We were discussing the farm he just put under contract last week – a few hundred acres of fields and woods out in rural Southern America. We had only walked the tract once before he realized it matched his ideal escape. His three boys – 12, 12, and 9 – had followed me through the open fringe of woods beside a cut corn field, pointing out deer rubs, chucking corn roots at one another, patting big trees with their hands.
Today, my client told me they’d driven to the property again over the weekend, just the family. His wife and daughter had come along, and the whole troop had bushwhacked into new thickets that opened into swamps, pine stands whose floor he said seemed like a quiet blanket.
“Man, it just felt great walking out there, in those woods,” he told me on the phone as we sketched out next year’s dove field. “Like a complete getaway.”
And it’s not like I haven’t heard it before. Not like I don’t understand it myself, or that I’ve never helped a hard-working physician find some peaceful spot to entertain his kids and himself. It – this idea of finding the country getaway — can become a cliché in this business, if you let it.
But something about how calm and matter-of-fact this particular guy is just struck me; made me stop and look out my window at cedar waxwings stripping the last Yaupon and palm berries over a Charleston courtyard. At another rain front slipping through town.
It can never become cliché. It is why we do what we do, and why we transfer our time spent with our boots on – walking, driving, planting, burning, shaking hands, searching – to people who trust us. And, thankfully, a six-month client is considered “new” because my clients have become indefinite, years-long friends.
Right before we hung up, my client said, still calm and understated, “I’m really excited about this thing, man.”
“Me to,” I said. And meant it.