The pain in my toe is receding; I won’t even see the toe until next Thursday; Dr. Daly wants us to keep the bandage on for a week until she sees us. It’s just as well, and it should be mostly healed by the time I see it.

After days of cloudiness, rain, and modest thunderstorms, my blue sky visited me this afternoon.

A realtor stopped by and said the farmland down the road from us is going up for sale—14 acres for $99,000. She is obviously trying to stir interest and bidding.

I laughed. You came to the wrong place, I said.

I said we couldn’t afford it and didn’t need it. She says our town has been discovered, and people from New York are paying cash for almost anything on the market. She said the market is just as crazy here now as it was during the pandemic. The properties downstate are too expensive now, so people are coming North toward us.

I suppose it was inevitable.

. I told her we aren’t going anywhere; we love the farm and our lives here. This is my last stop; Maria may have different ideas down the road. She loves it here as much as I do.

But wealthy New Yorkers are clearly moving in, and the town is changing. It’s being slowly but surely discovered, she said.

(Portrait, Zinnia, Deep In Thought)

We’ve been very happy here, and neither of us would think of moving again, not for a long time.

This has been the perfect place for us, but the realtor says people selling at high prices now have nowhere to go. The places they might move to are also too expensive for them. I keep hearing this is happening all over the country.

I could tell the realtor was sniffing around to see if we might be interested in selling the farm. Properties like ours are selling like crazy, she said.

My own theory is that too many rich people live in cities and too many poor people live in the country. It’s out of balance. I guess I have a class resistance to rich people, perhaps because I am not likely to become one of them.

We are happy where we are, we aren’t interested in buying, and we aren’t interested in selling. It seems like many people are abandoning cities to move to the country. I can’t blame them, and I hope they are happy.