Once Upon a Time...

Once upon a time, there was a family that wanted to live away from the setting of a conventional neighborhood. The kiddos were just getting big enough to appreciate wide open spaces, the Daddy was tired of dealing with HOAs, and the Mama thought deep down inside she could be something of a hobby farmer.

The family looked and looked and looked, and at long last they found their perfect home; plenty of room inside and out, with nothing but hay fields, cow pastures, and woods for neighbors. The family moved in and lived there happily for quite some time.

Then one day the hay field right outside their front door went up for sale. It was quite a surprise, and the family watched anxiously as buyer after potential buyer was paraded over the land. There were even some contracts on the property, too, and all of the interested buyers were developers. The family discovered the field was zoned to allow up to six houses per acre, but one of the developers didn't think that was enough and was working to get the field rezoned to allow for even more homes to be crammed onto the land.

The family felt doomed. A neighborhood... of up to eighty homes... right outside their front door. But what could they do?

Then, suddenly, the developer's contract fell through. The land was up for grabs once more.

What they had to do was clear.

And so the family bought the land, ensuring that their home would remain nestled in a buffer of peace and wild, even though the rest of the land around them will eventually fall into development.

Once again, the family is living happily in their kingdom, surrounded by woods and scrub and their new expanse of open field... and feeling so fine about it that they can even be found occasionally out in the twilight howling at the moon.

And they'll live happily ever after. The end.