THE SENSE GOD GAVE A GOOSE
We were cruising the countryside with an old friend, fantasizing about home sites. I was channeling Goldilocks––this one’s got trees, but it’s too flat; that one is hilly, but it doesn’t have trees; that’s a nice creek, but it’s in the flood plain. That one is the Garden of Eden but with a hog confinement for a neighbor.
And then, I saw it. Wonderful meadows. A huge, mature woods. We parked the car and walked in, no mean feat the day after an ice storm when there’s no path. We came over the hill and––it was beyond our wildest dreams. There was a large pond and beyond that, wetlands. Near as I could tell, there was only one drawback: it wasn’t for sale.
Our realtor friend said he’d snoop around and find out who owned the land––maybe they’d sell off a few acres. But next morning, I opened the Iowa City paper and there, glaring out at me from the classifieds, was a detailed description of the very same property. For sale. Just posted. Other people were going to try to buy my land!
We were looking for 5 acres––it was 47 acres. We wanted to be 5-6 miles from town––it was 18 miles out. So we bought it.
Were we impulsive, or were we shrewd and flexible? Were we impractical or just exceptionally farsighted? There’s no doubt we were impulsive and impractical, and clueless and uninformed. We could add paragraphs to Roget’s list of synonyms for immature decision-making. Or maybe we had good intuition. And lotsa luck.
