I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it since moving over to Vermontism.com, but my family lives on a Christmas tree farm.

The caveat to this fact, and one that I explain often, is that we don’t actually own these trees yet. See, the former owner of our home leased his land to a local tree company about 7 years ago, and they are the ones who plant, trim, and otherwise care for these little guys. They also handle all the tree transactions, which means we aren’t due a dime of that money. We just get to admire them from our windows, and enjoy how amazing they smell when it’s about to rain…like today.

Some might view this agreement as a drawback to purchasing this property. Not so in our case. Because going from an 8,600 sq. ft. lot in the ‘burbs to an 11 acre rural farm was a significant, and daunting, leap for us.

I mean, we went from this:

to this:

The latter requires slightly more upkeep than a $20 per-mow stipend to a local W. Houston landscaping company. And given that all our worldly possessions fit in a “small” tractor trailer truck when we came here…

we obviously didn’t come standard with the equipment required to take care of that amount of land.

So a deal where we own the land, but someone else takes care of the crops thereon? That was actually a net positive for our particular situation.

There might come a day when we’re ready to clear the trees and use that land for…um, something…

But for the time being (or at least for the next 2 1/2 years, anyway) we’re okay with someone else handling it for us.

And if that means we occasionally have people in our yard with machetes and/or proton packs full of glyphosate spray?

Well, we’re obviously not thrilled about that. But trade offs must be made.

Hell, someday I might even go out there and learn how to do these things myself. And my wife will need to be on standby with a tourniquet, stitching thread, and a vat of Bactine…

j.s.