Moving to the Farm

One of the teachers I worked with, Myra Garner, told me that her and her husband had bought a farm as a tax shelter. He worked in an upper management position in a local company. They were from Georgia and Myra had a wonderful southern accent. The farm had a house on it that they planned to rent out and Myra thought it would be perfect for our young family.

Becky and I went out and looked at the place. It wasn’t much but offered a lot more room than our apartment. It had a kitchen with a dinning area and two other rooms and a bath downstairs and two bedrooms upstairs. They were doing some work on the house and thought we would be able to move in sometime that winter.

Rent for the house was $80. a month. We thought we could handle that and moved in during the late fall of 1971. It had a garage for the car and several acres to wander. There was a second smaller house on the farm that the Garners kept and used as a place to stay occasionally. They had two teenage boys who came out and stayed sometimes.

They had cattle on the farm and although Mr. Garner had no experience as a farmer. He worked hard to learn all about it and seemed to relish the opportunities. He didn’t have a lot of cows and borrowed a bull to inseminate them. His plan was to produce beef to send to market. He probably would have but in less than two years he was transferred back to a plant on the east coast.

My cousins, Russell and Rose Ross lived about a half mile away. They had lost their son, Stanley, in the Viet Nam war a couple years earlier. A friend, Maynard Bittle, and his family lived a couple miles away and we knew some other folks in the area. My Dad knew many of the people around there and talked a lot about the White Oak Church that was up on the blacktop a quarter mile away.

I didn’t mind living in the country but every time you needed something it meant a trip to town. We quickly learned to plan better so that didn’t happen too often. It was quiet and sometimes lonely on the farm.

We ended up having to move after about a year and eight months on the farm because the Garners were selling it to move back where they came from. Myra resigned her teaching position and they packed up everything and were gone. We briefly entertained the idea of trying to buy the farm ourselves but just didn’t have anything for a down payment so we were out. It probably was for the best because the farmhouse was not in good shape and would have cost a lot to maintain. The new owners eventually did build a new house on the place.

Heather was born while we lived on the farm. That is a story I’ll tell another time.