Canton is a quaint little town with around nine thousand people. It has that country feel to it with small farms all around us and the Farmington River about a 1/4 mile away with many trout management areas. The pheasant and small game hunting is good here, and the deer and turkey are abundant. The school system is one of the best in the state, and there are good people here who have been here all of their lives and whose families have been here for generations. Now, being that this is still Connecticut, there are the “yuppie” types who commute to the Hartford area every day and live in those expensive cookie cutter homes that all look alike up on the hill that used to be woods and mountains. But they are all in one area of town, so the town still holds most of its original country landscape and charm. (Now, I’m not being derogatory towards the “newer” people of town, but we all know that a lot of small town governments now allow those neighborhoods. You know those neighborhoods. The ones with the people who have those great paying jobs, beautiful homes and SUVs. The ones who live to keep up with the Jones’. They have 2.3 children who play soccer and they hire people to mow their lawns and put up their Christmas decorations.  Ah yes, tax base, tax base, tax base... )

Our home is beautiful. We are on an acre of land with about twenty acres of open space bordering our property out back. We clown around telling each other and everyone else that we have twenty one acres! The house is a two family, surprise, surprise. Tami and I have a four bedroom cape with an attached four bedroom cape/colonial next door. That’s where my sister, brother in law, mom and the kids live. There is a four-car garage that we call “The Barn.” We call it the barn because the tax office has it listed as a barn, and it’s valued at a whole lot less that way. I’m good with that. There is a dirt road that runs along our place and ends about a mile away at the firehouse. We ride our ATVs on it all the time.

Our lives have changed a lot since coming here. Tami is teaching in a town about fifteen minutes away with a smaller population than Canton. She teaches special education students in middle school. Special ed has been her specialty her whole career. While that vocation has its share of problems, she really prefers small town problems as opposed to the ones of the cities. With fewer students, she gets to be more involved with them. I’m more comfortable with her teaching in a small town rather than a big city. Now, I don’t worry about her going to work everyday. She has also gotten very involved at church. She is the chairperson for the women’s group there and runs the food for the hungry collection.

Our daughter Amanda was here with us for a year and a half then decided to join the Navy. She didn’t enjoy or grasp the college life and decided the Navy was her future. We think she made a wise decision. She is recently married now to a guy who is also in the navy. He is on a sub and she is stateside. They have given Tami and I a beautiful granddaughter, and now another one is on the way. We miss them very much. They live in Norfolk, Virginia, where they are both stationed. He’s from Nebraska and likes the idea of farming. I was trying to get him to come up here to our sub-base so maybe we could do some farming together, but our daughter didn’t like that idea. I’m now keeping quiet about it. Oh well, I tried.

Our son Michael has made some friends here. He was resentful of the move at first. He missed his friends very much, and we couldn’t get him involved in the area. He preferred hanging out with his old friends at the beach, playing pool and videos at the many game rooms in the area and going to the mall to meet up with the girls. That was much more exciting to him than muddin' up dirt roads with pickup trucks and going to bon fires on Friday nights at the state forest with the boys around here. He did eventually start making some friends here the last eight months or so, but none of it matters anymore anyway. He has just decided to go to school in Florida. He is going to motorcycle mechanic school in March. He wants to own a Harley Davidson repair shop. I’m very excited for him!

My mother couldn’t be happier living next door with my sister, and her now three children and husband. She is busy with them every day. She cleans and does the laundry and most of the cooking. She has two Golden Retrievers and a Pug. She breeds the two Goldens and we are awaiting the new set of puppies in about three days. This will be the original Golden’s second litter. Mom is going to let her rest now and breed the other Golden from the first set of pups.

My sister is active with the kids and teaches Sunday school. She misses the city life a little bit, but says she likes our new life better and wouldn’t want to raise the kids anywhere else. My brother-in-law has a full time job driving a truck all over the state for a produce company. He loves his job and takes all of the overtime he can get. (It isn’t easy raising three kids today financially, especially here in Connecticut. Contrary to popular belief, we are all not rich in Connecticut.)

We have all lived here in Connecticut our whole lives. My wife Tami and I were raising our two kids (children, not goats) in a nice home in the town of Stratford with a population of approximately 50 thousand people. It is a suburb of Bridgeport, one of the largest cities in the state. We had a nice three bedroom house on a quarter acre lot, and it was one of the biggest properties in the neighborhood. Tami was raised there in town, and I had been there for 20 years or so.

My mother was living at my grandmother’s home in Norwalk some 20 minutes away from us with my sister Kimberly and her daughter Siri. They had moved there about two years before my grandmother passed away, to help take care of her and to keep her company.

Tami and I both had good jobs, but I had longed for a country life for as far back as I could remember, and Tami wanted more space and more calm. The kids were growing up and becoming young adults. They were both done with school, and we were taking less active roles in the community. The area was getting too busy and too populated. It was time to go.

We felt we had four priorities to address once we decided to move to the country. One was getting as close to the country as we could without risking our careers. We didn’t want to jeopardize Tami’s teaching career or my job as a title searcher. We figured if we stayed in Connecticut Tami could keep her teaching certificate and I could stay at my job. I covered the entire state, so it wasn’t like my “commute” was going to be any different.

The next was keeping us all together. We did everything together as a family (me and Tami, the kids, my mother, my sister and our niece). My sister Kimberly is only a year older than our daughter Amanda, and our son Michael is two years younger than her. They grew up going to the same schools, the same church, scouts, everything.

The third priority was to have a place for my mother to call her own. She too had a wish to be in the country, and Tami and I wanted to make sure she was taken care of. Not that she needs taking care of, but to make it easier on her and keep us all together.

The last priority we had was to give them all a better start than we had. We didn’t have much when the three kids were coming up, and we don’t have any great fortune for them now, so we figured by keeping us all together and giving each of them a fresh start in a quieter area with elbow room and good schools for my sister’s kids, we would be on the right track.

We knew we had our work cut out for us. We needed such a unique place. Definitely a multi-family. We all love each other and enjoy each others’ company very much, and we needed to keep it that way! No way were we putting four grown women (who all love to cook, who all have strong personalities, and who all take care of their children with the same values and morals but with different techniques) under the same roof. Did I mention a multi-family?

I also wanted a place for my veggie garden and greenhouse, maybe some animals, and we absolutely needed woods. O.K., I needed woods. I love to hunt deer and turkey. Everyone else was hoping for woods.

Tami and I sometimes felt like we would never find that perfect place we needed for all of us. The right number of bedrooms, a large enough yard, good schools, jobs for the kids, etc. It also had to be a multi-family. Oh, that’s right, I already mentioned that. Not to mention the cost factor. We had to find a place we could afford and we had to sell the place we owned.

Well after a year and a half of searching (and what seemed like a half a million miles of weekend traveling and open houses), we found our place in the country. Well, what we consider the country. It actually happens to be a nice area with a mix of country, and some suburbia thrown in here and there. We have settled in the town of Canton, Connecticut, and we have been here a little over four years now. It’s about an hour and a half north of where we were in Stratford. That’s actually one of the nice things about Connecticut. Nothing is ever more than two hours away from anything else here. It’s such a small state. I have been bass fishing in the hills of northwestern CT in the early morning, pheasant hunting on the east side of the state right after lunch time and reeling in flats or blues by twilight on Long Island Sound all in one day!

[To be continued…]