My Million-Dollar Donkey Read Online Free
Author: Ginny; East
overnight, we had a million dollars in the bank and total freedom.
What did we do? Well, I didn’t rush out and buy expensive clothes. My husband didn’t zip out to buy us tickets for a whirlwind Paris vacation, and we certainly didn’t purchase a red or blue Porsche. Mark left me in Florida to pack up the house and handle our affairs while he headed off to Georgia to begin remodeling our little vacation cabin so we’d have a place to live in. His giddy delight spilled from him by way of animated speech, bright smile, and happy eyes.
I was happy because he was happy.
Within the week, Mark spied a “For Sale by Owner” sign on 50 acres of beautiful, undeveloped land, primarily forest, with about eight acres of pastureland. Instantly, that surreal million dollars parked in our bank account caused an itch in his pocket you could liken to poison oak on his butt. He wanted that property. Bad.
He drove all night on an adrenaline high to get back to Florida. “You’re going to flip when I tell you what I’ve found.” He sat on the bed to share his new, brilliant life plan which involved our buying this huge tract of land with most of our cash on hand. He would build a cabin each year for us to sell. When he was done building to his heart’s content, we could sell the final home (ours), and we would have made so much money we could move to Italy or someplace equally exotic for our next adventure. We’d be rich(er), thanks to him.
“Fifty acres?” I asked in disbelief. “We agreed we wanted a simple cabin on a mountainside, like the ones we’ve been renting for years. We said we were going to live a smaller life, not a larger one. You gripe every week about mowing the half acre of suburban lawn we have title to now. What will we do with fifty acres? And why are you suddenly talking about a construction business? I thought we were going to spend some time relaxing and enjoying time with the family. You don’t know anything about the construction business.”
“We will still live a simple life, only now we’ll be putting that little cabin on 50 acres,” he said. “No more nosy neighbors, no more customers infringing on our private life. No more people . Just us.”
“You want us to become hermits?”
“I’ll build us a simple log cabin out of the very trees gracing the property,” he said, his eyes as bright as a child on Christmas morning. “Thoreau did it.”
Seventeen years of marriage can make a man a master of pushing a woman’s “romantic ideal” button. He well knew I was enthralled with writers, primarily the transcendentalists, and my deepest dream was to emulate them.
“We can stay in our vacation cabin in the interim and have an adventure. I’ve been promising you a trip for our twentieth wedding anniversary. If you let me do this, I’ll take you anywhere in the world you want to go. Anywhere.”
The promise that the two of us would take the romantic trip that I’d been pining for forever, and live like my hero Thoreau, meant I certainly wasn’t going to refuse him anything he wanted in the bargain. Residing in a rural area would be a huge shift for people like us, but living where the closest Starbucks was over an hour away and a trip to the mall practically demands you pack an overnight bag was bound to realign our focus to the things that matter most.
So we made the decision. The Hendrys would leave consumerism and the American middle class obsession with accumulating wealth behind. We would walk away from security and abundance in the spirit of realigned values. We had no clue what in God’s name we’d do to support ourselves if this adventure proved to be folly, but despite our reservations, we felt a pull to that 50 acres and the idea that our family story could unfold in a new way. If our life had been a piece of origami, the time had come to create a new animal from the same flimsy piece of paper.
So, we started spending the cash that represented our lifetime of hard
What did we do? Well, I didn’t rush out and buy expensive clothes. My husband didn’t zip out to buy us tickets for a whirlwind Paris vacation, and we certainly didn’t purchase a red or blue Porsche. Mark left me in Florida to pack up the house and handle our affairs while he headed off to Georgia to begin remodeling our little vacation cabin so we’d have a place to live in. His giddy delight spilled from him by way of animated speech, bright smile, and happy eyes.
I was happy because he was happy.
Within the week, Mark spied a “For Sale by Owner” sign on 50 acres of beautiful, undeveloped land, primarily forest, with about eight acres of pastureland. Instantly, that surreal million dollars parked in our bank account caused an itch in his pocket you could liken to poison oak on his butt. He wanted that property. Bad.
He drove all night on an adrenaline high to get back to Florida. “You’re going to flip when I tell you what I’ve found.” He sat on the bed to share his new, brilliant life plan which involved our buying this huge tract of land with most of our cash on hand. He would build a cabin each year for us to sell. When he was done building to his heart’s content, we could sell the final home (ours), and we would have made so much money we could move to Italy or someplace equally exotic for our next adventure. We’d be rich(er), thanks to him.
“Fifty acres?” I asked in disbelief. “We agreed we wanted a simple cabin on a mountainside, like the ones we’ve been renting for years. We said we were going to live a smaller life, not a larger one. You gripe every week about mowing the half acre of suburban lawn we have title to now. What will we do with fifty acres? And why are you suddenly talking about a construction business? I thought we were going to spend some time relaxing and enjoying time with the family. You don’t know anything about the construction business.”
“We will still live a simple life, only now we’ll be putting that little cabin on 50 acres,” he said. “No more nosy neighbors, no more customers infringing on our private life. No more people . Just us.”
“You want us to become hermits?”
“I’ll build us a simple log cabin out of the very trees gracing the property,” he said, his eyes as bright as a child on Christmas morning. “Thoreau did it.”
Seventeen years of marriage can make a man a master of pushing a woman’s “romantic ideal” button. He well knew I was enthralled with writers, primarily the transcendentalists, and my deepest dream was to emulate them.
“We can stay in our vacation cabin in the interim and have an adventure. I’ve been promising you a trip for our twentieth wedding anniversary. If you let me do this, I’ll take you anywhere in the world you want to go. Anywhere.”
The promise that the two of us would take the romantic trip that I’d been pining for forever, and live like my hero Thoreau, meant I certainly wasn’t going to refuse him anything he wanted in the bargain. Residing in a rural area would be a huge shift for people like us, but living where the closest Starbucks was over an hour away and a trip to the mall practically demands you pack an overnight bag was bound to realign our focus to the things that matter most.
So we made the decision. The Hendrys would leave consumerism and the American middle class obsession with accumulating wealth behind. We would walk away from security and abundance in the spirit of realigned values. We had no clue what in God’s name we’d do to support ourselves if this adventure proved to be folly, but despite our reservations, we felt a pull to that 50 acres and the idea that our family story could unfold in a new way. If our life had been a piece of origami, the time had come to create a new animal from the same flimsy piece of paper.
So, we started spending the cash that represented our lifetime of hard
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