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We dreamed about it. We joked about it. Then we sold a house in Connecticut and realized if we were ever going to do it, the time was probably now.
Now is also the time in our life when we are most vulnerable to suggestion. I left a corporate job, our kids are leaving home for college, and we recently moved away from the New York area where we had lived for the past 16 years. We are in our mid-forties. Life is half over (half full?) Change is afoot.
The dream has had hazy outlines for a long time: Northeastern Vermont, apple trees, lots of land. My father's family has roots in the Northeast Kingdom. My sister married a man whose family is also in the area. Albert is Canadian and has siblings living in Montreal, a mere two hours away. Vermont is the home of the MacIntosh apple. We all love apples. I like to garden. Albert is handy, and has always been the only man in our neighborhood who mowed and tended his own lawn. This makes sense...doesn't it?
Then, during a December holiday visit to Montreal, we discovered Ice Cider. Ice Cider is a product that originated about 10 years ago in southern Quebec just over the border from Vermont. It is a dessert wine based on apples and cold temperatures. It is sold in a beautiful slender 375ml bottle, for about $20. The dream gained some small degree of clarity. And then in March we finally sold the Connecticut house after two years of trying.
On April 10th, my grandmother's 99th birthday, we bought the farm.
This blog will be my diary of our life's greatest adventure. I hope it goes on a long time. I hope we don't end up broke and divorced in 2 years. I hope we haven't "bought the farm" on everything we care about.
For now, we are so excited to be starting this together. It's like a honeymoon all over again. When we signed the papers creating our LLC with 50/50 ownership and the titles of "Co-Managers", it felt like signing our wedding certificate. We put down the pens and just looked at each other with joy.
The bemusing part is that we know full well on an intellectual level the risks we are taking, and yet we can't resist. Our business plan calls for us to lose money steadily for 5 - 6 years, and we're not sure where all the funding is going to come from. But we're running ahead like lemmings - except that we know what's coming and we're jumping off the cliff anyway. Is that the definition of passion? Or just idiocy?
I guess we'll find out.
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