Flashback: Four Years Before the Farm

Four years ago, I lived in the big city where Dad worked. It was okay, but not quite my cup of tea. I had always had that dream: I was going to be a country girl. Mom and Dad wanted the same thing, but they had never quite taken the next step. You can imagine my surprise and delight when they started looking at houses. It began at the computer. They got emails from a website that advertised different houses. They scrolled through house after house, trying to find a house that would suit our family. At the time, we were a family of five, so that required a good amount of space. Website advertisements evolved into driving to a house and checking it out. Usually, the houses were an hour away or more. Being a person who doesn't particularly like long drives, the driving part of house searching was not the best part, but it definitely wasn't the worst.
     Imagine this: You are minutes away from a house that could possibly be the "one" that could make you the long-wished for country girl. You pull up to the house. It looks fine on the outside, and it seems big enough. You have to stop yourself from racing out of the car to see if you like it. Dragging your feet to stop yourself, you meet this overly perky lady who escorts you to the door. Mrs. Perky opens the door, and it hits you. The awful smell. Some houses smelled like cat urine, some smelled like garbage. Then you decide that this house isn't the dream house, and the search continues.
      It took months to find the "one". It was a foreclosed house with a pond, four acres, and it was only forty thousand dollars. There was a catch though. The house was unfinished, so we had a lot of work to do. Dad, having no knowledge of construction work and specializing in tearing burning houses apart, walked into the house and said," Let's tear out that wall and that wall." Mom was unsure of this, but we did it anyway. That was the first project we kids worked on that dealt with the house. Dad handed us each a hammer and he let us rip. Let me tell ya, there is a indescribable pleasure in smashing sheet-rock with a hammer. One of the special delights was we had our seventy-six year old grandfather working by Dad's side most of the time. Granddaddy, as we call him, taught me this and that about what he used to do when he was a kid. I greatly enjoyed every story, because Granddaddy lived in the Great Depression. Since he lived in that era, I found it amazing what they would do for fun. For instance, a purple (and toxic if you catch it at the right time) berry worked as the perfect dye for their cotton bags. They would squash the berries and write their names on them.
    Now, I'm definitely not saying that this house was all fun and games. It was quite the pain occasionally. The man who built this house was a lunatic. Nothing was level, his fashion sense was worse than mine, and he just didn't know anything. We had constant troubles. We still held our heads high and trudged on. We did pretty darn good I must say, because we haven't had our house collapse
or anything.  This was part of our house mid-construction. Renovating was quite the endeavor.