I apologize for the delay in making announcements about the expansion property, I hoped to tell you something definite by now. It’s been an incredibly stressful few days as we try to finish the closing, which hasn’t happened yet. The good news: we raised enough for the down payment, because of all you wonderful people. However, paperwork, contracts, lawyers, and all that necessary “official” stuff has caused a couple of delays, and there are moments we’ve been trying to just keep breathing, not totally sure how far we are pushing the patience of the seller.
I want to remind myself as much as all of you of where this whole adventure began. Starting out my little herd of rescued goats and chickens as a single mom here on the side of a mountain on a patch of borrowed abandoned moonshiner land in Appalachia. The RV I felt so lucky to be able to afford to buy so I could move out of the condemned mobile home left behind on the property. A falling down, snake infested tobacco barn that constantly leaked and flooded. I owned nothing in this world except a tiny ford festiva I used to haul ALL of our hay and feed, and I worked 2 jobs, 80 hrs a week at the dairy and 20 hrs as a cafe waitress to make ends meet and make sure we had everything we needed. I spent a lot of time alone with my first 5 goats and the big, quiet wilderness that surrounded us. This was us, right here.
And here we are, 14 years later, many hundreds of special animal individuals helped, so many lives changed, our own ten acres and a real house just minutes outside of a sparkly city. Maybe just about to double that. A busy, buzzing, nonstop org that not only saves animals but educates, inspires and maybe sometimes saves humans, too.
When I’m feeling pretty down, tired, exhausted and anxious about not being better than I am or having done more than I have, or the floundering and imperfectness that comes with being a rescuer, I try to remember how far we’ve come. We’re not looking straight up a mountain anymore, and although we haven’t reached the tippy top, we can look a ways down now.
Send us your good thoughts for Monday, we hope to bring you some good, definitive news from a little higher up.
