is to everyone else. We didn’t plan to sit back and let this land overgrow to the point that self-respecting Ewoks wouldn’t be caught dead living there. The truth is, we didn’t have any business moving into a place we couldn’t take care of. The excuse was always that certain relatives who did have the equipment would be dropping by to help us keep the land manageable.

Next weekend.

Every week.

For the past six years.

We didn’t have the money to get our own brush hog, or to hire someone else to use theirs. By the time we had anything even remotely like the necessary amount of money, we had a baby to take care of.

Fortunately, an alternative has presented itself. One of our neighbors, fellow parents at little E’s day care no less, began asking if we’d be willing to lease the 3 acre chunk of land, complete with the barn and the water hookup, so he could put horses there. The burden of clearing the land and getting it ready, and maintaining it, would be on him.

This also means that our renter’s going to have to fix the gaping hole in the fence that was caused by some drunk-off-their-ass druggie kids, but given that the fence their vehicle snapped through was barbed wire, there’s a pretty good chance that would’ve had to go before horses could be kept there again anyway. (For the record, the aforementioned drunk-off-their-ass druggie kids and their pretty well-heeled families went underground the first time we served them with any kind of legal demand that they repair the damage their little meth-huffing angels caused.)

Horses, I hear you say? But aren’t you done with horses? Yes. Yes I am. Their owners will be responsible for feeding them. That’s part of the contract – sole responsibility for the animals lies with the owners. We’re just providing fenced-in grazing land.

Once we got all of this signed and on paper, he’s off to the races. Here’s what it looked like this morning:

What you’re seeing is views across my own property that, two or three or five years ago, were impossible, simply because the land was so overgrown with brush and bracken. Instead of brush hogging the land, our renter found he was going to have to bulldoze it instead. (After all of this initial outlay, needless to say, we’re going easy on what the land lease is actually costing our renter.)

It looks pretty rough right now, but better than it did with towering vegetation that just didn’t look right on any day of the year other than Halloween.

Truth be told, it’ll be kinda nice to have some horses nearby again. I do miss them a bit, even if I’m madly allergic to them and their hay. (The good news is that I get to admire them from afar.) And not having to do any of the actual land-clearing work? Even better (especially since I presently have a sinus infection from hell and medicine for it that knocks me flat out).

I wonder if I should warn Obi sometime between now and the first time he bolts out the door and into the pasture, only to find horses there…