WARNING: This post may be long — contain love and horse shit, questionable financial decisions, and a grown man getting emotional in a pasture.
I came home from work today after spending nine hours building a website about liquid nitrogen being used to cool concrete during construction.
I know.
Real rock-star, heartthrob stuff.
Nothing makes you feel more dangerous than staring at a computer at 2:17 in the afternoon thinking, “This page needs a stronger call to action about thermal control.”
Then I pulled into the farm.
And there they were.
Coco, our mini horse, standing in the pasture beside Freya, our new Rocky Mountain horse.
And I just stopped.
Actually stopped.
Like some emotionally compromised Hallmark cowboy who had accidentally developed feelings.
Coco and Freya. Nothing spectacular happened. That was the whole point.
Because for a second, all I could think was:
Holy crap. This is actually our life.
Not the Pinterest farm life where everyone wears clean boots and leans against a suspiciously spotless barn during golden hour.
The real version.
The version held together with fence staples, questionable math, YouTube tutorials, colorful vocabulary, Lowe’s receipts long enough to qualify as historical documents, and enough revolving credit to make a financial advisor quietly close their laptop and walk away.
Three years ago I made Mariah a promise.
Somehow. Some way.
I was going to get her a horse property.
A farm.
A place where she could finally have the thing she had wanted for basically all 42 years of her life.
Was that my lifelong dream?
Nope.
My agricultural background was basically knowing that cows made milk and corn came from somewhere outside Pittsburgh.
But it was her dream.
And apparently I looked at the woman I love and thought:
“I have absolutely no idea how to do this…but I’ll figure it out.”
That is either true love or an undiagnosed condition.
Possibly both.
Since then, I have Googled questions I never imagined another adult would need answered.
“How deep should a horse fence post be?”
“Can goats eat this?”
“Why is the donkey doing that?”
“Is my horse mad at me?”
“Why does every farm project require another truckload of gravel?”
And my personal favorite:
“How much electricity is enough electricity to convince a 1,000-pound animal that boundaries are important?”
Building a farm is basically learning another language, except occasionally the language kicks you, eats your fence, and poops directly beside the water bucket you cleaned five minutes ago.
But somehow, piece by piece, it started happening.
A barn showed up.
Then another barn.
Then fencing.
Then goats.
Then chickens.
Then Gus, who contributes absolutely nothing financially but somehow has the strongest personal brand on the property.
Then Coco.
And now Freya.
And standing there tonight looking across that pasture, something hit me harder than I expected.
I kept my promise.
Not perfectly.
Not elegantly.
Certainly not debt-free.
Good Lord, definitely not debt-free.
But I kept it.
There is something strange about loving someone enough that their dream slowly starts rearranging your entire life.
Their dream becomes your weekends.
Their dream becomes your checking account.
Their dream becomes a post-hole auger that refuses to start.
Their dream becomes standing in Rural King at 8:47 at night holding three different bags of horse minerals wondering exactly when you became this person.
And eventually…
their dream becomes part of yours.
That’s the part nobody puts on the Hallmark cards.
Love isn’t always flowers.
Sometimes love isn’t fancy dinners or tropical vacations.
Sometimes love is looking at the person beside you and saying:
“I don’t understand this dream at all. But I understand that it matters to you.”
And then spending three years trying like hell to build it.
Even when you’re exhausted.
Even when the fence isn’t straight.
Even when something breaks immediately after you finished fixing the last thing.
Even when the HVAC system costs so much money that I’m pretty sure the bank technically owns several major organs.
Then today I looked at those horses and had my little Ferris Bueller moment.
You know that feeling:
You’re probably wondering how I ended up here.
Yeah.
Me too.
And that’s exactly why I’m writing What the F(arm)!
Not because the world desperately needs my story.
It doesn’t.
Civilization would probably survive without knowing how much time I’ve spent researching donkey behavior.
I’m writing it because someday this will all be old.
The fences will weather.
The barns will fade.
Mariah and I will get older.
The animals we love won’t always be standing in these pastures.
And someday I want to open that book and remember exactly what this part felt like.
The exhaustion.
The mistakes.
The panic.
The laughter.
The projects that should have taken two hours and somehow became three-day archaeological expeditions.
And evenings like tonight when absolutely nothing spectacular happened.
Two horses were just standing peacefully together in a pasture.
But somehow that was enough to make me realize:
We actually built a home.
Not just four walls.
Not just 12 acres.
A home.
Four people have already preordered What the F(arm)!, which means four people have willingly invested money in whatever strange experiment is happening out here.
God bless every one of them.
If you want to read how we accidentally sold our haunted Pittsburgh house in about 24 hours and somehow ended up with horses, goats, chickens, barns, a donkey named Gus and a concerning relationship with the Lowe’s credit department, visit BigfootsFarm.com.
And if you preorder the book, you’ll officially become part of an extremely exclusive club currently helping fund Gus’s snack addiction and my ongoing war against lumber prices.
But seriously.
Tell your person you love them.
Tell your dog.
Tell your horse.
Tell your weird little donkey.
And if somebody you love has a dream that seems inconvenient, expensive, mildly insane and involves an unreasonable amount of horse shit…
maybe help them chase it anyway.
Because one day you might come home from work, stop in the driveway, look across a pasture you built with your own hands and realize something you never saw coming:
The dream you promised to build for them somehow became the life you never knew you wanted.
And that’s pretty damn beautiful.
This is the kind of thing that ends up in What The F(arm) — $40, half of which turns straight into hay for the animals in that photo. The presses roll when 25 people pre-order.
