1. I did empty out the pantry room and move things into the extra little kitchen or in our room.  Unfortunately, my room is still a mess.  That’s on tomorrow’s project list.  But we do have that guest room back, which is good, because the thermostat is in there, and during the coldest periods, keeping the door closed in there gets a little scary (also the furthest spot in the house from the stoves).

2. I sorted out some of the games and also cleaned out the game closet – I didn’t get rid of all the boxes, mostly because the kids were concerned they couldn’t see what games we actually have that way.  Still mulling over how to do it.

3. Got my stash of goods for sudden arrivals of foster kids somewhat depleted by the group of four, but this prompted me to do much more sorting and organizing and keep better lists of what I need and don’t need – I’ve now got enough girl clothes in most sizes that I can look for specifics when I go thrift shopping , which is useful, because now I know I need warm pajamas,  sweaters and leggings and bathing suits for girls and cloth diapers for babies, but not necesarily pants and t-shirts in most sizes.  Was able to get through five days with 4 kids without shopping for anything but diapers and formula – which is really good, since I had no time to do any of those things .  Sorted and reorganized the laundry room, put all the boys’ old clothes away in better-organized fashion.  Sorted out shoes (also often needed on the fly – kids almost always come in too-small shoes, because hey, shoes are expensive) and winter gear (same as shoes).

4. Did nothing with garage, but trained dogs to sleep in the house in cold weather.  Hey, you win some…

5. Reorganized the kids’ room – mostly.  They have mostly unorganized it by now .

I need to do a major kitchen reorganization next, and also my seed and gardening supplies.  That, and some infrastructure (electrician here now for rewiring that has needed doing for ummm….a long time, plumber coming soon for similar problem…), including better gates for the bottom of the stairs and the wood cookstove will just make life a lot easier.  I also am doing more cooking ahead and storing some kid-friendly meals so that when we suddenly go through the sharp learning curve of getting to know new kids, we don’t have to rush around cooking or order pizza.

How about you?  Did you get your projects done?  Got any new ones?

Sharon

As you may or may not remember, we had ten kids for about 24 hours in November, when we took a short lived placement of five (several of the kids were allergic to cats, everyone moved to a cat-free home) shortly before M. who had been with us for a month, left to live with his Aunt.  The next week was Thanksgiving and one of our biannual trips to my family near Boston, and then I plunged headlong into the book, so it is safe to say that nothing has been cleaned or organized more than the bare minimum for some weeks.

Taking such a large sibling group, even for a short time, was eye-opening.  Due to legal requirements about shared space (kids over 7 can’t share rooms with opposite gender siblings) and different possible numbers of kids, it is hard to know exactly how many rooms we’ll need or how we’ll want to arrange them.  We have an official “kids room” but may need more space than that.  Medical needs of children might also shape how we arrange things, as might just plain getting-along issues.  We have a six bedroom house, so there are a lot of options, but not only do we need to be able to make adjustments fairly quickly, but we also need to have more flexibility, and ideally, want it done before the next time we go to ten kids .

This is actually a good time for us – hectic for most of the rest of the nation, Chanukah is a minor holiday, celebrated mostly in quiet ways at our place.  Eric’s semester ends soon and the exams and other grading chaos will ensue, but all the more reason for the rest of us keep busy, and by the 20th or so, he’ll be able to help.

So the next few weeks will spent doing the following big home projects:

1. Cleaning out and reorganizing the laundry room into a “family closet” kind of like this. I actually did this years ago, and I thought I’d invented the idea – I moved all the kids clothes, and then ours onto open wire shelving in the laundry room, so that I didn’t have to constantly haul laundry around or deal with the kids throwing everything out of their dressers.  It has been one of my favorite things – but making space for 2-6 more kids will require some revisions and restructuring.  For example, the dryer which we haven’t used in 6 years, is still sitting there taking up space because in order to get it out, I have to take everything out and move the washer.  I am finally going to do this.  Meanwhile, all the kids’ out of season clothes have been kept in bins below the open shelves – those are moving out and into upstairs closets.

2.  Our food storage has taken over one of our spare bedrooms.  Remember, we’ve got six bedrooms, of which, until this year, only two were occupied by sleeping people.  So we turned one of the smaller bedrooms into a pantry space.  The problem is that we may need that room back – it is a logical candidate to be a kids’ bedroom – or a housemate’s bedroom.  So most of the food storage is going into either the spare kitchenette in Eric’s grandparents apartment, or up to  curtained off segment of our room. Of course, that means I have to clean out both those spaces first.  Someone in a previous post expressed fear that we’d be sleeping in a pantry – no worries, our room is so huge you could play raquetball in it, so there’s  plenty of room to isolate food storage.

3. The games closet.  We are board game fans and we have a ton of them – they take up an entire enormous closet, and frankly, are a huge mess – every time my kids take out one game they mess them up, and things spill, etc…  I am going to try a new system, in which all the pieces are kepts in cabinets, the boxes are disposed of, and the boards are labelled and stacked in a bin – at a minimum this should allow the mess about 1/3 as much space, even if it doesn’t keep them tidy.  I’ll keep the boxes for a while, just in case I regret my decision.

4. A reorganization of the boys’ room.  Over the years a room that was mostly designed for little kids to play in has become more the room of bigger kids who spend their time writing, cartooning, drawing and rampaging, rather than playing with toys per se.  Time to move things around and make the room into the big-kid space it actually is.

5. The garage.  Let’s just stop there and leave that.  Also, before it gets really cold, we need to get the garage set up for the winter.  Mac the Marshmallow, who hates to sleep in the house and refuses to do so can be persuaded on the worst nights to take refuge in the garage, so it needs dog space, and to be cleaned out.

There are a bunch of smaller projects as well, so that’s what I’ll be doing in the dark of the year.  Oh, and winterizing the barn, breeding the does, butchering chickens, getting the calves butchered, cooking and throwing a couple of parties during Chanukah – but after the book, that seems easy.

What about you?  What are your projects?

Sharon

We had close to 9 inches of rain and wind gusts that I’d estimate above 60mph – they took down two big locust trees and several willows. One of the locusts came down 10 feet from the buck barn where the buck goats and the calves were, another 10 feet from the rear of the house, while my kids were sitting in the room reading. Our enormous beech tree was entirely surrounded by the rushing creek (it is normally well up on the banks) and it rocked and creaked a few times, but did not come down, which is a good thing, since it would have taken out a good chunk of the house.

Both barns held up well – they got a little wet but not too bad, and will need only minor repairs. The goats are presently outside clearing fallen brush, and in the net pretty happy that these yummy trees came down. After they are done with them, we’ll move on to firewood.

The creek did cross its banks, but the house is on enough of a rise that we didn’t flood – but again, it was a nearer thing than we’ve had before. My neighbor, she of the shared sheep was not as lucky – she evacuated, her home flooded and her livestock are spread among friends and neighbors. Our friends down in the Schoharie Valley and at the lower ends of Schenectady have it very rough.

We lost power on Sunday afternoon, which worked out very well, since the sump pump ran most of the day. We were out until this morning, which again, isn’t anything I can complain about – we’ve had longer outages in winter from random storms. As always, we’re pretty power-loss ready.

Besides the trees and one of the barn doors ripped apart by the winds, the biggest loss was my garden – the main garden was under nearly 2 feet of water. I had debated harvesting a lot of things on Saturday, but elected to spend the day at a foster parent event instead. I lost a lot of stuff – including, sadly a lot of the flowers that were slated for table and bimah decorations at a friend’s bar mitzvah this weekend – I’ve been planning all summer for this event, but most of the flowers were blown down or broken. I’m working on finding more, but a lot of the farms around here have similar damage Still, this should be the worst thing that ever happens to us! A few broken flowers and rotting squash are small potatoes.

I’m not sorry I spent Saturday at the foster parenting event, however, instead of harvesting. Some of you (who track my stuff on facebook) will know that we were called on Wednesday to take a group of five kids (and no, not the same group of five kids that they wanted us to take the previous week, believe it or not), several of whom were suffering some severe health problems due to neglect. We got the call Wednesday afternoon and expected to have the children (ages 6 1/2 to 5 weeks) arrive that evening, then we were called suddenly and told that the judge removed only one of the children, the one who was actually hospitalized.

We weren’t able to find out a lot more information immediately afterwards, and I admit, I’ve been losing sleep worrying about the kids not being safe. I hadn’t intended to spend my Saturday afternoon at this picnic, but went in the hopes of getting more info on the kids. Fortunately, it worked – I met someone involved with the case who was able to tell me that in this case, she thought the decision was right. The parents are young, overwhelmed and have missed some major medical issues they should have caught – but from ignorance. The parents needed services and support – and now they will get them. I have to say, that did more to let me sleep well than knowing the basement was dry.

The creek has gone down enough that I’m not scared either the kids or the baby goats will fall in and drown, and I’m grateful for our near miss. I don’t usually put “hurricane” on the list of major threats to upstate NY, but I might as well add it to the list of reasons why I’m glad we stay prepared.

I hope all of you are safe and well. Please let us know how things came through in your neck of the woods!

I wrote this piece in 2006, and it is interesting for me to revisit it now, after our flirtation with moving. In the end we stayed for all the reasons I write about here – I think I hit on something true, but I don’t know if I really understood how hard it is to simply accept the limitations of one place until I actually did it.  Yeah, I know, physician, heal thyself .

It really doesn’t matter what you believe is the central crisis of our present society, whether you are focused on economic instability, peak oil, climate change, poverty and inequity or all of them together. When you filter out the details and get down to brass tacks, the answers to all of the above problems are the same.

Go home. Stay there. Cook your dinner instead of getting it out. Donate what you save. Talk to your neighbors. Buy local. Grow your own. Go to your town meeting, neighborhood council, or other public forum, and try and improve things. Vote.  Show up.  Make things instead of buying them. Share. Help those in need in your own neighborhood. Walk instead of driving. Play with you kids instead of buying them stuff. Turn down the heat and put on a sweater. Chase your kids or play soccer with your neighbors instead of going to the gym. Talk instead of watching tv. Plant trees. Learn permaculture. Barter. Raise some money for a good cause. Pare down. Live simply. Garden. Go home. Stay there.

Now the first and the last clauses here represent something of a problem for a lot of Americans – because you cannot build community, or develop a local society, or have an orchard, or depend on others for the things that you need, unless you actually stop moving around and stay somewhere. And most of us are not very good at that last – the average American moves every 5 years.

That’s not enough time to pay off the mortgage, or see that standard apple tree grow to fruition, or get to know the local issues well enough to have an impact on your town. In five years, you can get a carpool together, and get some bartering going, but you’ll have to leave just as things get good. It gives you just enough time to begin acquiring that wonderful quality, “known-ness” in which you know your neighbors, and you understand how they are connected to other people (that the postman is the BIL of the woman in the third house down, and that the woman in the green house is worried about her mother, whose health is failing), and how you fit in (you are the weird one who composts and has chickens, right?). 

Then, most likely, you move – for the best of reasons – because this was a starter house and you need something bigger, or to get closer to your dream house, or to build your own passive solar place, to be closer to your elderly parents, or so the kids can walk to school, to be nearer a new job or in a safer neighborhood, or to downsize now that the kids are gone. And you start again with a new garden, and new soil, new trees and new neighbors, new friends for the kids and new everything.

Now I have a lot of natural sympathy for people who move a lot. I would be one of them, but I can’t be. My husband, Eric, feels about moving much the way I feel about toxic chemicals, only not so positively. If it were left to him, we would probably still be living in an apartment in Somerville. But now that he’s here, it has taken him the better part of nine years to get used to being here, and he’s happy, so he’s never, ever moving. Add to that that this is the house we lived in with his beloved grandparents, and we’re here forever.

On the other hand, if three months have passed since we moved here that I haven’t looked over the local real estate listings, I’d be shocked. Me, I’m a grass-is-greener kind of person. I’ve never been anywhere that I didn’t think (however briefly) “could I live here?” And often, when I’m most frustrated with my life, my first reaction is “we should move to where we could be carfree/have more land/be nearer X relative/be further away from other people/have a smaller house/build green/etc…”

It has been a long, long struggle for me to realize that I am staying here forever, if possible. I still fight against that reality sometimes. I do love my house, but like many of the people I love, I’m not always sure that I actually want to live with it. If you were to describe the ideal post-peak house, I suspect you would not choose a 3000+ square foot rambly, under-insulated farmhouse with a bat collector (er, cupola space). It is a pain in the ass to keep clean (and we’re not the tidiest people in the world), drafty, too big even for our four kids (we had hoped Eric’s grandparents would be with us much longer), because of its size, the taxes run high, and has a host of other things that make it much more difficult and annoying to make efficient than would a new, green-built home. It doesn’t come with an ocean (I grew up near the sea, and that bugs me), and it is in every way imperfect, even when I like it.

And in that sense, it is perfect, isn’t it? Because I’m going to bet that most of you live in the wrong house too. And in fact, no matter how hard we try, we’re not going to replace our 90 million dwellings with brand new, perfectly designed ones. We can’t, and think of what we’d waste in doing so.

A few people will build new, green houses, but most of us will make do with what we’ve got, or, as most of us do, buy another house and another house, trying always to get to the point at which our house will fulfill its dream functions for us. But we never quite succeed. I once read that people who build their dream houses only live in them an average of 7 years. Because in 7 years, dreams change, I guess, and we get frustrated by the fact that houses, no matter how wonderful, are in the end, only houses, and go looking for the magic house that will be more.

And all that moving around exacts a price. First of all, there’s the economic price – the cost of realtors fees, and advertising, moving costs and buying new things at the other end – we lose an average of between 6 and 8% of the purchase price on each house. In a bubble market like the one we once had, that’s no big deal – we get it back. But that’s not the norm, and we all know those days are over. So moving costs us economically. 

It also sets us back on every goal we have in creating local economies, local communities, local cultures. Every time we pick up and move, we lose a year or two of high quality work – because while we’re adapting to a new place, meeting people, finding out about local resources, getting used the new job, seeing where the sun falls in the yard and testing the soil, we’re spending time that could be gardening and working at the shelter and bartering with the neighbors. It also costs energy – moving our crap, buying new stuff, flying on airplanes, renting trucks, these are not low energy input activities. They raise our personal energy footprint.

Now sometimes we’re going to have to move – and not every home has a future, particularly given climate change.. But over the coming decades, a lot more of us are
going to have to stay put. We are going to have to change to a foot economy, and relocalize.

 You cannot fully relocalize if you are dreaming of the day you will move to your perfect house, that you will find the perfect community of people just like you. We can’t wait until we can all afford the perfect place. And some, perhaps many, of the places we’re in are going to have to become perfect because they are ours. With the crash of the housing market, it isn’t going to be economically feasible to trade up all the time. No matter how good your R value, the building materials in your perfect house come with a big energy footprint. No matter how annoying your neighbors, maybe it is time to share with them, rather than dreaming of the perfect community. Even if the house is too small, or too big, doesn’t have the garden space you dream of or is down the street from weird people, it might be the best place for you.

So I’m trying. When we invest in our house, we do it in ways that will serve us for a lifetime. Last night I looked out at the stars and I tried to imagine that this, with its benefits and limitations, is our permanent world, the place where we will always live. The only home my children will know. We are renovating the house to make ourselves more self-sufficient, and to set things up so that we can live comfortably without electricity or other fossil fuel inputs. I am trying to make it more beautiful, to pare down what we don’t need, and to make things prettier. And I am trying to believe that here is where I am supposed to be.   I’m not always successful – but I’m trying.

Sharon

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!

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

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

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

“‘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

6:26 am: We’ve been ignoring the kids for half an hour or so, and they’ve been playing fairly quietly in their room as we doze a bit, but now the volume is rising, and the children are coming out more often to peek and see if we’re up, so we figure we might as well get up.  Eric gets up, announcing that it is “time to go to work in the smurf mines” and gets the boys out of bed and downstairs.  I follow a minute or so behind.  We get busy getting breakfast (choice of oatmeal or toast), tea and juice (we have apple cider lying around), and checking the barn in case Maia actually decided to have her babies.  She didn’t. 

In the first DITL, the kids were littler (they are now 9 1/2, almost 8, almost 6 and almost 4), so subtract two years, and it was November.  There was more diaper changing involved and more help dressing.  The kids needed more attention in the mornings, and we had to start the cookstove – it was cool on Tuesday, but not cold enough to need a fire yet, so we didn’t light one. 

7am – Kids are mostly fed.  We make Eli’s lunch – leftover bagels with peanut butter (yom kippur break-fast is the one meal of the year we rely entirely on purchased food – bagels, lox, cream cheese, etc… there’s just no facing cooking a meal at the end of 24 hours with no food or water, so we have leftovers and the kids think they are a huge treat), an apple, carrot sticks and a piece of chocolate cake made by my sister, leftover from our weekend family gathering.  I pack Eli’s bag – he’s toilet training at school and so he needs a couple of spare outfits every day, and we do dishes and sterilize the milking equipment.

7:30 – We say Modeh Ani, the Jewish morning prayer, and the kids go outside with Eric to milk the goats.  That’s a new one – in 2007 there were no goats, and daily chores took 10 minutes, not 40.  But we love milking, and we love the goats, and the kids love to be part of it.  Simon gets hay and fills their water trough, Asher collects goldenrod for the goats, Isaiah feeds the chickens, duck and turkeys.  Everyone pets baby Tekiah (the little goat, now almost two weeks old) and makes much of her.  Then Eric digs around in the garage for the sukkah poles and tarps – why can’t we ever find anything?

Meanwhile, I go up to the computer – I find I write best early in the day.  Besides, we’ve got stuff to do today, since Eric is home and we have a brief pause between the arrival of the next guests (my Mom and Step-Mom, yay!) and the holidays.  On the way up, I change the sheets on the guest bed (time for flannel, it will be cold) and throw on a load of laundry.  Am trying to come up with a funny post – decide I’m not funny today.

8:30 – Eli’s bus comes, and he heads off to school, happily – he loves school, and wasn’t that excited about the many hours of yom kippur services the day before, so he’s glad to get on the bus.  Chores are done and the boys troop in for some math time with Daddy. I’m still working, managing to get a post up and about 1/20th of the email replies I should have done.

9:30 – Tomorrow we’re expecting frost, so we’ve got to bring in a lot of the crops – and I’m also going to pick up some supplemental stuff at a couple of local farms, along with decorations for our sukkah.  So we make the rounds – first to the Carrot Barn, our favorite, where I meet a reader (Hi Bob!) and buy a ridiculous amount of tomatoes and eggplant to make sure that I don’t actually spend any time slacking off .  Oh, and it happens they have one last box of canning peaches – do I want them?  Uh huh – and sure, I’m sure I’ll find time sometimes in the next packed days to can up a bushel of peaches.    We also get gourds and colored corn for sukkah decorating – sukkot starts Friday and we’ll need to have the sukkah up on Thursday.

Next, we go on to the fruit farm, and pick fall raspberries (I have a bunch, but the children regard them as their private snack garden and don’t like me picking them ) – I’ve done enough jam making, but I want to make raspberry vodka to be given as gifts at the holidays.  With three enthusiastic berry pickers, it doesn’t take long to pick a couple of quarts for vodka making.  Then we go to another farmstand, and pick up Mums for decorating the sukkah, a couple of pumpkins (for pies, my pumpkin crop wasn’t great this year) and more sweet corn to be cut from the cob and frozen.  And then back we go, crammed in our little clown car, each of us with a mum on our lap.

12:00 – On the ride back the kids had “Modeh Ani” competitions – coming up with the most creative tunes to a traditional Jewish prayer.  Asher does it to the Munchkin song from “The Wizard of Oz,” Simon has a Beatles medly, and Isaiah discovers that it can be sung to ”Great Balls of Fire.” We’re back, and it is time for lunch – grilled eggplant and pepper sandwiches with goat cheese, sliced peaches, broccoli. 

1pm: Eric starts at the corn – I do the vast majority of the food preservation, but this job he’s taken over from me, because it isn’t one I enjoy, and he doesn’t mind.  The corn husks go to the goats, the chickens love the earworms, and he husks, cooks and cuts.  The kids alternate between helping and playing with the animals.  Meanwhile, I pick all the basil and make two kinds of pesto – the traditional kind with the regular basil, and a “thai style” one with coconut oil, ginger and lemongrass along with our copious quantities of Thai and Holy Basil.  I’m not really clear on how well this will freeze, but I’m trying it, since I want to preserve that summery flavor.  I also mix up the raspberry vodka.

2pm: The kids have been good sports with helping with the corn and nabbing berries, but are getting bored, so we have a little school time. I haven’t really prepped anything, so we read a holiday story _When Zayde Danced on Eldridge Street_ and then continue our study of ancient societies, talking about how hunter-gatherer societies were different than ours and how agriculture began.  Then the kids do a little writing practice – Asher copies letters, Isaiah copies words (he’s learning to read and write) and Simon practices cursive.  The boys have been extremely accomodating – Yom Kippur isn’t a great kid holiday, since the parents are grumpy and distracted and it involves spending a lot of time sitting quietly.  After school, I let them watch part of the movie _Matilda_ and eat their share of the remaining chocolate cake.

3:15 pm: I’m doing dishes (this is an ongoing project in our house – it is a rule, the dishes are never done, the sink is never empty and the laundry is never finished) and watching for Eli’s bus – there it is.  I go out and chat with the drivers while Eli revels in being free and able to run around a bit more.   I locate Eli’s shoes, which he has abandoned, and narrowly avert an abandonment of his pants.  The kids have a snack – it is getting chilly and rainy so we make popcorn and cocoa.  Eli goes out to swing in the rain, Simon and Isaiah go to the hay barn to read together, and Asher sort of follows us around being silly, throwing toys in the air and singing things to them.  I ignore the peaches.

4:30 pm: No particular plan for dinner, other than giving the children some corn .  How is it that we manage to forget that meals are going to be needed, even though they come every single day, three times a day? Ah, I have plenty of milk, so corn chowder.  And time to make a quick pan of cornbread – we’ll have a corny meal.  And broccoli, and slice tomatoes with basil, as long as we’ve got them.

5:45: Dinner, yum.  We’re all hungry and tired, but happy – it has been a busy, but mellow and productive day, although the house is still messy, we’re not ready for guests, I have no plan for the peaches, we didn’t get enough school done and I’m still behind on my email – but hey, this is good for us.  The food is delicious, and we all eat a lot, except Eli, who doesn’t like milky soups, but who devours his tomatoes and all the rest of them, along with the bread.  We’ve been eating a *lot* of broccoli because we have a lot of broccoli, and you know you are overdoing it when your son asks you, “But Mommy, aren’t there any mustard greens or anything?”  When the kids are desperate enough to beg for mustard greens, you’ve pushed them too far .

6:30: Out to milk – it is raining, but the kids don’t care.  I gather some comfrey and burdock leaves for a last treat, and raspberry leaves for expectant Maia – Eric milks again and I herd the chickens back into their pen and haul water.  We feed dog, bunny, cats.  All creatures must be fed and attended to.  It all goes a lot faster these days, and the rhythym of chores, morning and evening, seems to bracket the day. 

7pm: The boys are back in and getting into fuzzy pajamas.  They are exhausted – Asher is whining, Eli has taken a blanket from the guest bed and has wrapped himself in it and found a corner to snuggle in, and Simon and Isaiah are acting up the way they do when they are overtired.  We brush teeth and head to bed.  Both of us go up to read stories – Eric is reading _A Wrinkle in Time_ to Simon and Isaiah, Asher wants his 97th repetition of _Owl Babies_ this week, plus a read-through of _The Camel’s Lament_, I’m nearly finished with _My Side of the Mountain_ with Isaiah and Simon, and we decide we’ll move on to the sequel (which isn’t nearly as good).  Eli opts for _Two Cool Cows_ and some of _A Child’s Garden of Verses_. 

The kids are excited about a spate of upcoming birthdays.  Isaiah wants his own birdwatching binoculars, some legos and “one of those barns with a big hayloft that’s attached to the house.”  I showed him a picture of a New Englander house with attached barn, and he’s wanted a hayloft for years (our barn is a single story with an attached haybarn next to it) to play in.  I want one too.

8pm: Kids are in bed – Simon is still reading, Isaiah and Asher are asleep, Eli is playing and Eric and I are pooped.  He’s got a class tomorrow in environmental physics, so he and I talk about I=PAT equations and possible math problems for his students, bouncing ideas back and forth.  We eat chocolate cake too .  I read a few pages of a Georgette Heyer novel, Eric reads a little of Richard Heinberg’s new book on coal, in preparation for his coming class on that subject.  The official rule is that it is embarassing to go to bed before 9pm, but let’s just say that by 9:08, we’re down and out.