Bits and Pieces of my life

The other day I was reading over on a homesteading message board, and someone asked “how did you find your piece of Heaven on earth”. I read some of the replies, and it got me to thinking; just how did I end up on an old farmstead in South Dakota. The short answer I give people is “This is where I found my dream job” but the real answer is way longer than that.

Part One - For want of a toilet wax ring . . .

I’ll take you back to the spring of 1995. I suppose I could go all the way back to 1979, the year I graduated and married my high school sweetheart, but I think I can fill in the pertinent parts of the first 16 years of our marriage as I go along.

We had been living in our house for 4 years now. After 11 years of apartment life, two children and me going back to school, this first home of ours seemed like a dream come true, and at the time we bought it, we really felt it would be our ONLY home. I grew up on a farm, and my husband also had a love for the land, but we’d given up our childhood dreams of owning a chunk of land in the country long ago in our strive to provide food and shelter for our children. At eighteen, we were young and in love, and thought that would be enough, but with our first child born at the age of 20, we soon learned dreams do not put food in your mouth.

After the birth of our second, a beautiful little girl, I got serious about making something of my life, and went back to school and started on my path in the field of accounting. My husband had also settled down, now working for the Operating Engineers as an instructor trainee. He had done a variety of things during those earlier years, mostly in the mechanic field, including a stint in the MN National Guard where he went through OCS and was a 2lt before deciding a military career was not what he wanted.

So here we were, two kids, two car garage, 1/3 acre lot in a southern suburb of the Twin Cities metro area. I had lots of yard to garden; I had my pets, which at one point or another included cockatiels, parakeets, finches, an iguana, anoles, rats, mice gerbils, assorted fish and cats. Hubby had a well stocked garage, courtesy of the early years as an auto mechanic, and enough time to putz around with building projects. We bought the house with an unfinished basement, and soon embarked on what was our first of a long line of remodeling/building projects.

I’m not sure what we were up to at the time this story begins, but for some reason, we needed to remove our toilet. I may have been painting, or putting up new wall paper, I don’t remember. But we needed to move the toilet so I could work behind the tank. Not a problem, but to put it back, we needed a new wax ring, and we didn’t have one in stock.

So this project required a trip to Menards. Our relationship with Menards goes way back LOL!! We headed north on Hwy 3 towards Rosemount, and as we got into town, there was a big sign that read “BOAT SHOW” and out of the blue, my hubby says “let’s stop in.” Now, this really isn’t out of character for us. We’ve always been good at getting an idea and just doing it. So we stopped in, and looked around at the boats. We found a Starcraft with a Force motor, and the salesman started talking interest rates and payments, and it dawned on me that we could actually afford to buy a boat. We had just finished paying off our car (the only brand new one we had bought up to that point), hubby had his used pickup that he had replaced the engine on, and we were making plenty of money at our jobs to make ends meet. We left the showroom with lots of flyers, picked up the wax ring and headed home.

Later that night, after getting the toilet back in place, we started talking about the boat. I knew my hubby had grown up in White Bear Lake, and had spent many an hour out on his Grandpa’s boat. He had spent as much time fishing as I had horseback riding, but he’d never really talked about how much he missed it after we were married. I had owned a few horses when we first got married, but sold them when I was pregnant with our first child. I think at that time, I thought it would be a few years, and I’d get into horses again, but as the time went by, that dream faded. With the purchase of our suburban house, I really thought that was my life, and horses were just a childhood dream of mine that had been put aside for adult responsibilities.

My husband told me about his dreams of fishing, how he had missed it for all these years, and how much he really wanted to teach his children how to fish, and spend time on the water. I got motivated, and starting looking into financing options, and we ended up with a second mortgage on the house, and a 16 foot Starcraft with a 50hp Mercury on back. (And no, we didn’t buy it from the place with the boat show).

And that’s how we started out to buy a $2 wax ring and ended up buying a $12,000 fishing boat.