April 2026 Ranch Visit (II): The End

Today The Ranch will slip away.

It will go unnoticed.  A series of electronic actions will occur based on signatures made on documents.  Filings will happen.  An electronic transfer will go out.

The New Owner will take formal possession of the keys.  Electricity and propane and garbage and property taxes will be ended,  reincarnated in the New Owner's name.

The House, The Cabin, The Barn - now standing empty and unoccupied - will in the days and weeks ahead come to be filled with new contents and new experiences, new adventures and new plans, new memories.  All belonging to someone else.

The end of an era will come with no notice at all, just the quiet whizzing of electrons over systems.

A Road ends.  Where it leads from here, I cannot now see.

April 2026 Ranch Visit: Curtain Call

 

This was the last visit to The Ranch as it has been for all of my life.

I say "visit"; it was much more of a series of tasks that needed to be completed.

The Ravishing Mrs. TB is down visiting her family again, so she picked me up from the airport.  We made a quick stop at my sister's to pick up the truck, then headed up to see my Aunt and Uncle before the movers got there.

There was a little time, so I took one last stroll through the house.  It is basically a shell of memories now, a series of rooms that are empty of belongings and furniture and hold nothing now but memories, memories that will soon be pushed out by new memories of others.

How often over the past years, especially the last six, did I sit in the office and idly gaze out the window throughout the seasons as I worked remotely?  How often did we visit as a family before we moved to New Home, and how often did we still visit afterwards when the visits were less frequent but equally heartfelt? How often did I see, in the evening, my mother reading on the couch with the lamp on and TB The Elder next to the fireplace, sleeping?

All gone now, except in the twilight recesses of our minds.

---

My sister called me earlier in the week - the last contingencies have fallen off, and the buyers wondered if we would be willing to accelerate the sale.  We said of course - with the move of things especially and the departure of Uisdean Ruadh, there is nothing left holding it up.  This coming Thursday will now be the final closure date.

---

The moving crew showed up by 1130;  the truck loading took less than an hour with the more fragile items distributed among the cars The Ravishing Mrs. TB, my sister and I had brought.  They were quick about there business and headed off down the road; we more slowly closed the barn door and locked the barn for the last time.

And like that, it was time to go and get things placed into the storage unit and effectively leave all of this - not once and for all (not yet), but leave as anything other than visitors in the future.

---

In 2021, I drove my father out from the house to his new living arrangements.  There was a moment - after we had to go back to get his room key and then come back down the road again - where he had a look on his face, a look that said he was aware of the fact that this was the last time he would be seeing The Ranch, a place that he had been coming to for over 60 years and a place he had lived for the last 20.

I had anticipated this moments for months, but nothing still prepared me for that last drive of a mile where effectively everything receded into the background for the last time. Like my father, I realize that even if I did come back, it would only ever be as a visitor.  The property that had been his heart and my anticipation for years has passed beyond our reach.

---

After everything was settled and the movers had left, the three of us - The Ravishing Mrs. TB, my sister, and myself - went out to an early dinner before I had to fly back. 

On the one hand, there remained a great deal of sadness in my heart - no matter how I consider it, this is the ending to a very long chapter in my life in a way that was not anticipated and in some ways, seems terribly abrupt.  There was a time that I thought I knew my future; now I know almost nothing about it.

But then I remind myself of the other side, of years of going back and forth, of calls of things breaking and me having to find a fix remotely, of worries about what was happening when I was not there and what I would come back to upon my monthly visit.  All of that passes away as well; being able to concentrate more fully on New Home 2.0 and what our own next steps are, now that we are effectively child-free and entering a new era of life is not something to dismissed.

I had one future that I thought I knew; now I have another one that I had not anticipated.  

March 2026 Ranch Update: Fin De Siècle

 What a difference a month makes. This weekend:

This is literally 30 days earlier:

This month's visit to Old Home and The Ranch was a surprisingly busy one.  It started with a pick-up and breakfast with La Contessa, followed by borrowing the truck from my sister and heading over to the local Self Storage to rent a 10' x 20' unit - I had put in a reservation the day before, but given my luck, I thought the cost of paying a bit early was more than balanced out by the stress I would avoid by worrying for three weeks about getting a spot - and then not being able to.

Heading up to The Ranch, I started with a quick sweep of the house.  Thankfully the roof seems to have made it through the Winter without leaking (Yay!) and no critters have made themselves felt.  We had spoken to our real estate agent about moving the items in the barn to the now-secured storage locker.  "I know a guy" was his response, and I met said guy.  He looked at everything; his only concern was if anything was fragile. Not a problem I replied, we will have cars.

I then went up to visit my Aunt and Uncle (and cousin).  My Aunt is not doing well:  her last chemo infusion was in November (she wanted to avoid one for the holidays so she could feel okay) and she was supposed to start in January, but a series of infection in her feet have left her unable to restart chemo.  The cancer is aggressively growing and the recommendation at this point is for comfort care.  That said, she was awake and engaged during the visit.

I headed back to the barn, where the Cowboy and Young Cowboy were present.  The barn is mostly cleaned out now as they remove their stuff, which will all be out by 01 April; an estate sale is likely to follow.  The Cowboy, as it turns out, has met the buyer (who came up) and his children.  It turns out that he is actually from not too far away.  The Cowboy seemed to like him; it gives me some comfort that it sounds like someone that will really enjoy living there and will take care of things.

It is odd, of course.  The cattle are all now gone to sale, the horse will be out this week.  There was nothing in the Upper Meadow but a lone deflated balloon slowly tumbling in low winds and a Canadian Goose making a patrol.  The barn and its surroundings are mostly empty at this point.  Of note, we all seemed to carefully avoid the fact that this could be the last time we would meet in a long time.

Most of the contingencies have fallen off.  There was one request for a UV system for the pump and a financing request for replacement of the wallboard in the pumphouse that had molded.  Both will be attended to; we close within 30 days.

This is the time of year that my parents would have loved.  Everything is green but not yet overgrown.  The daffodils are starting to fail, but the irises and local wildflowers will soon start coming out.  The days are warm but the evenings are cool.  The turkeys are out on their rounds.  In years past, the cattle would be in the meadows, dark blots against the green grass.

The Fin De Siècle - The end of an era - rapidly approaches.

The Ranch: A Contract

 We are in contract.

The buyer that made the original low offer last year came back with our counteroffer price.  It is, over all, the contract that we were asking for.  Contingencies should fall off this week; closure should be sometime near the end of April. 

The fact that - up to the time we received the offer - I had only booked trips through April - is not lost on me.

Kindly enough, The Ravishing Mrs. TB made a trip back with me this past weekend to review things and take a look at what we are keeping to size up a storage locker.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I have very mixed feelings about the whole matter.

If anything, the realism of the past two years is enough to convince me - or really any sane person - that this "divided attention" scheme does not work.  As The Ravishing Mrs. TB pointed out, home maintenance and being a landlord are two of my least favorite things, and both are things that - over the past two years (five years, really) I have had to practice to some extent.  And it is not as if we are even really "there" anymore: the house is completely empty, and my visits are pretty much to see that we have no new leaks or critter issues.  

There is certainly no sense of "living there", the illusion I granted myself from 2020-2023 when I could spend a week there at at time.

On the other hand, of course, it remains as beautiful and rooted in my family history as ever.

What happens next?  Well, we still have some equipment to sell and a barn to empty (via estate sale or mass "come and take it"; there is almost nothing I can store and/or use at this point) and our own items to store.  The Cowoby and Young Cowboy will move their things off the property, Uisdean Ruadh will move to his next home.  By my last trip in mid-April, I anticipate there will literally be nothing for me to do except walk an empty house, cabin and barn for a check, walk the property one last time, see my Aunt and Uncle, and turn in the keys.

And after that?  I told The Ravishing Mrs. TB this was my "biggest" thing:  I simply cannot imagine an "after that" at this point.  Yes, there will not be as many trips and yes, the concern of getting a phone call for an unexpected issue or repair will be gone, but so will what for many years I had thought my future would be.

That was okay, she suggested.  For now, perhaps simply being done for a bit will be enough.

December 2025 Ranch Update

 

I might equally title this "November and December 2025 Ranch Update", as it occurs to me that I posted nothing last month.

We had a bit of a set back in the pumphouse by The Cabin.  Usidean Ruadh was having a bit of a faucet problem and so he called The Young Cowboy, who went and took a look at it.  On a whim they checked the pumphouse and found that a fitting had failed and had been flinging water at pressure for perhaps up to two months (the last time Uisdean Ruadh remembers going in was sometime in October, so it could have been up to two months). There was two inches of water on the floor.

They got it shut off and The Young Cowboy very kindly resolved the issue.  That said, we now have a pumphouse with mold on the sheetrock (and into the insulation as the leak went straight into the wall) that will need to be remediated long term - The Young Cowboy sprayed it down with bleach so at least the immediate need is met.

Not exactly the development we were hoping for.

As I had mentioned, our agent had suggested taking the property off the market for the Winter, which sounded reasonable as we had no interest (and things are slow in Winter anyway).  The individuals that had made the low-ball offer came back asking about renting the place for six months.  We had a difference in the nature of the conditions - they wanted the barn cleaned out and the cattle gone within one month of the start of the lease, my expectations (for what they were offering) was the house/garage only.  We have not heard back from them after we countered.

Given all The Cowboy and The Young Cowboy have done for us, a short turn around time a renter seemed not right to me.  Also, for the size of the property, what they were offering seemed a little....low.

My Aunt continues to hang in and do well.  She is between chemo treatments for the holidays.  Her spirits are high, she is fairly mobile, and she is always engaged in the conversations.  Thanks for all of your kind thoughts and prayers.

---

If anything, these past few months have convinced me that the decision we came to was the right one.  Trying to regularly keep with a property that is far away is mentally tiring - let alone worrying about what random failures are going to happen.

I look back now and wonder if we just should have cleared the house out and rented it as soon as it was clear my parents were not coming home.  I do not know that I could have done that then, but part of that was a fair amount of sentimentality on my part, sentimentality that was not really driven by giving consideration to the facts on the ground (in this case, the fact that I was likely not going to be able to move there for years yet or even if it were realistic to do so).  I will say that, in general, this is causing me to reconsider a great many things in my life and ask the same question.

I will always have a heart for The Ranch, knowing at the back of my mind that someday, the visits will be very infrequent indeed or even cease entirely.    But there is also a part of me that will be glad to lay this down once and for all.

There Is (No More) Place Like Home

 Earlier this month I set out for my trek to visit The Ranch

These visits are becoming more and more (or less and less) cumbersome in terms of execution.  There is nothing to do at the house but to do a quick walkthrough.  Other than that, it is just a series of visits with my sister and Brother-in-Law, my Aunt and Uncle, my cousins, The Cowboy and The Young Cowboy, and Uisdean Ruadh to see how things are.

I accomplished most of these visits.  I walked down to The Barn to re-examine the things that we had set aside to save - and found out that I had managed to forget where the key was, so I went on a walk.

And then I realized:  for the first time in years, I found myself at a loss for things to do.  This place still had a warm place in my heart, but it was no longer home.

The moment passed after a bit: I  walked back down to see The Cowboy and chatted for a spell, took my pictures, and then walked back up to the house.  Still almost two hours until I needed to meet Uisdean Ruadh for dinner.

It is a strange thing when a thing is no longer a thing.  We all know it, I suppose:  the relationship that grows cold, the restaurant where the food no longer is delicious but just okay, the movies or books that never are quite as good as we remember them at the time.  The thing has passed from the extraordinary to the common place or even to something or someone that we used to know.

The going is silent and slow, until all of a sudden it happens at all at once.

It is wrong to say that The Ranch will never be the equivalent of a restaurant or a failed relationship; the history there is too long.  But neither is it wrong to say that is not "The Place"; it has just become a place, one of a long series in my memory.

I currently have day trips planned monthly between now and February.  Total time on the ground is generally ten to twelve hours.  Which seems sufficient - even more than sufficient, given what there is left to do.

Have I created a separation based on the necessity of the reality of the sale?  Perhaps.  But this is not uncommon with other things in my life where for one reason or another, a time for a change has come.  For better or worse, once I am done, I am done.

Rather Tired

 

I have to confess I am rather tired.

This weekend was another trip back to The Ranch to do my now-monthly round of check-in. Originally I had elected to try and make this a one day trip, but after thinking of the opportunity to see my Aunt Pat again, it made more sense to try to extend it to today. 

An early flight - up at 0315 on a Saturday, one hour flight to Old Home, then grabbing the truck that my sister had left in the parking garage when she left the night before for the weekend, then breakfast with my cousins, then up to The Ranch and visiting my Aunt and Uncle....and that was all before noon.

(My Aunt has restarted chemotherapy.  That said, she was happy to see me and was definitely involved in the conversation.)

After that, it was time for chores.  Opening up the water lines on the toilets to flush the bowls, realizing that there was no water, going down the hill to bump the pump to get  it started, then waiting for things to fill up.  Checking for any leaks or critters in the house (thankfully still no critters, and only the evidence of the one roof leak which has not leaked since this Winter).  Weed whacking the weeds directly around the house.  Visiting with The Cowboy and The Young Cowboy.  Making a drive down the hill to donate books and get a new battery for the Gator (which is still not work, although it at least turns over - alas, for another visit).  Going through items one more time to see if anything else can be moved to the donate pile.  Dinner with Uisdean Ruadh.

The following morning, rising earlier (because it is light early) and finishing a book in silence.  Breakfast, vacuum, reclean the toilets, talk a walk down the road, and then back to the airport to park the car for my sister (ironically enough, she saw me in line waiting to get on a plane just as she got off and we talked for a bit).  Flying back to New Home 3.0 and inevitably arriving a little late - just late enough that I could not make it to Iaijutsu class for the week.  Then, of course, catching up on the remaining chores at home (grocery shopping, interacting with a grumpy rabbit that was not happy I was gone for 1.5 days).

And, of course, trying to get yogurt started for next week.

---

This flow of events is now fairly typical for my once a month visits to The Ranch.  The exhaustion is too; so much so that I have largely booked single day visits for most of the rest of this year in the hopes that I can get the chores I need to get done in half a day, come back home, and give myself a full day to recover (as well as get to Iaijutsu class on a regular basis).  

If anything, this sort of thing makes me glad that things happened at the end of 2023/early 2024 the way that they did: I cannot imagine trying to do this now with my mother still alive and having the bulk of the decluttering ahead of us.  

The ability to go and stay for a week and work remotely while they were alive was always something of the equivalent of a hothouse flower living in an arctic environment:  an artifice which was made possibly by a number of factors including The Plague, work from home, a job that allowed me (twice) to be remote, and a fully stocked house to do it in.  None of the factors exist anymore and even if some of them did, the simple fact is that there is no more Interweb there (not surprising, considering what it cost).

And while I am still grateful I am able to go there at all, it is surprising to me how much a thing changes when it comes to feel more like a chore than a joy.

A Brief Stop At The Ranch, February 2025

I spent most of Saturday at The Ranch.

Visits have continued to get longer between times and shorter times while there.  Part of this is due to the fact that life simply gets busier and it is harder to get away.  Part of it is that I am a slave to the airline schedule, which sometimes is with me and sometimes against me - regardless, I scarcely get more than 36 hours total on the ground.

This visit - after giving Uisdean Ruadh a hand with moving the last bits out of his storage locker along with The Director, a lunch with the both of them, checking in with The Cowboy and The Young Cowboy, and dinner with family - was a mere 26 hours from arrival to departure.  That left enough for a quick swing of the house and cleaning the toilets (my number one visiting task).

Am I sad that I am not spending as much time there?  I am not sure I can even answer that question.  On the one hand yes, it is still as beautiful as ever.  On the other hand, 30 hours is scarcely enough to think about any one location for any length of time.

The timing is not likely to change, at least not for the foreseeable future:  my current job is very much an on site, 5 day a week sort of thing.  Occasionally I could probably work remotely - people do - but even then with the ending of InterWeb access there, I could not work from there if I wanted to. 

So I do what I can.

It is a little jarring to go from 1 week a month somewhere for the last four years to a day (more or less) every month to two months.  But that is reality now.

Life changes.  And we do the best we can.

Sorting Lives

(Author's note:  As part of this visit to The Ranch, I stopped by to see my Aunt Pat, whom you have very kindly been praying for/thinking good thoughts for.  Imagine my surprise when she opened the door!  She is doing much better, to the point they are thinking of moving her off hospice.  Thank you for all of your kind thoughts and prayers.) 

Two weeks ago, I completed the sorting of the last of the materials at The Ranch.

The moment almost slipped by me without noticing, the last sheet of paper in a pile of papers from the file cabinet that I set aside during my last visit to go through again to make sure I did not dispose of anything that I truly wanted to keep.  I sorted it into the appropriate pile - keep, burn, shred - and looked for the next sheet.  It was not there.

I was finished.

It was an odd feeling, as this is a process that more or less has been going on for the last four years.  We knew this time would come; if anything I was guilty of not being proactive and starting to sort sooner.  That slower pace worked as long as I was able to get back there for one week a month; it did not work nearly so well when a week became a weekend.

Having never sorted a life or lives, it is a sobering thing to realize that you have in essence looked at an individual's life (or in this case a married couple) through the things that they owned.  In some reasons I know why those things are there, in other cases I do not:  Why did they keep this?  What significance did it have?  If I let go of it, am I releasing some precious treasure?

Ultimately of course, all we can do is all we can do:   we set aside the things we know, we evaluate the things we do not know, and let the rest go to some else.

And somehow, suddenly find ourselves at peace.

A Brief Visit To The Ranch: November Edition

This weekend at The Ranch was a mixed bag.

On the bright side, I believe we now have everything that we intend to keep packed up and in boxes.  The last remaining outstanding item is the file cabinet - and even with that, the initial sorting has been completed.  What remains is to analyze everything I set aside in the "shred" and "get rid of" piles to make sure I agree with that assessment (and then shred them, of course).  That said, we now are in a position to actually try and visualize how all the rest of everything is going to be removed from the house (literally, we have no idea).  

Also, my mouse problem of two months ago seems to have resolved itself via some baited food and a trap which last month apparently got the last inhabitant in the attic.  No sounds nor sight this month.

On the less bright side, the roof leak reappeared - although fortunately just before my arrival (as with the initial time), so it appears that there is limited if any damage to the floor.  The Cowboy mentioned they had significant rain and wind just before my arrival.  Wind seems to be the main factor, as there were no leaks last year at all.  I dried everything off, replaced the container in the attic, and put a large plastic container on the floor to catch any water.  The Cowboy has offered to look in on it from time to time until my next return in January.

The visit with my Aunt and Uncle went well.

She is tired (unsurprisingly) but seemed in good spirits and was up and engaged during my visit with my Uncle and my cousin, even if she did not have a lot to say.  The visit was 30 minutes or more, and she was awake and listening the whole time.

They have placed a hospital bed in the upstairs living room, although she has not used it as she prefers the couch, saying it is more comfortable.  This is not the first time I have heard such a complaint about a hospital bed; they are hoping a new mattress will resolve the issue - the hospital bed does allow them to raise her feet, which helps with swelling.

Any thoughts or discussion about timelines was not broached during my visit.  I hesitated to ask; no-one asked the unspoken question.  I have every hope to see her again in January.

Traveling there and back again has become less and less of an enjoyable experience.

The problem, of course, is that unlike my last two jobs (and my stint at unemployment) I cannot take a week off at a time to stay there.  As a result, my visits are wedged into a 24 to 30 hour period.  Within that period - exclusive of rising (often very early), preparing and driving to the airport, and flying - I have to get from the airport (whether by family or friends, and often with a breakfast to visit), pick up the truck, do whatever business I have to do in town, drive to the Ranch, make sure I visit with my Aunt and Uncle and The Cowboy, have dinner with Uisdean Ruadh (as is the custom) - and ensure I have enough time to do some packing and organizing, sleep, shower, eat breakfast, prepare the house for my departure, and then get back on the road to drop the truck back off and then get to the airport.

When I took the job at New Home 2.0, I knew that I would have to be onsite for the work - people occasionally work from home, but at this site there is no accommodation for weekly work from home sorts of thing.  It is a manufacturing site; we manufacture things.  I do not think I had anticipated the impact it would have on my visits back to The Ranch.  It has made such visits much less things of anticipation and much more things of inconvenience, more of a chore than a pleasure. 

It is nice to see family and friends of course, and always seeing the property is a joy - but now it always a joy tinged with sorrow and a certain exhaustion knowing that as soon as I see it I will be swiftly departing in less than a day.

An August Walk In The Woods

 I had not intended to take a walk - after all, I had things to do  before I returned back to the life that continued on without me this weekend, the whirling and scrambling of the modern world currently past my sight and sound.  But the morning remained too cool and beautiful to ignore its allure and the chairos - that Greek word for "moment in time" - might never come again.

And so, I walked.

The dampness of the soil belied the dry brown of the native grasses that is typical here in August, the last long pull before Autumn comes with the distant promise of the rains of Winter.  The combination of my foot sinking into the soil and the crackle of grass as I walk which should not have arrived for another three months or so strikes me for its incongruity.

The morning is clean and cool, the overcasting clouds that brought rain the day before departed.  The world has a fresh cast to it as it often does after such a rain, the sort of thing that I think should always happen after a rain but so seldom does.

I walk along the Long Road, the road that is - per the property lines - the actual deeded driveway here.  It has never been used as such as long as my family has been on this land as we have always used the shorter route across the other properties that surround this island of sanity - or at least we have been using it since the 1940's.   The right of way is now so established that if one is to electronically map this location, the name of the dirt and gravel road will be that of The Ranch.  One of the few times that tradition supersedes modernity.

It comes to mind I never told TB the Elder that.  He probably would have just listened and nodded his head, knowing that simply was the way it was always meant to be.

The detrius of Winter has been cleaned out as I walk, likely by The Cowboy and The Young Cowboy.  One can clearly now see the areas where new growth is going on, where trees have fallen and allowed the great Battle of Light of The Forest Floor that has been going on for ages to begin its eternal renewal.

Across the Lower Meadow the remaining horse looks up from his grazing at me, wondering if I am food bearer or close enough to be one.  It grazes away with the cattle now:  a pair of deaths this year left it the sole survivor of its kinds. From a distance I cannot tell if the cattle are an acceptable substitute.

I wander my way down as the canopy overtakes the road.   It muffles the noise well enough, allowing the idea that I move through a muffled green tunnel pushing out all but the sounds that belong here.

As I approach the Lower Gate, the sign of the limits of our property adjoining the others, I surprised to see a small black and white form working its way of the road:  A skunk making its way to wherever skunks go at this time of the day, oblivious to me as I was to it.  It makes its odd lope up the road - front back front back - its tail bobbing a second after its body.

I attempt to shoe it away with my voice but the skunk remains strangely unmoved by my verbal commands.  I stand my ground for a moment - then carefully work my way up on the side of the road; no sense in reckless courage.  I wait for a bit but the skunk does not come by.  I finally peer back down to find that skunk has not advanced.  It sees me and begins making its way down the trail - periodically stopping to turn its back to me and raise its tail.  Familiar enough with the old stories, I wait patiently until something on the road grabs its attention, perhaps a last minute meal.  

I will not make the Lower Gate today.

The Lower Gate.  In a way the end of the world here, just as the front gate that we pass through on our way in with its metal arch that gives the name of this place and the names of my parents is the entrance.  The Main Gate is welcoming in that sense, a celebration of always coming.  The Lower Gate is not so with its single cattle panel design:  "Beyond me lies monsters" it always seems to say to me.

I realize in a brief moment of awareness that there was time that I believe in monsters, and then a time that I did not.  Now, I realize, I believe in them again - even more.

I start making my way back up the road, always an enlightening activity as it seems seldom that I actually avail myself of the opportunity to look at the same things but from the reverse side.   In a city or urban area this is much less of a thing:  houses and landscaping and industrial parks seldom change for the better no matter how you look at them.  Here, change is common and and almost everywhere I look, presenting me with small tableaus and frozen moments completely unexposed to me as I head down.

As I pass a fat pine tree,  I realize our local variety of "Poison X"  is turning red as if if were already Autumn.  That it would be such a forerunner seems odd to me; that it is doing this is not comforting, perhaps signs of a bad Winter in-bound. My Great Aunt who owned this property, with her extended memory almost back 100 years, might have recalled.

As I make my way back down the road the House rises up above the bottom of small hill that it sits on, framed by the living green and brown of trees on a dry brown canvas of spent grasses.  The sun dapples through the trees as the cerulean blue sky sits behind it:  a testament, the physical remaining testament as it were, of the land here and my parents' love of it and their intent in some way to see it preserved.

Sighing, I begin the trudge up the hill.  The world awaits me.