MILEPOSTS OF MY LIFE: DAN MOVES BACK TO MINNESOTA

Dan put his home in Kentucky on the market and it sold immediately. The buyers were in a hurry to seal the deal so the closing was actually the next day after the purchase agreement. A termite inspection was required but there was no access to the underside of the home. The old stone foundation on the 100-year-old home was continuous and there was no basement or trap door to the underside. But the buyers insisted on an inspection. With their permission, Dan cut a hole in a corner of the craft room right in the beautiful hard wood floor to access the crawl space. No termites. Possession of the home wouldn’t be for several weeks so Dan and the family had time to go to Minnesota and look for a home to purchase.

With only a $12/hour income at the new job, their budget was limited but they had a decent down payment so there were a few possibilities. Dan still had country living on his brain so to get acreage he had to look a bit of a distance from the metro area to stay on budget. After looking here and there, they found a nice five bedroom home on two acres a few miles north of Princeton, MN, a 40-minute drive from his new job.

Dan and his family would miss lots of things about their life in Kentucky. But their hearts had returned to the northland and they would never regret the move back to Minnesota. In the end of May 1995, they loaded up a large moving truck, pulled a trailer with a car on it, and also drove their van on a two-day drive back “home”. They arrived at Dan’s parent’s home and stayed there until closing on June first. During this time Dan was all bothered that time was passing and he wasn’t getting his summer garden planted. So the sellers of the new home gave him permission to till and plant the large garden plot prior to closing. The closing came and went fine, however, Dan would inherit some basement renters for the first month. The renters were nice enough but the month sure went slow. Finally, they moved out and the Erickson family had their entire home to themselves.

One of the first thing on the to-do list at the new home was to find a decent church. Having had good experiences in an Assembly of God church the local Assembly church was the first choice. On Sunday the Erickson family headed out to the church just a few miles away. The facility was modest but nice, able to seat about 100-150 people. No one said a peep to Dan and family when they arrived, so they just sat down. There were only about 30 or so people scattered throughout the pews. After the perfectly average service, no one said anything to the Ericksons as they left. Clearly, with the nice facility and so few cold people, there was a story there and not a good one. That church wasn’t going to be home for them. Having grown up in the Evangelical Free church, Dan decided to try the local free church. Dan didn’t particularly like all the doctrines and attitudes of the free church, but they usually had kindness and friendliness right. The church was full of good people so the Ericksons settled there for the next few years. The children prospered in their faith in the youth programs and conferences, so it ended up being a good decision. An interesting side story: A few years later Dan drove but that cold Assembly of God church and he couldn’t believe what he saw. They were putting on an addition! A zealous, God loving pastor had come to the church and preached the word that people needed and wanted to hear. The church grew incredibly over the years and is a great light to the community and a great place to grow in one’s faith.

Dan soon began work at the school in Andover, MN and realized that he had gotten himself into harder work than he anticipated. The immediate projects he had were physically challenging and his already bad shoulders screamed in violent protest. Within two weeks it was clear that full-time work at the school wasn’t going to be a possibility. The various bosses were understanding and kindly reduced his hours to half time and took it easy on him with the hard labor. Of course, Dan couldn’t pay all the bills with the reduced income so another source of cash had to be pursued. As it had been so good to them in the past, reviving the craft business was the clear choice. So, for the next few years, the business grew again and did a fine job of meeting the needs, along with the maintenance job. Dan knew that neither the maintenance job nor the craft business was a long-term solution, so he often considered what he might do instead that would be more of a career that would work for the long haul.

For years Dan had wondered about and been a bit intrigued with the idea of selling Real Estate. Dan’s Dad had a successful second career in the Real Estate business while Dan still lived at home so he knew a bit about what the job would entail, the good, bad and the ugly. In late 1996 he heard a commercial on the radio with Century 21 offering careers and training in Real Estate and something just jumped inside and said it was time to give it a try. Next time: The start of a new, rewarding, successful career.

 

THE KENTUCKY CHRONICLES 6: FINDING THE SIMPLE LIFE

Dan had purchased another home in Kentucky that needed extensive work. Nearly all the plumbing needed replacing as it had been frozen. There were only two bedrooms and Dan wanted to convert it to a four bedroom home using the completely unfinished attic which had a traditional attic access only. The foundation needed work. Deferred maintenance abounded. It needed all new paint and all new flooring. There was no heat. There was no septic system. The only water source was a leaky cistern. The yard flooded in front of a portion of the house and needed drainage. And there was much more. With the help of Dan’s friends, Steve and Jon, he went to work. After a couple of months of hard work the home had been greatly transformed to a four bedroom home with a main floor laundry and looked downright respectable and was very comfortable for the family. One of the main floor bedrooms was converted to a craft room, as well as an outbuilding to continue the craft business.

The acre and a half homestead had great potential to be a mini-farm with space for a large garden, a barn, a shop and a pasture. Dan moved some animals over from the other farm, fenced the pasture and tilled a significant garden. The soil was quite rocky so the tiller continually stirred up rocks and Dan was somewhat convinced that the rocks were fertile and reproduced. Those rocks did this for the three and a half years Dan tended the garden.

The home was located on highway 150, between Springfield and Danville, Kentucky. Dan lived on a hill, on a sharp bend in the road. The highway was quite busy and lots of trucks traveled the highway. Because the curve was so sharp the trucks decelerated as they rounded the bend making an incredibly loud sound, both day and night. There were many nights Dan woken up, and it seemed, shook into consciousness by those jake-breaking trucks.

During the time Dan lived at the home, many cars and trucks took the curve too fast and spun out of control, damaging fences, cars, and causing injury. The sound of the spin outs and then a crash was something one never got used to. When Dan heard another frightening sound like that, he grabbed the phone and ran out to call the police or ambulance for another driver who didn’t heed the curve speed limit sign. Sometimes someone would deliver something or come and visit Dan and not completely grasp the danger of the curve. One time a delivery truck stopped right at Dan’s driveway to back in, completely invisible to anything around the bend approaching him. Dan heard a loud truck in the distance and perceived there was going to be big trouble if he didn’t do something. He ran like the wind to the other side of the curve just in time to see a truck barreling around the curve. Dan frantically signaled to stop and, thankfully the truck saw him and reacted promptly, locking up all his breaks. He barely missed the oblivious delivery truck.

When Dan bought the home, he also was oblivious to the significance of the curve. When leaving the driveway and looking left, one could not see at all what was coming, perhaps at 55 miles an hour at times. So for the entire time Dan lived there, he had to shut off his car before exiting the driveway to listen for oncoming traffic. This worked pretty well and Dan never got creamed by what seemed to be an endless supply of rather careless drivers.

It was here, or perhaps at the other farm that Dan began to think that hard work was not fun anymore. The larger the acreage, the more the buildings, the more the endless work to maintain it all. It would be different if one was a real farmer and it was his income and food. But to work another job and then continually be doing other country chores had begun to get old. And it left little time for eternal things like study, prayer and service to others. For years to come, Dan would be frustrated with the balance of work and spiritual things. While Dan admired a perfect yard, landscaping garden, and pretty buildings, there was little eternal value in them. Dan didn’t want to go to his grave with only a post card picture perfect homestead to show for his time on earth. Over the next years Dan slowly simplified his life so that when he came home from work, less and less things of only earthly significance cluttered his life. This gave him time to contemplate, pray, study, and be there for his family and others. Dan is still working on the simplification plan, and life just keeps getting better as it gets simpler.