My Son Wanted to Put Me in Assisted Living. I Bought a Run-Down Horse Farm in Kentucky Instead

“I’m seventy,” I told him. “Not dead.”

He wanted me to sign a power of attorney. He wanted to talk about long-term care insurance and whether we should look at a reverse mortgage to cover costs.

I told him I’d think about it.

What I actually did was call a real estate agent.

When I was a boy, my uncle worked on a thoroughbred farm outside Paris, Kentucky. Every summer, I’d go stay with him. I mucked stalls, carried water, and fell in love with those horses so hard I never really got over it.

Then life happened. College. Teaching. Marriage. Mortgage. Raising a family.

I never had a horse of my own.

So I sold the house in Louisville. The agent found me a thirty-acre farm outside Paris, with a sagging barn, a farmhouse that needed a new roof, and fences that were more suggestion than fence.

It also came with two retired thoroughbreds the last owner couldn’t afford to move. A tall chestnut gelding named Captain and a gray mare named Dolly.

Both of them were over twenty. Both of them were too thin.

Nobody wanted them.

I knew exactly how they felt.

Marcus thought I’d lost my mind. My financial advisor thought so too, though he was more polite about it.

The first month was a disaster. I bought the wrong hay. I didn’t know how much to feed. Captain started limping, and I panicked.

That’s when I met Josephine Akers.

She lived on the farm next door. Sixty-six, short gray hair, a voice like a drill sergeant. She had been an equine veterinarian for almost forty years before she retired.

She came over the fence without being invited, took one look at Captain’s leg, and then looked at me.

“Who told you to feed him that?” she asked.