The Chatelaine's Keys

Sharon August 2nd, 2010

We almost did it. We really did. We went so far as to get mortgage pre-approval, meet with a builder about the costs of repairing the barn and the house, and make an appointment to make a written offer. And we decided to stay here.

There were several reasons for doing so. The first was that our offer would be contingent, and we thought there was a better than 50-50 chance that the sellers might well sell the house out from under us – that is, since we didn’t per se want to sell the house, but rather to buy *this particular different house* the fact that we’re in no way ready to show (my comment was that the best way to make that happen would be to put the children in self-storage ) meant that a contingent offer was pretty contingent. We know the realtor wasn’t making stuff up about the additional interest – two more people stopped by to look at the house while we were there.

The interior of the house needed about as much work as we’d expected – and the nature of the work was doable, but one factor made it more expensive than we’d hoped – raising what we’d have to get out of this house to do it without debt. Add to that the expensive fencing requirements (not for the livestock, for Eli, our autistic eldest who needs space to roam without being able to wander off – we’ve got that in place in our current space) and we began to wonder whether we could do this without taking on short term debt – which is the exact opposite of the point.

None of those things, however, was really the defining factor – it was simply that we sat down and talked about what we could do in our current place to lower costs and expenses and make the farm here more profitable. We decided we needed to have this conversation regardless, since there was a real chance we wouldn’t get the house even if we made an offer. And in the course of it, we decided we were more excited about going forward where we are than about the year of chaos and instability that moving would bring – that if we stay, we can make more progress on the farm and less on the marathon job of just bringing ourselves up to speed.

It was a tough decision, and one that we still have some regrets about. It took us until Saturday to finalize it, and for the last couple of days I’ve felt exhausted, as though I ran a marathon – my whole mind was in another place, then back again, and I’m tired. But I think we made, as Eric put it “a right choice.” I’m not sure about “the right choice” but maybe that’s too much to ask for.

Chief among our plans is to lower the property taxes by getting our farm exemption – which means we need to achieve 10K in gross sales averaged over two years. We did achieve that much in sales during two years during our CSA, but were not eligible because our agricultural production occurred on only 2 1/2 acres. Now that the livestock are a larger part of our farming production, we can definitely meet the 7 acre requirement, but because my attentions have been so divided between writing and agriculture, we haven’t sold enough to qualify. So that’s the next project – making the land pay.

We’ve also decided that we’re going to get serious about rebuilding our local community. For years, we were spoiled – we lived near several families with kids about our age, and we were totally intertwined in each others’ lives. We had shared ownership of vehicles, washing machines, traded childcare and carpooled everywhere. There were other members of our community, but three families sat at the center.

And then something unspooled. One family’s marriage broke up, and the remaining parent was too overwhelmed and busy to take part, another family had both partners take new, demanding jobs, and suddenly it didn’t work anymore. And we’ve spent more time and energy trying to recreate this than in moving on and making community with other folks. We decided in our conversation that we would work harder on other sources of mutual support, and look for other people who want to work in the barter economy. We also made a list of all the friends and neighbors we do barter or trade or share with – and it was surprisingly long. Perhaps some of the problem is our intentions.

Meanwhile, the house next door to us, complete with in-law apartment and rather nice open land is for sale, if anyone wants to live next door! And we’re talking about either renting out the apartment Eric’s grandparents once lived in to a nice family who would like to share community, or if we can’t find housemates, converting the apartment to an inspected kitchen for the production of food using our produce, and a space to hold classes in.

We’re also planning on changing the livestock around a bit – we’ve always planned to add sheep for meat and fiber to our upper pasture (we have sheep there now, along with a beloved guard donkey, Xote, but this is in a barter arrangement with a neighbor who actually owns the sheep – it has been a lovely agreement, but she’s got a closer pasture available now, so it will likely end this year), but lately we’ve been talking about fiber and meat goats – small ones, and about participating in the projects going on to breed triple purpose small goats – meat, milk and fiber.

We’ve been doing experiments with woody hay crops and silvopasturing that I’d like to continue. The wetland plants and herbs that we’re growing are doing well despite the unusually dry year, and we have already had inquiries about doing native plant restorations in areas cleared of invasives. We’ve been selling vegetable, herb and flower plants, but are planning to expand.

Moving would have required that we put in several thousand dollars of capital investment into making the farm ready to sell – we decided in the end we’d rather invest that money in projects that make the farm function better, rather than improve the aesthetics of our home (not that they couldn’t use improving in some spots). Our goal is to get the infrastructure of the farm solidified, and enter next spring (I can’t do much before then – I have to finish a book!) ready to achieve a number of new agricultural goals.

So we’re staying. Again, we don’t know if it is the right decision – but we’re hopeful that it is *a* right decision. There are good reasons we might be wrong – but all life is full of risk, and you can never know the best thing to do. This, at least, might be *a* best thing.

Thanks everyone who offered comments and advice, thoughts and suggestions for consideration for helping us think this through!

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Sharon July 27th, 2010

It might have been Serendipity – we happened to be driving by, just Eric and I on our brief solo trip. Or it might have been the survey ribbons that went up across the road a few weeks ago – the suggestion that our neighbors who have been building a 5000 square foot house with a special dog-washing bathroom (no, I’m not kidding) are going to help finance that by selling off the plot of open land right across the street. Or it might have been the fact that our property tax assessment went up by nearly 2000 dollars this year – to almost 6K! Or it could be the fact that despite the face we’re peripheral to a flood plain that hasn’t flooded in 100 years, when our bank sold our mortgage last time, they forced us to up our flood coverage by another thousand bucks. But me, Miss “Someone has to stay and make right the places that aren’t perfect” is having thoughts about moving.

I don’t move because I do think you actually have to stay in place, and because I love my home, but I also don’t move because Eric would rather chew his own arm off, frankly. But this time, Eric is actually making the call to the realtor to go see the place. I’m not sure whether the increasing bills for house expenses or those survey ribbons drove him over the edge, but something did.

We were meandering through a small town not to far from us – we have friends nearby that we’d stopped to visit. Because we visit friends there regularly, we’ve been watching the local economy in this town evolve for some years – New York has a growing Amish community, and this town now has about 60 Amish families and is still growing. We’ve always driven throught he town and loved it and talked about how much fun it would be to live there. And across from a beautiful farm, was a for sale sign on an old house, one that looks not totally unlike ours, with 11 acres. Unlike our place, though, it has an enormous old dairy barn and the land is flat and fairly fertile.

We stopped, just for a laugh. It wasn’t serious, but we got out and walked around (the house is empty) and looked in the windows and the barn. And we laughed and drove away. And then we came home and a few days later looked again at the survey ribbons and received the flood insurance bill, and we started talking about it.

Today we drove up with the three younger kids to walk around – Simon had overheard us talking about moving, and it was upsetting him to think of a change. We figured that he’d be less upset if he could see the property and imagine what we are talking about, if he knew how far it was from synagogue (actually about the same distance) and most of our friends. And it did – he’s calmed right down. Isaiah and Asher were ready to move in the minute they saw the hayloft of the barn and the climbable maple tree in the front yard. It is Eric and I who are freaking out. It turns out that I like to look at houses, and to speculate with no intention of actually doing things. I don’t, so much, like the actual work of doing all this, of figuring out what the best thing is.

I don’t want to move. I really, really don’t want to move. I don’t want to do the enormous work of sorting out and moving our stuff. I don’t want to give up the fruit trees that are finally producing and the garden beds that we’ve spent all summer building. I don’t want to give up this place we know and the neighbors and community here. I don’t want to spend time on offers and counteroffers, estimates and budgets, insulation and moving vans – I’ve done all that. I bought a house. I built an addition. I did that stuff, and I’m done now.

But – and there’s always a but – I’m also thinking about it seriously. There are those 6K in property taxes – and our worries about New York’s budget and the possibilities of furlough or job loss. That’s a lot of money in taxes every year, and it is likely to get worse as our district struggles to cover things. There’s the flood insurance – we’d be out of the flood plain on this property, even though there is a creek. The cost of living here would be substantively lower.

Then there’s the neighborhood – slowly, gradually, the tight ties our neighborhood had when all the younger mothers in the community were home with their kids have decayed a bit as parents went back to work full time. Our long history of bartering and sharing with our neighbors has fallen apart – not because we don’t want to offer, but because they feel they can’t pay us back anymore. We are still friends, still share things – but we’ve started to feel more scattered, less integrated into each other’s lives – once we might not have been able to leave, now I think we could.

There’s the land across the road – in the nine years we’ve been here, three more houses have gone up on our road, and many more in the development across. They are nice people, but the rural character of our town is changing into something more suburban. We can live with more neighbors – but the privacy that we’ve had here is more a part of what we long for than I knew. That can happen anywhere, of course, but it is happening where we are, and agricultural neighbors, the kind that are building up our neighborhood, are rather different than suburban McMansions with dog-washing bathrooms. Or maybe they aren’t – people are people. But it seems that way sometimes.

The house we own is too big – even with one housemate, it is simply too large for six people, two of whom don’t want to spend any more time cleaning than they have to. It was right when Eric’s grandparents were living with us, but they are gone. We could take in more housemates, but it is difficult enough to live happily with friends – we could do it with strangers, but we’re a little reluctant – we worry about the dynamics in our happy home. Phil has been a delight and a blessing – but it took us nearly two years to find him.

The place isn’t perfect – it would need work – and so does our house if we are going to sell it. I shudder at the thought. All of a sudden, my whole life would be selling and packing and moving and making things pretty – I don’t want to do that, I have other things to do And how can I leave my garden, the trees just starting to fruit, the pets buried in the front yard, the memories of Eric’s grandparents? How can my kids who have known no other place move? The very thought is depressing.

But the thing that draws us most is the fact that because of the large Amish community, there’s an emerging walkability and bikeability that my area lacks – by necessity, the community is being rebuilt to a horse scale. I chatted with a neighbor, out mowing his lawn across the road. He greeted me with a broad smile. I asked about the house – he told me he’d been born there, and that his father had lived there until his death. He told me about sliding down the banister, and about the inside, which we haven’t seen except through windows.

I asked about the community – was it friendly? Oh, yes, he said, and listed off activities and things they did. Were there children? Yes indeed. How are the neighbors – excellent, and his new Amish ones, he said, were the best and kindest neighbors he’d ever had. Everyone knows each other, and they all lend a hand when someone gets sick, as his neighbor down the road did. As I headed back to the car, he waved and said he hoped he’d be seeing me again.

The house is old and underinsulated. The barn needs work, and setting it up for the goats and making it safe for the kids to roam will take more than a little time and money. The place isn’t perfect. And it comes with the painful necessity of moving. But the mortgage would be even smaller than this one, and the property taxes and insurance halved. It is less land but more fertile land, flatter. Less wooded, but older woods, with more hardwood.

I do not want to move. Part of me wants to cry at the thought of devoting so much of my time and energy to that project, and even more of me wants to cry at the thought of leaving our creek, our land, our soil, my lovingly tended gardens – even if there is new soil and gardens and a creek where we go. This has been home, and that place is strange. And yet, there’s a tipping point, a point when new possibilities start to seem possible.

I’ve got shelves now in my kitchen for my jams and jellies and bulk foods – it took six years to get them. I’ve got shelves in my dining room for my enormous collection of gardening and cookbooks – they were a birthday present when I turned 35. I’ve got my garden beds – and they are fertile. We’ve got a fence around the yard so that Eli can run. We have a cistern and a well pump. We have our pastures and our barns. We even have a sign. The sign could go with us, and so could the pump, but it feels like losing ground – we are just, finally making this what we wanted. The only problem is that things we can’t build or repair or mend or improve seem not to be working around us. We’ve got our fingers on everything in our control – but what’s out of it has an increasingly large say. But maybe that’s how it always is, maybe that’s how it would become if we were to move.

Most of all, I want to be home. And I wonder – how much do I believe in staying if I allow the cost of living here and the limitations of a neighborhood I did choose to drive me away? Is this a moment for courage of convictions or to make a change? Is our home, our farm this place, its land and its building or can our home, our farm move with us, and our sense of comfort come too? How do we tell? I have, frankly, no clue.

I really don’t. We’re seeing the inside of the house on Thursday afternoon, and in the meantime, Eric and I have been snapping at each other. We’re both in a panic – because we’re sort of serious. And we both have no idea what that means.

Here’s a picture of the house we’re going to look at, btw – you can’t see the enormous dairy barn:

Further updates as events warrant.

Sharon

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Sharon July 19th, 2010

We were away for 28 hours, and it was enough.  I feel strange writing this because one of the things Eric and I used to love best was travelling – for years our favorite thing to do was to plot where we might go next, and, ideally, go there.  We’ve visited 7 other countries together, and had long dreams of other ones, of somedays, of the day we would be free to join the Peace Corps together, or go and live far away from our current place. 

But having children changes things, at least for us.  When I was first pregnant we were absolute that this would not stop us from travelling (this was before energy awareness fully hit me) – that we’d either take the baby with us across time zones, or as soon as he was old enough (we assumed 2ish), we’d leave him with grandparents and go away for stretches – not more than a week or so.

How funny that seems to me now.  What I didn’t know about parenthood was that I wouldn’t want to leave my two year old for a week – indeed, I’d feel vaguely panicked about leaving him overnight, although eventually we did that, and eventually, the panicky feeling would go away.  I also failed to realize how my newfound consciousness of the future that I was bringing Eli into would affect my feeling about casual plane trips just to see other countries. 

And by the time Eli was two we had Simon, newborn and nursing – I was tandem nursing both of them, actually.  I had assumed, before I was a mother, that the ties that drew parents and children together were burdensome, that one put a good face on it, but basically was chomping at the bit to get away.  Instead, I found that I had changed more radically than I’d ever expected - it wasn’t them keeping me, although that was part of it, it was me wanting them. 

And then we acquired a farm.  The thing about a farm is that a good one is like Charlie Brown’s Christmas Tree – it needs us.  When we begged my mother for pets as children, my mother used to roll her eyes and say “I don’t need any more needy things, I’ve got children.”  My husband and I filled our farm with needy creatures, and the farm itself was filled with need – it blossomed under our love and showed quite clearly when and where we neglected it.  It got harder to go away, although due to the kindness of good friends and good neighbors, we were able to continue with family visits, and even the occasional escape.

Eric and I took one of those escapes this year (thank you Mom and Grandma Nancy!!!!!) - it had been two years since we’d been away without the children, and while we thoroughly enjoyed our trip to visit several local farmers and their farms, and our night in a B and B near Cooperstown, one of the things that was the strangest was that almost everything we wanted to do could have been accomplished as a day trip.  We made a circle, up through friends in Montgomery, Herkimer and Otsego counties, and ended up less than 45 minutes from our house in the late afternoon sunshine.  We laughed when we realized that we could technically have snuck back into our house late, spent the night for free, and snuck out again without anyone knowing, rather than paid for a room.

Over the years we’ve revisited the shared city of our grad school days, travelled to Maine to meet a friend and a new dog, taught in the Catskills, tasted wine in the wine regions.  We’ve had five of these trips all told, since Eli was born.  But what we’ve found as the children get older and it becomes more viable for them to go away, is that we don’t long for it anymore.  We enjoyed our trip, enjoy an occasional day of solitude, but we found ourselves, early in the morning on the day we were to return home, thinking and talking of the kids and the farm. and pushing ourselves to stay away (since the Grandmothers had told us they wouldn’t be back until 2 or so anyway).  We missed the boys – and the animals, and the garden.

That seems strange to me too – I’d only been gone for a day, remember.  It seems odd to miss something so present in your life.  And everything was being cared for gloriously – the children were far less likely to be suffering from our absence than wishing that we stay away longer, so that they could be further indulged by adoring Grandmothers.  Our farm was being cared for by Phil, who does the chores conscientiously and thoroughly – more than we do some days.

But it is only me who knows precisely when the container plants need water, only Eric who watches the does carefully enough to tell whether that tiny hesitation in Mina’s step is a sign her hoofs need further trimming, a natural consequence of her vast pregnancy, or the sign of an emerging limp.  When the rain came through in Herkimer County on the first afternoon of our trip, I found myself wondering if it was raining yet at home, and how much – we need it so badly.  I was enjoying myself, but something in that rain began the process of turning me internally towards home.

And we turned physically as well – we thought we might go further west than Little Falls, but instead we went south and then east again, without fully admitting we were circling back,  not feeling any need to burn gas or travel further just to see.  We’d learned what we wanted – visited people raising fiber goats that interest us, stopped to visit a small community near us with a rapidly growing Amish population, to wach the emergence of the localized, horse-scale economy in a town that previously had been scaled to the car.  We had a lovely dinner, playing the parlor game of guessing the stories of everyone else in the restaurant, stopped at the farmer’s market, and we were ready for home.

Eric asked me if I thought it was lame that he didn’t mind not going away, that he didn’t passionately feel any need to get away from the children and the farm.  Before we had kids, we would have looked with mute incomprehension at anyone who told us we wouldn’t want to leave.  And we would have thought it was strange.  And maybe it is. 

But the things to know about home seem almost infinite to me.  I’ve been trying to establish blackberries here for several years now – and haven’t been able to find a variety that can handle our heavy winters.  And then Phil, who went wandering in the woods with his girlfriend, came back announcing that there were blackberries in our woods.  How did I miss them?  I still can’t find them – he’ll have to show me.  But if I could miss the blackberries, all these years, all this time wandering in our woods, there are other things I could miss, plenty of deep and hidden things to discover and learn in just this one small place.   

This was the first year we had tree swallows – or was it the first year I saw them?  Even though I attend, even though I watch, I still miss things.  I planted motherwort and blue vervain here in my herb garden and as part of native plant restorations in the latter case.  In the last few months I have realized that I have a stand of each growing wild, that I simply did not see before.  After nine years of looking, I’m still making new discoveries.  The children, of course, are full of these discoveries – and we see new things seen through them as well.

It isn’t that I don’t like to travel – I do.  But what always interested me most about travelling was the time spent getting to know people’s everyday lives, and that takes time and distance, and as a parent and a farmer, right now, time and distance aren’t possible for me.  So I concentrate on knowing my place – and every year ?I find new things to know.  It isn’t obvious to me that deep knowledge of one place is in any way inferior to wide knowledge of many places – and since the realities of energy depletion mean most of us may not have the option of travelling as often or as freely or at all, I think there’s something to the idea of the vacation taken at home, making new discoveries.

We got home before the boys and the grandmothers, and despite the heat, wen straight to the garden, Eric with his scythe, me to the weeding.  It felt right to get back into the rhythym of the place.  And when the peace of his barely-audible scythe swishes and my silent pulling were broken by shreiks of enthusiasm, from boys anxious to tell us all that had occurred while we were gone, we knew we were all the way home and content to stay.

Sharon

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Sharon June 22nd, 2010

There are some chores on a farm that can only be described as meditative – they involve lots of not-too-strenuous but deeply repetetive labor.  These are the kind of chores that I sometimes have trouble getting started on because they look both boring and endless.

Facing a bazillion chamomile blossoms, half a bushel of shelling peas or 1000 onion transplants can look like a long slog.  And yet once you get into the rhythym of it, somehow the endless work seems more manageable than one expected – it can even be enlightening.

I’ve done a lot of this work recently – first was the weeding of the long beds, then the filling of the holes in the cinder blocks with compost and soil mix, then the shelling of shell peas, followed by the removal of stems and strings from an awful lot of  snap peas, both to go into the freezer for winter.  And this morning we finally started on the chamomile blossoms that started calling me (and which I totally ignored) last week.

Picking chamomile blossoms by hand is tedious – the stems have no real medicinal value, so all you want is the flower heads.  It cannot be done rapidly and it requires a precision totally unlike many of the plants that I harvest with pruning shears.  And chamomile blossoms are tiny – an hour’s work in the sun will get you a bowl full, if  your bowl is small.

And yet there’s no substitute for doing this right – the taste of chamomile tea, dried fresh minutes after picking is so different than anything that comes in a bag.  Their value for calming, settling, easing and getting ready for bed is vastly greater when correctly harvested and handled as well.

This morning I found myself filling our drying area with hanging herbs, putting off the chore of facing the flower heads.  I clipped extra lemon verbena, fiddled with the catnip, went back to the yarrow again to cut some more, mostly to avoid the chamomile.  I picked the calendula blossoms, even though there weren’t many and it could have waited.  I looked over at the clover, but decided that was worse than the chamomile and I was starting too late in the morning.

Finally, I got to it.  And I found I didn’t mind at all, actually – the sweet applish smell of chamomile on my fingers, the smooth motions as I go through the feathery greens, the chance to just listen to bird song and to just watch the goats nibbling goldenrod shoots, the chance to think, it was a good thing.

Isaiah and Asher came out and joined me for a while, chattering away about their ambitions and projects, asking questions about the plants and coming back to tell me what the thermometer in the drying area read.  They picked and I picked and we talked, and suddenly, half the patch was harvested.

After they left I did some more, leaving about a third of it for tomorrow or the next day.  The funny thing is that it didn’t seem like a big deal anymore – the work had passed almost without noticing.  There were so many things to think about, or even not think about, to just immerse myself in the sounds and smells and feel of my world.  For moments, even long moments, I achieve that much desired state of mindfulness, the sense that one is doing the the thing wholly.

And then the kids are back, and we’re talking about summer projects and guests and building birdhouses and finding salamanders and when the pumpkins and watermelons will be right, and the bowl is filled again, and so are the drying racks, and what seemed endless and impossible was just a bit of work sandwiched in with a lot of good watching and listening and thinking about things and nothings, and talking. 

Sharon

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Sharon November 19th, 2009

Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, has given a lovely speech on the central question of our times – what is our economy for?  Thanks to Rod Dreher for pointing it out:

“‘Economy’ is simply the Greek word for ‘housekeeping’. Remembering this is a useful way of getting things in proportion, so that we don’t lose sight of the fact that economics is primarily about the decisions we make so as to create a habitat that we can actually live in. We are still haunted by the dogma that the economic world, ‘economic realities’, economic motivations and so on belong in a completely different frame of reference from the sort of human decisions we usually make and from considerations of how we build a place to live. And to speak about building a place to live, a habitat, reminds us too that we look for an environment that is stable, ‘sustainable’ in the popular jargon, a home that we can reasonably expect will be an asset for the next generation.

Economics understood in abstraction from all this is not just an academic error: it actually dismantles the walls of the home. Appealing to the market as an independent authority, unconnected with human decisions about ‘housekeeping’, has meant in many contexts over the last few decades a ruinous legacy for heavily indebted countries, large-scale and costly social disruption even in developed economies; and, most recently, the extraordinary phenomena of a financial trading world in which the marketing of toxic debt became the driver of money-making – until the bluffs were all called at the same time.

If we are not to be caught indefinitely in a trap we have designed for ourselves, we have to ask what an economy would look like if it were genuinely focused on making and sustaining a home – a social environment that offered security for citizens, including those who could not contribute in obvious ways to productive and profit-making business, an environment in which we felt free to forego the tempting fantasies of unlimited growth in exchange for the knowledge that we could hand on to our children and grandchildren a world, a social and material nexus of relations that would go on nourishing proper three-dimensional human beings – people whose family bonds, imaginative lives and capacity for mutual understanding and sympathy were regarded as every bit as important as their material prosperity.”

And

“Earlier I mentioned the work of Kenny Tang. At the end of his wide-ranging recent book (pp.137-60), he sketches four scenarios for the second half of the twenty first century, varying from a ‘golden age’ picture in which economic stability offers a secure background for sustaining the planet’s assets, through a model in which good intentions for sustainable and ethical behaviour in respect of the environment are undermined by boom and bust cycles in the economy, a more serious model in which patterns of consumption do not basically change, so that we face ‘resource wars’ over our finite supplies, and finally a nightmare scenario of a planet that has become a jigsaw of ‘protectionist nation-states’, where each state both refuses to challenge its aspirations for material growth and helps to inflate commodity prices worldwide by protectionist strategies.

What is most sobering about Tang’s fourth model is that so much of it reads like a description of what is already happening in many quarters and what some of the rhetoric of the wealthy world seems to take for granted. And what his analysis points up is a message that can be derived from any of the economic forecasters I have quoted: without a stable economy, the rest is idle dreaming. And a stable economy depends on our willingness to question the imperatives of unchecked growth – which in turn is a moral and cultural matter. The energy for resistance has to come from the sort of stubborn moral and cultural commitment to humane virtue that I have been speaking about.

I realise that the word ‘virtue’ is hard for many to take seriously. But it’s high time we reclaimed it. We have no other way of talking about the solid qualities of human behaviour that make us more than reactive and self-protective – the qualities of courage, intelligent and generous foresight, self-critical awareness and concern for balanced universal welfare which, under other names, have been part of the vocabulary of European ethics for two and half thousand years: fortitude, prudence, temperance and justice. In the Christian world, of course, they have been supplemented by, and grounded in, the virtues of faith, hope and love that, in their full meaning, are bound up with relation to God. But there has always been a recognition that the four pillars of ordinary human virtue were not a matter of special revelation but the raw materials for any kind of co-operative and just society. Without courage and careful good sense, the capacity to put your own desires into perspective and the concern that all should share in what is recognised as good and lifegiving, there is no stable world, no home to live in – no house to keep.”

The combination of graceful prose and intellectual clarity is just lovely.

Sharon

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