I remember having driven past "our farm" before it became ours.
We were driving around, taking in the sights northwest of the lake basin, enjoying the summer rains and the incredible rainbows they would generate in this already "beautiful enough" landscape. The road descended, entering a small rural town.
A pleasant community of simple houses, loose running poultry and street-sleeping dogs rolled out in front of us. Young people in small groups stood about on the streets, old men sat on benches across from the large wooden church, chatting in the afternoon sun. Opposite the church, a soccer field glowed brilliant green, and beyond it stood a zinc-paneled bullring in faded paint, partly rusted. The sky was brilliant blue, that tropical cerulean blue that seems to speak of happiness. A shower had just passed over the town, leaving everything shiny and sharply defined and as we turned east on one of the small streets we were greeted with a massive, vibrant double rainbow the likes of which we had never seen.
I asked a young man the name of the town and mistakenly thought he had said "good lands"... As we left town, we noticed a gravel road to the left of the main pavement and decided to explore it. It wound upward, somewhat narrow in places. It was a landscape of fields with horses and cows, trees extending along the ridges and hillsides, many windblown and flagging. A single house stood in one of the fields.
As we climbed higher along the ridge, I noticed a "Se vende" sign, for sale, on a wooden fence in front of a gated property.
A dry summer field, an "arid plain", stretched out behind a wooden gate wide enough for a truck to pass through. I drove slowly along the gravel road, my wife and I silently taking in the countryside. I had noticed the "tapia", the roofed entrance to the farm on our right long before our car passed it and I visually scoured the field from corner post to entrance while driving the length of the frontage.
The field was brown and yellow, the mountain vegetation and shrubbery on the yellow landscape formed islands of dark green here and there, a few trees lined the north side of the field. One tree stood out starkly in the middle of the flat field.
I could not see anything much but a flat plain about 200 meters wide. In the distance, behind the field rose a hillside and had I been thinking more (and driving less) I would have seen that the field sloped downward to an unseen creek and woods.
From where I sat, I didn't much like what I saw, despite liking the area for it's beauty and distance from the area's 2 cities.
A few days later, our seemingly self-appointed real-estate guide (an affable man in his early 60's, father of the young woman who managed the property we rented during our stay) offered to show us some properties in the same small town.
We were driving around, taking in the sights northwest of the lake basin, enjoying the summer rains and the incredible rainbows they would generate in this already "beautiful enough" landscape. The road descended, entering a small rural town.
A pleasant community of simple houses, loose running poultry and street-sleeping dogs rolled out in front of us. Young people in small groups stood about on the streets, old men sat on benches across from the large wooden church, chatting in the afternoon sun. Opposite the church, a soccer field glowed brilliant green, and beyond it stood a zinc-paneled bullring in faded paint, partly rusted. The sky was brilliant blue, that tropical cerulean blue that seems to speak of happiness. A shower had just passed over the town, leaving everything shiny and sharply defined and as we turned east on one of the small streets we were greeted with a massive, vibrant double rainbow the likes of which we had never seen.
I asked a young man the name of the town and mistakenly thought he had said "good lands"... As we left town, we noticed a gravel road to the left of the main pavement and decided to explore it. It wound upward, somewhat narrow in places. It was a landscape of fields with horses and cows, trees extending along the ridges and hillsides, many windblown and flagging. A single house stood in one of the fields.
As we climbed higher along the ridge, I noticed a "Se vende" sign, for sale, on a wooden fence in front of a gated property.
A dry summer field, an "arid plain", stretched out behind a wooden gate wide enough for a truck to pass through. I drove slowly along the gravel road, my wife and I silently taking in the countryside. I had noticed the "tapia", the roofed entrance to the farm on our right long before our car passed it and I visually scoured the field from corner post to entrance while driving the length of the frontage.
The field was brown and yellow, the mountain vegetation and shrubbery on the yellow landscape formed islands of dark green here and there, a few trees lined the north side of the field. One tree stood out starkly in the middle of the flat field.
I could not see anything much but a flat plain about 200 meters wide. In the distance, behind the field rose a hillside and had I been thinking more (and driving less) I would have seen that the field sloped downward to an unseen creek and woods.
From where I sat, I didn't much like what I saw, despite liking the area for it's beauty and distance from the area's 2 cities.
A few days later, our seemingly self-appointed real-estate guide (an affable man in his early 60's, father of the young woman who managed the property we rented during our stay) offered to show us some properties in the same small town.
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