Perhaps it is the cooler nights or the sun going down earlier, but I started feeling winter coming on last week.

Sure, the temperatures are still hovering around 80 or so most days, but it just isn’t the same as it was earlier. It really makes me regret the loss of yet another summer to the hands of time.

I always start feeling this way in the fall, no matter what I have accomplished over the past months. It usually leads to a flurry of last minute accomplishments. Once it led me to start a two-story building in late October that I worked out throughout the winter. I don’t want to do that again.

Despite these early beginnings of a feeling of time lost, I took Saturday off to do nothing. Well, not exactly nothing, but nothing productive.

The day started off with a trip to a bastion of summer — a local auction, where the price of things surprised me in several ways. I wasn’t able to purchase any of the land for sale, but that was the only part that didn’t surprise me. I’ll just keep looking around for land until I find the piece that I can both afford and appreciate.

This wasn’t one of those auctions where you pay double what someone’s old wheelbarrow is worth. This was much more expensive than that. Unlike most of the ‘city folk’ and other outsiders who come to our area, the appeal of a ‘view’ is lost on me. Instead, I prefer the common sense techniques of our forefathers. My grandmother owned several mountain vistas, but built her home on the south side of a slope near water and a spring head. To the old-timers, water and a fairly level patch of land were more important than a view of the neighbors’ land.

I do appreciate a nice view, but I don’t mind walking up a hill once in awhile to enjoy it. My favorite view is of the stars and those are visible most anywhere.

At any rate, my search has thus far been fairly fruitless. I had a chance to buy some land at a reasonable price off a gentleman from another area. That land had a spring, but no stream. I really didn’t have the money at the time to make the investment. I have kicked myself a few times for passing up on it.

One day, I’ll likely not be able to believe that I passed up on the house that sold on Saturday. It needed more work than I felt sure I could do; which is why I let it pass me by. I’ll never know how much I could have gotten it for, since the fellow who bought it obviously had deeper pockets than mine. I say that because he bought the entire 20 acre farm, one tract at a time, for somewhere around $180,000. That’s more than I can afford to pay for anything. That very much reminds me of the prices I see every week in the real estate listings. Tree growers and home buyers from elsewhere have driven up the values of all the land.

Even so, the house did sell for a reasonable amount. It was my fear, though, that I could buy the house and then not afford to fix it up well enough to live in it. That’s much like not having a house at all and the investment would have left me too poor to buy another. Little good that would have done.

It’s gotten to the point that a working man has little hope of being able to purchase a nice home and a tract of land here. If you’re a working-class individual and had the good fortune to inherit a small farm, I hope you have the good sense to keep it. It is likely irreplaceable.

Looking back on the farm my family sold so many years ago, I wonder why. I never could see the logic in selling our home and moving to another area. Perhaps it was the things I couldn’t see that made a difference.

My hope of owning a 30-acre farm in these mountains is dwindling as time goes on. I have almost resigned myself to the fact that I will be more than blessed if I end up with 10 acres and a decent house. If it takes very much longer, it will likely end up being a decent house alone. The farm animals will have to live somewhere else, like the meat and dairy shelves at the local grocery store.

But I’m still not giving up. I will search far and wide until I am sure there is no hope remaining that such a place will be available for me. Then again, there’s really not that much wrong with the place I live now. Maybe I should learn to be more thankful that I have a warm, dry home. Even if there isn’t enough land for a small farm, I did manage to have a garden. That’s a start.

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