**FROM CITY LIVING TO COUNTRY AIR**
I would like to say that a grand idea informed my decision to buy a hobby farm. But it was a mid-life crisis, pure and simple. One day I was content with my urban life in Toronto, and the next I woke up yearning for a pastoral refuge from all the noise and pollution. I found myself longing for freshly plowed fields, clean air, shady streams and a much slower pace. After two years of weekends spent impatiently searching the Ontario countryside, I fell instantly in love with 100 rolling acres in the hills of Mono, about 90 kilometres north of the city.
It was a grey April day in 1995. As I drove slowly up the lane of the last place of the day—a 100-acre hobby farm that was a little bigger and farther from the city than I wanted—I experienced a tiny flicker of hope. Drifts of snowdrops bloomed along the maple-lined drive. The split-rail fencing was in good repair. The drive curved gently past neatly pruned yews, and then, sheltered by ancient cedars, a perfect gingerbread-trimmed Victorian farmhouse appeared. Stone terraces and retaining walls framed garden beds around the house. Lawns, still patchy with snow, sloped away to deeply furrowed fields and cedar bush. Hope exploded before I even stepped out of the car. An hour later, I was head over heels in love and ready to make an offer. That was 12 years ago, and I was blissfully ignorant of the ways in which the farm would change my life.
*The Victorian farmhouse that stole her heart*
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