Blog 3656 – 11.07.2025

Caught Between Two Worlds

In two weeks, actually two weeks from tomorrow, I will celebrate my seventh fifth birthday. That is three quarters of a century and in my family only my dad’s youngest brother and a great uncle have passed that mark to my knowledge and even those two by less than ten years. It is still my intention to stick around to write ten thousand daily blogs and to pass the one hundred year mark myself.

When people my age use the phrase “caught between two worlds” they are usually referring to this one and the next. Yet, I would like for you to consider it in a slightly skewed or different sense. One year ago yesterday I closed on a fifteen acre tract of land in Bon Wier, Texas adjacent to some sixty acres my that son had purchased earlier that year. He had shared with me his vision of one day owning a total of one hundred acres. Some fifteen or so years ago I had had a dream myself of owning a one hundred acre horse ranch so I asked my son if I could help him realize his vision. He told me there was a brother and sister who owned fifteen acres each next to his property, but that neither had responded to his offers to purchase their land. I said let me try them, believing they might be more willing to sell to someone nearer their own age. I first contacted the brother because his piece had a sweet pond on it. He was agreeable to my offer and we closed on November 6th of last year. A couple of months later I wrote to his sister telling her that I had bought her brother’s land and wanted to make her the same offer on hers. Though reluctant to sell, at first, after asking her two sons if they wanted the property and finding out that neither one ever intended to live there she sold me her half of the property that her mother had equally divided between her and her brother.

Then I had my eye on a small tract of land, just north of the first tract I had bought. It was thought to be 3.2 acres, yet after being surveyed ended up being just short of five acres. My son said this piece might be tricky as it belonged to the estate of a man who had died in 2013 and the probate of his will had never been completed. After searching the online records we found a copy of his will and he had left the property to his niece who had herself passed a few years ago and he had stipulated in his will that in the event she did not survive him that he wanted it to go to his niece’s daughter and son in equal shares.

I contacted the daughter and she told me in no uncertain terms that she had no intention of selling nor did her brother. Not to be deterred, I mailed a formal offer to both of them on the property with a closing date of December 31, 2025 to give them plenty of time to think the offer over. I called the sister again a few weeks later to follow up on my offer and she told me she had put it in her gun safe and would consider it after she figured out what to do with some other properties that her mother had owned. To sweeten the deal my son and I offered to pay the lawyer who had begun the probate of her great uncle’s will to complete the work and get her and her brother title to the land. That was the ticket for the brother was anxious to get his half of the money and the sister was tired of paying taxes on land she had derived no benefit from. Last month we closed on that property. Now we only need to secure four more acres to have the Hundred Acre Wood of my son’s vision and my dream together.

In August after having water and electricity run to my first fifteen acre tract and preparing a campsite I moved a twenty foot pull behind camper trailer on to the property. I had up to that point driven from Houston to Bon Wier, about a three hour drive, once a week mostly by myself to visit the property and do what little I could in a few hours to clear a campsite and a few trails.

My hope was, once I had a camper with facilities on the property to talk my wife into making the trip with me each week and spend a couple nights there. This we have done for over a couple of months now. With my son’s help again we now have a used Polaris Ranger 500 to ride around on and just this week added a used Bluebird wood chipper to our tools for clearing our almost five acre tract that we hope to make into a home site and perhaps a ten acre version of the horse ranch I dreamed of over a decade ago.

I am, and I believe my wife is too, caught between two worlds and not this one and heaven, but Houston and Bon Wier. We are not homesick for heaven so much as for our home in the East Texas Piney Woods. I told my son who was on a business trip to Denver this week that I am so glad and grateful that he allowed me share in his Hundred Acre Wood vision/dream and that I have come to think of that place as our true home and I really miss it when we are not there.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David James White

“And your young men will see visions and your old men will dream dreams” -Ecclesiastes