We had a bad spring in 2002. My husband Andy hated his job at a large Midwestern university (okay it was Michigan) and pretty much they hated him. In contrast I loved my job at Michigan and loved the little suburban house we lived in on a small lake. We had our own little half acre in the shade of towering oaks and hickories. In the spring the woods around the house burst into ephemeral bloom with trillium and trout lilies. Later there would be wild geranium. It was like a dark enchanted fairy garden. Our two little girls Kenny and Helen were happy kids picking bouquets of violets and making fairy houses out of stones, sticks with little tables and acorn cap plates. But things changed, my mother who lived nearby died of an unexpected stroke. The dark was no longer enchanted, it was gloomy. Half an acre seemed too small for Andy who grew up on a large farm. I wanted to be in the sun and possibly grow tomatoes, beans, maybe some basil. The girls wanted more space for more animals, maybe a dog and someday horses.
Andy got a job offer at a University in New York and we were off house shopping. We wanted to be near the university, we wanted at least 5 acres, we wanted nice large bedrooms for the girls. The internet is an amazing thing, I started house shopping using those criteria and the computer coughed up a bunch of possibilities. I'm a sucker for real estate prose and my first hit was "an elegant dutch colonial" I had no clue what the heck a dutch colonial was but elegant sounded good and it had 20 acres and a bunch of bedrooms. We went to New York to look at that house and some others. The elegant dutch colonial already had an offer but we looked at it anyway it was more of a quirky dutch colonial than an elegant one, it had electric heat and strangely the panels were in the ceilings because as we all learned in elementary science heat does what, sink??!!! The “large horse barn and paddock” were so overgrown with autumn olive they were difficult to find especially the paddock. Best of all the house had a tiny door in one small bedroom that you had to limbo through and then you ended up being able to stand up in a giant sharply peaked closet, you proceeded through the back of the closet (about 20 feet) and then came out in… Narnia! No really you came out in another bedroom. This was the only way to get into that part of the house from the rest of the house. The kids loved it. They loved the creek that ran through the back of the property teaming with crayfish and salamanders and water bugs.
The next house, a former funeral parlor in the 1800's had a scary mysterious room in the basement with a giant padlock. The owner said we couldn't go in that room. Me being the kind of person who still has nightmares from watching poltergeist approximately a million years ago decided to pass on that one. The house after that had 5 acres on a nearly vertical cliff face but it did have a swan fixture in the powder room (you pulled on a wing and water came out the beak). It had a fireplace in the master suite you turned on with a remote control and Andy was so excited by that (on off on off) he missed the fact that over the fireplace was a large nude painting of the owner. He is still mad he missed that. The next house had 7 acres but most of it was temporarily under water. The next one was huge with an indoor pool but no closet doors anywhere. We are a family that needs closet doors! If you ever come to our house don't ever open a closet or you will be buried in the avalanche of junk that pours out. The doors are the only thing holding that in. We decided to send a back-up offer on the quirky dutch colonial. There had never actually been another offer and that house was ours.
We had 20 acres and Andy and I felt like we should use it somehow. We would clear the autumn olive we would put up fencing. The girls were against raising anything that might end up on the table even though they were voracious little carnivores. Kenny the eldest explained this as in Flinstone-like-fashion she munched on a large rack of ribs, "But I didn't know this pig personally mom!" Sometimes I have to agree with Ted Nugent if you are going to grill it maybe you ought to be okay with killing it. Still we decided to go with fiber animals, maybe some breed of sheep or goats. We started researching livestock and then we took a break and did a typical American thing, we went to the annual Dexter Memorial day parade. Cars full of candy throwing politicians zoomed by and all the local high school bands, fire engines lights blazing and an occasional burst of air piercing siren, girls scouts, boy scouts cub scouts brownies daisies and local dance troops, clowns, dogs in costume. The Dexter Memorial Day parade was kicking! And then along came something else, a local 4-H group leading llamas and what the heck are those smaller fuzzy llamas?? Alpacas maybe, are those alpacas? Wow they are little and cute. Really cute! Impossibly really cute! Back home to the internet!
Alpacas are really really cute and wow are they really really expensive. The sticker shock was amazing! I had to see these alpacas that cost like a zillion dollars each. My brother John, who was always up for a road trip, the kids and I hopped in the car and off we went to our first alpaca farm. The farm managers were fun and kind. They had five kids and every single one of them had flaming red hair. They caught one of the new babies (hey I leaned a new word, baby alpaca are called cria for creation). I touched her. How to describe this, she was soft, but it was the kind of soft you might feel if you could touch an angel's wing or if you had a whole bunch of dandelion fluff all together. She was like a cloud, like silk like the best stuffed toy Gund and Steif together ever made. I was hooked. This baby was not for sale (years later we tried to buy her in auction but she went for 38k, even at the start I had great taste). Now the problem, how to get Andy hooked?
Andy was emphatically against alpacas heck they were thousands of dollars and he said, "They looked like something Dr. Seus might have drawn for "One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish!"
I said, Fine then, they are fuzzy they don't honk, lets take them home and watch them pronk!"
He said, "No! Are you insane? Buying one of those will be quite inane. On top of that, they cost thousands of dollars if you buy one I will holler!"
I finally talked him into going to an alpaca show. I signed him up for classes at the show. He attended talks. He was quickly captured by alpaca color genetics. I guess I have not mentioned yet but Andy is a geneticist. He studies ancient DNA from mummies, he studies modern DNA from all kinds of creatures. He studies mostly people but also whales, chimps, and had even done work on ancient camelid DNA (Alpacas are camelids by the way along with llamas, camels both dromedary and Bactrian and guanacos and vicunyas). He figured out pretty quickly that most alpaca breeders who knew a world about alpacas didn't know almost anything about genetics. Most color genetics has been figured out for things like bunnies, cats and horses. Things like homozygous and heterozygous are pretty clearly understood and things like dominant and recessive colors. The work on alpaca color genetics was in its infancy. Andy was hooked.
I was hooked the kids were hooked. We started with 12 and as I write this we have 45 alpacas (15 sheep, 3 horses, and 3 angora bunnies but that's another tale).
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment