Interesting question…
We live on about 70 acres of family land. It’s not the farm where I grew up, Dad sold the farm and bought this place when I was about 20, a couple of years after I’d left home. I came back with my wife in tow 5 or 6 years later when a promotion brought me back to the area and Dad offered us a couple of acres for nearly nothing if we wanted a spot to build on. We got the Certificate of Occupancy and moved in about 26 years ago.
Used to be mom/dad, me and my family, my brother and his family. Brother and his family moved away probably 18 years ago. Mom passed about 10 years ago. Dad passed earlier this week. Our son moved away for college about 8 years ago and hasn’t moved back (miss him sometimes but thankful he didn’t fail to launch). Son recently said he is thinking about moving back to the property, in one of the now unoccupied houses, when he gets married and starts having kids in the next few years. Who knows what will happen with all that? Not me, for sure. For now it’s just me and my wife rattling around on 70 acres of mostly trees with a pond, creek, 3 houses, a smallish equipment shed, and enough open grassed areas to need a decent tractor and brush hog to tame it.
To the point of the thread, we’ve used the pond for fishing, frog gigging, and the occasional muskrat hunt. We’ve used grassed areas of various descriptions for football, frisbee, croquet, volleyball, badminton, clay shooting and various other practice activities with firearms and crossbow, gardening, as well as a bunch of other similar stuff. We’ve used the trails for walking, hunting, photography, mini-bike riding, bicycle riding in addition to the practical necessity to get around the place. We’ve used every bit of the place for insect hunting/collecting when my son was into that.
Even when we had kids here full time, I don’t recall ever cordoning off a specific area strictly for kids aside from some play equipment that was suitable for children and clearly not suitable for adult sized folks. We have had ample outdoor recreational activities for whatever children were here at the moment, as well as outdoor recreational activities for adults.
Could be just me and the wife here for many more years. Could be by the time I retire there are at least a couple of grandkids learning to fish in the pond in their back yard where their dad learned to fish. Either way is swell.
Kids grow up and move away. Adults get old and their world shrinks until they’re no longer here at all. More kids show up and the old basketball goal goes back up, the fishing tackle box gets a fresh update, and there’s another kid proud of the fact he’s the only person in his 6th grade class (including the teacher) that can back a 20’ trailer 200’ across a dam with a stick shift truck when there’s no good place to turn it around.
Nothing to be sad about. If you fall in love with the place you’re at and try to stay there, life will run right over your ass. Enjoy the now and roll with it as it changes, because it will.
