I'm 67(M) I've been a tree farmer most recently, (15 years) but have also been a school teacher, and computer geek.

The farm is 80 acres, 75 km from Edmonton, 10 km from the nearest gas station, 25 km from the nearest hardware store, 50 km from the nearest good grocery store.

Wife wants to move to the Sunshine Coast to be near grandkids. She's tired of answering the phone, doing the accounts.

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I'm torn.

Part of me wouldn't mind giving up the 10-12 hour days, the relatively meagre pay. (We can withdraw about 30K/year from the farm. Basically equivalent to one person working minimum wage.)

The farm is unlikely to be sellable as a working farm. We've had it listed for over a year, and have received three inquiries. One was serious, and is still pending. The other two, from the questions they asked are looking for a way to launder money.

The other option is selling it as a house and land, then selling all the trees and equipment at auction (A LOT of work to set up.)

In both cases we end up with enough money to buy a 40 year old mobile home on a half acre of land on the coast. (Ok, I exaggerate somewhat)

If I say "No, I'm not going" wife would stay too, but be unhappy, which would make me unhappy.

If I say, "Ok, lets go" I will be filled with resentment, self loathing for not standing up for myself.

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This started to impact the farm. I was making decisions on the basis of 'we're closing things down, so order only....' or 'no need to fix...' I finally told L. that I was running a farm. It was her job to find a place we could afford to buy, and to manage the sale of the farm. This has helped my own focus somewhat.

Emotionally this has been hard. It's much like being a teenager again, with sudden mood swings, flashes of anger, irritation, generalized angst, often totally unrelated to either farm or life.

I'd read about cutting. Physical pain giving relief from emotional pain, and giving the illusion of control. It works. I know it's not rational. I no longer see this as a rational problem.

I've always been the problem solver. As a kid one of my nicknames was "Spock" because I always analyzed everything.

One of the solutions I've proposed is that she go out to visit multiple times per year. Between the lines, I think that Stepson wants a long term daycare solution, and that L. would like to watch the kids grow on a more frequent basis. (We looked at a house near Powell River, another ferry ride away. Stepson's response,"May as well stay in Alberta."

So I've been asking myself questions to try to get to the bottom of things:

Q: Do you want to keep farming?

A: Some days yes. Seeing a batch of trees three feet taller this year than last can be exhilarating. Stuffing another thousand seedlings into pots can get boring.

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Q: Why do you not want to move.

A1: I'm scared that without the farm work, I will turn into a slug. Even now, when I look at the people my age they are all 10 years older than me. That is, I can still pick up a 25 kg sack of fertilizer, or a 100 pound potted tree. My GPS on my phone says I do 6-10 km a day.

A2: I really don't want to try and be a nice neighbour with my tiny 1/2 acre lot. Indeed, I wish my present house was 300 yards further from the county road. I've got two neighbours within 300 yards, and that is too damn close.

A3: I don't really like my stepson, or his wife.

A4: I like winter. Sure, I'd trade February and March for another copy of September and October. 6 months of snow is a lot. But "Sunshine coast" was a clever bit of marketing. It rains a LOT there. Snow is prettier.

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Q: Could you stop farming, sell off the stock as you can, but still live there?

A1. See A1 above.

A2. I need to do something productive. I can't sit around, and just surf reddit, and read books.

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Q: Could you farm out on the coast?

A1: This has a lot of appeal. It means starting from scratch. New climate, new market. But land on the coast is so expensive, and very little of it is suitable for any kind of farming. (The two big crops there are timber and rocks.)

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Q: Could you do something else on the coast?

A: Maybe. Much of the Sunshine Coast is just hospitality and health care. Due to the ferry to the mainland, the traffic tends to be local. Making a sellable product has some serious marketing and distribution issues.

Sure, I could fix people's computers. I could get a job as a common labourer for that matter. But I'm still stuck in crappy little box on a postage stamp of land, where going more than 50 km in any direction requires an expensive ferry ride, where all the trails have people on them.

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Ideas welcome. As you ask more questions, rather than responding to them directly, I will add to this note

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Q. Can you shuttle back and forth, working the farm during the growing season, and live on the coast during the winter.

A: Considered this. During the winter, I spend time working on my web page; placing orders; responding to season pre-order requests. In principle this is all portable. It requires renting a pet friendly place (hard to find) for the winter season. We did this for a month last winter. It convinced me that I didn't want to live there. We rented an 800 square foot 2 br. house. L and I couldn't get far enough apart. She likes having the TV on even if she's reading. I can't do anything -- read, do computer work, write, if there are audible words. Worse, we have to pack everything up at each end of the stay. And some critical bit is at always at the wrong end. Or we have to own two places, duplicate a lot of stuff. While we have no debt, our income is only about 50K/year total.