A variety of trees and wide open spaces in the Sand Hills entice you over the next ridge.
We weren’t looking for a piece of prairie, but it found us all the same.
Inching through stop-and-go traffic snarled on an eight-lane freeway between Dallas and Fort Worth, Shawn called his dad back home on the family farm in central Kansas to wish him a happy birthday.
On this night in early December his dad mentioned a property that sounded interesting. An auto mechanic the family had used on a number of occasions had died the previous spring. His widow was putting his 30-acre property up for auction.
It was an odd piece of land with a house tucked behind a tree row along a busy road, a large metal building that grew with the auto shop business, another metal machine shed, cattle pens, a small cabin hugging the shore of a catfish pond and pasture ground in the Sandhills fringed with cottonwood, oak, catalpa, and cedar.
The property was within hollering distance from Shawn’s brother’s land, where his family had moved into a newly crafted home just a few months earlier, and a few miles outside of Hutchinson, a modest city on the plains with enough shopping and dining options to provide for most wants.
This wasn’t what we had in mind when we dreamed of our “what comes next” plan. We knew we wanted to move from suburban Dallas-Fort Worth to central Kansas after Shawn became eligible for retirement. My poor farm boy husband missed open horizons and uncrowded spaces, forced to live in metropolitan areas near his aerospace engineering job for 30-plus years. He wanted to trade in his days of messy commutes, bureaucratic red tape and business trips for quiet sunrises, working with heavy machinery—what his brother called tractor therapy—and the tiring satisfaction of physical labor.
When we’d thought of moving back to Kansas, both for the country living and to be close to Shawn’s family, we’d intended to build on empty acreage near his family’s farm. Driving country back roads searching out enchanting views or traipsing along a wooded creek bed straddling a pair of wheat fields, we dreamed of a home we might build some day.
Some day being the plan. After we got the kids off our payroll. With two daughters in college and one in high school, we had no intention of beginning what Shawn called our “What Comes Next” plan.
But the phone call with Shawn’s dad got us thinking in a different direction. We asked if he would go look at the property and let us know what he thought of it. His dad and the brother who lives nearby called the realtor handling the sale to arrange a visit. They deemed the land interesting with lots of possibilities. The auction date was just a few weeks away.
This was a rare year when we went to Kansas for Thanksgiving instead of Christmas, our plans complicated by our eldest daughter attending a Christmas Eve wedding in San Antonio (who gets married on Christmas Eve?).
But as luck would have it, one of my best friends from high school, Martise, who lives on the Yucatan Peninsula, was visiting Wichita between Christmas and New Years. I’d arranged a long weekend visit to Kansas to spend time with her and Anne, the other member of our high school “Three Musketeers,” who teaches at an Arizona mission school on a Navajo reservation and spends breaks with family in Kansas.
In between visiting the Wichita Art Museum, shopping the fragrant abundance at The Spice Merchant and sharing laughter and our favorite Vietnamese noodles, I managed to drop by the property on Plum during a frigid, snow-clad Saturday open house.
I found the house itself a puzzle, the pond and cabin a pleasant surprise, the rolling pasture enchanting and the old auto shop and various structures rather overwhelming.
The house, though well-kept and upgraded many times, began life in the bicentennial year as a mobile home. You could see it in the long, narrow rectangle from the dining room bay window, flowing into the kitchen, with a bathroom and two small bedrooms tucked neatly in behind.
But the house sprouted wings over the years. It looked like this couple just added a room here and there, whenever money matched motivation.
Mama wants a master bedroom. Here came the room, complete with a bath that included the BEST shower I’ve ever used IN MY LIFE, all done in what my daughters call “old lady pink.” Mama wants a bigger walk-in closet. Y’all, I was having serious closet envy, too. My home closet is about 20 square feet. The Plum house closet is six or seven times that size.
Fancy shower includes whirlpool bath for your feet and four body jet sprays on the wall to your left.
Mama wants a hot tub room (which they later removed and turned into an office) with its own bath so the grandkids didn’t have to use the nearby master bath. Mama wants a sunroom with floor-to-ceiling Pella windows, the kind with tiny blinds between double panes. Everything, including the switchplates, wallpapered in the greatest colors of the ’90s. Navy stripes, mauve and coral florals…
Add a large covered deck, a small deck off the sunroom, a koi pond next to a mini-bridge and a variety of lovely trees (blue spruce, magnolia, Mexican plum)…. You get the idea.
Imagine all that built around the heart of a mobile home. Things that make you go “hmmmmm, interesting” or “how crazy is this?”
On the other side of the detached garage (in addition to an attached garage), there was an auto shop. Almost all the equipment had been sold off, but the metal building had room to work on six cars, two of them in their own individual garage bays. Like the house, the auto shop sprouted additions as the business expanded. Most of the structure was old and the pipes froze that winter, causing a leak.
What in the world did we need with the world’s fanciest mobile home and a somewhat dilapidated auto shop?
Next to the shop, a small orchard included young cherry, peach and apricot trees, a goat milking shed (yes, that’s a thing) used for storage, a snazzy chicken coop with power for heat lamps and lights, a rusty yellow machine shed and movable cattle panels, feed bunkers and an automatic watering system.
As I walked east toward the middle of the property, hunched in my jacket against the late December cold, I saw a sight that made me grin. A Jayhawk made from metal greeted me from the wall of yet another strange building that grew in stages.
Jayhawks have a special place in my heart. I graduated from the University of Kansas, where I met my farm boy husband. Rock Chalk!
It started life as a glorified shed, built by Amish craftsmen. It had a sink, space for a fridge, a place for a table and chairs and a window unit AC. Our mechanic had added a large closet, a decent three piece bathroom and a bedroom with another closet and a motel-type heating and air-conditioning system.
Surrounded by young trees and a handful of large cottonwoods and cedars, the odd cabin sat next to a small pond we were told was well stocked with catfish. A composite deck, a water tank and broken windmill completed the picture. Oh, and there were ducks waddling around. Three mallards and a female, they had night-time quarters in a fenced pen next to the pond.
A cozy cabin snug against the shore of a small catfish pond.
My brother in-law accompanied me on my tour of the property. After seeing the cabin, I rode in his pickup through the gate into the pasture to the east. A couple of Sandhills rolled the terrain like a wrinkled blanket, high enough I couldn’t see beyond them. When we got to the second hilltop, the pasture, dotted with oak, cottonwood, catalpa and cedar, flattened into a plateau before dipping down to the eastern fence line. Beyond it, I could just glimpse a large barn about a half a mile away. To the north, a thicket of cedar trees obscured the views and a small neighborhood with lovely custom-built homes bordered the land to the south.
I got out and walked toward the back of the property, then trudged back on a different path south of the dirt track that had taken us into the pasture.
Two small natural ponds, one in the back corner and one near the south fence in the middle of the property, had Nickelodeon slime green sludge on top. Around each pond, a grove of cottonwoods reached bony white fingers to the sky.
All in all, I fell under the Plum Prairie spell. I could imagine a comfortable house built into the last big hill to the east with sweeping views of the sunrise. Room for the horses I’d pined away for in my childhood bedroom decorated with horse posters and my model Breyer Appaloosas, paint ponies and roans. A shop for tinkering and pens for a handful of cattle for my farm boy husband.
This was Dec. 29, 2013. The auction was set for Jan. 11.
I couldn’t wait to tell Shawn, “I think we need to go to this auction.”
Thickets of trees give way to spacious pasture ground.