Rural Route Love

CARLISLE, Pa. -- Sonya Rinker was looking for a guy: someone who was kind, respectful and had a special place in his heart ... for tractors.

She wanted a man who could share the thrill of a good tractor-pull show, who could see beauty in a shiny row of green and yellow John Deere tractors.

She didn't know that somewhere along these rolling Pennsylvania hills, there was such a man, a shy guy named Tom with two vintage Deere tractors. He had been looking for a gal, someone who'd put up with his milking cows at 3 a.m. and his six-day work weeks.

Sonya Rinker and Tom Henisee lived 57 miles apart when they both signed up for an online matchmaking service designed to link up people just like them -- farmers and others who know their way around a barn and a milking machine.

Playing the dating game isn't easy in rural America: Tens of thousands of twentysomethings have moved out in recent decades, small towns have shrunk, younger farmers have become a dwindling commodity. Or to put it another way, there's a lot of land and not that many people.

Sonya was 24, but already worried. She was eager to find a mate.

"I was dead set on it," she said. "I was getting a farmer or someone who had the same interests as me and I couldn't find any around here. I was getting tired of being by myself."

Tom had been searching for someone on the matchmaking service for eight months without much luck. He was ready to call it quits.

But when they saw each other's profiles online, they began e-mailing. He was 2JD Tractors (JD for John Deere). She was Cowgirlup1582 (for her birthday.)

For seven months, they exchanged e-mails, first names only.

Then they traded phone numbers and talked for 13 straight days.

Finally, it was time to meet.

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Rural America is peaceful and bucolic. But it also can be lonely and isolating.

The nearest neighbor might be two miles away. Work often starts before dawn and ends after sunset. And knowing everyone in town is great -- unless you're looking for someone new to date.

Jerry Miller, an Ohio publicist whose clients include alpaca breeders, began thinking about all this after he spoke with a divorced farmer who said she was scared she'd never meet anyone else. She worked long hours, didn't have time to socialize and already knew everybody at church.

Miller sensed a void -- and a business opportunity, too. After doing some research, he founded an online matchmaking service, FarmersOnly (which despite its name, is not limited to those who plant the corn and till the soil).

Since it began in late 2005, this entry in the e-love business has attracted more than 85,000 people from across the nation, Miller said. Many are farmers or connected to agriculture or rural life. But there are also wannabes who yearn to chuck it all and move to the country.

A modest fee of $30 for three months buys a profile and a photo posted to an online site.

It's like any other dating service -- almost.

"Sometimes the farmers will be a little direct," Miller said. "A lot of the [matchmaking] sites will say something about romance and smoochy talk. But some guys will say 'You have to be able to milk a cow and bale hay.' I've talked to a few and said, "'You know this isn't a help wanted.'"

In more than two years, Miller said the online matchmaker has attracted everyone from a young Iowa man who bemoaned the lack of marriage prospects -- he knew of only 10 single people younger than 25 in a 10-mile radius -- to a 90-plus woman who said she wanted a "real man."

So far, more than 40 couples have married, Miller said. They have been young, middle-age and elderly. First-timers, divorcees and widows.

These "successes" have no pattern. Sometimes, two people just click.

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On their first date, it was Sonya and Tom. And Pap.

Sonya's grandfather was a chaperone, sitting quietly in the back of her Jeep until they reached the Bonanza steakhouse, where the retired farmer chatted with Tom. About tractors, of course.

"He just took to Tom right away," Sonya said. "They just hit it off. He thought Tom was a good kid."

Tom didn't mind Pap's presence. "It's all about trust," he said. "Her mother didn't want her to go by herself, and I understood that."

The two had already exchanged photos -- early on, when Tom sent her a full-bearded shot, Sonya told him he looked like a mountain man and urged him to shave. He did, sending her a clean-cut image: She pasted before-and-after pictures in a photo album chronicling their courtship.

But photos only capture so much, and when the two met, there were surprises.

Sonya's first impression: "He was too short."

Tom's: "She was a big girl. [I thought] Are you sure you want to date her?"

But they had much in common: close families, a love of the land and of animals. As teens, both had shown animals at 4-H fairs (cows for him, cows, pigs, goats and sheep for her.)

Though Sonya works in an insurance office, she has 11 goats, chickens and a heifer named Katrina. She also helps Tom with milking chores on the weekend.

"I know he isn't afraid to get dirty," she said. "I'm not a prissy little girl."

She also is no wallflower. That appeals to Tom.

"I was just overwhelmed by how easy it was to talk with her," he said. "I have problems talking with people. For some reason, it really clicked with her. It's like it was meant to be."

Pap died last summer. Soon after, when the couple stopped in to check on his place, Tom had a surprise prepared: He told her it was time to bring some new happy memories to the house, then presented Sonya with a ring, got down on one knee and proposed.

She said yes.

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Carolyn Keppel, still grieving over the suicide of her husband last spring, was looking for a friend. She was tired of chatting with women -- she just wanted to talk with a man.

George Brzeczek had more serious intentions -- he wanted a partner, someone with whom he could share his life. His wife of 35 years had died suddenly in the fall of 2006 and at night, it didn't feel right sitting alone with his dogs. "It just wasn't working well for me being by myself," he said.

He met a few women through FarmersOnly, but nothing developed.

Then came Carolyn. They were instantly compatible: Both had spent part of their childhood on farms, both had animals, both loved dogs.

George was smitten, but he didn't want to scare her away. They talked and e-mailed for several weeks, then chatted a few more. Then they decided to take the next step.

George made the three-hour drive to Huntington, Ind., from his small, part-time farm in Helena, Ohio. He rumbled into her driveway with his bus-yellow Ford truck with its Marine decal. She stepped down from her porch, and extended her hand. He had something else in mind.

"He jumped out and gave me a big kiss," she said. "He says he was finally glad to see me."

They had a picnic lunch and after he left, Carolyn headed to her nurse's job, thinking it was the beginning of something special. So did he.

Carolyn and George began seeing each other every weekend. One night in between, Carolyn said, he called and told her he had cut hay in the moonlight, bringing back warm memories of days on her grandfather's farm.

When George decided to propose, he decided he'd take Carolyn on the tractor, they'd gaze at the harvest moon and he'd give her a ring.

But then George's sheep got sick and he needed Carolyn's help deworming them. He held the squirming animals down, while she squirted a medicine-filled syringe into their mouths.

George was impressed. "Man, baby you're good at this," he told her.

When they finished, when they were exhausted and sweaty and as far from romance as two people can possibly be, George turned to her.

"Would you forgive me if I just got down on my knee and proposed on the porch?" he asked.

There was little doubt of the outcome. "Here was this woman who had just dewormed 35 sheep for you," said Carolyn, 56. "You've GOT to know the answer is yes."

They married last November at an inn in Missouri.

These days, George, a 57-year-old maintenance planner for BP, looks forward to coming home each night to Carolyn, their five dogs, horses, donkeys and sheep.

"It worked out real well," he said. "Real well."

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If all goes according to plan, Tom and Sonya will be married at the end of August.

She has ordered the dress, he has been measured for his Western-style tuxedo. Their colors will be green and yellow -- John Deere colors. There will be male and female cow figures atop their cake. They've chosen the song that will introduce them as man and wife: Kenny Chesney's "She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy." After the wedding, they'll repair to their home -- Pap's house.

And they'll make the seven-mile journey ... by tractor.