Ben Hewitt's Blog, page 32

Thanks and Thanks Again

I call this one “Watch Your Step”

Lots of new readers in recent weeks. Trying to figure out if I need to be more active in managing comments… for the time being, would those of you who tend to post multiple comments on a single piece limit yourselves to, say, 3 comments per post? I don’t want others to feel intimidated. Thanks.

For new readers, I do accept donations via the generosity enabler (Paypal) below. It’s not expected, but is certainly appreciated, and helps offset my investments of time and $. But seriously, only if it feels right. Thanks again.

The Things We Don’t Even Know to Look Out For in the First Place

Cutting ridge supports to length

There is much more to say about the pleasures of so-called “peasant labor,” particularly in the wake of my romanticized, self-satisfied babble a few days back.

I must first say this: Yes, I love physical work, and I have at least a middling capacity for it (unless wittle Benny gets a boo-boo, in which case all bets are off until I’ve fully rehabilitated my blister). And yes, it does occasionally feel to me as if the work I do to earn my moneyed living is, to quote something I read recently “white collar, desk-bound, pontificating bullshit.” So there’s that. But the larger truth is that I’m incredibly grateful to be able to provide financial support to my family in the manner I do, and the minute I stop being grateful is the minute someone should just haul off and slap me upside the head.

There was comment the other day about someone’s father or maybe uncle, about how he worked construction his whole life, never turning down the overtime, and now his body is a wreck. Maybe the work was good while his joints and muscles held up, maybe he actually loved it. Or maybe not. But either way, he did the good, honest labor, and it twisted him up, wrung the health and vitality right out of him.

The same day, I heard on the radio, on a call-in talk show, yet another despairing conversation about the state of our nation’s educational system, about how we really need to be sure we get more kids into college, about how we’ll never compete as a nation if we don’t send more young adults to university, about how it used to be enough to maybe get a high school degree, and then you needed at least two years of college, but now, if you don’t have at least a bachelor’s degree and maybe even some sort of post-graduate paper, well… you lose, sucka. I’d link to it, but I’m not willing to risk you wasting your precious time listening. Besides, you can hear the same damn conversation in a million different places every day of the friggin’ week.

These things are connected, of course. The wrung out father/uncle, the ceaseless lament about our nation’s ability to compete on the global stage and how we must push our children harder, funnel them more efficiently into the higher educational system, give them the tools they need to compete amongst themselves. Because we all know college graduates earn more money over their lifetimes, right? Because we all know the science-and-technology-heavy jobs of the future require more than a high school diploma.

Hey, I got a question for ya: Whose gonna build your fucking house? Who is going to saw the timber to make your toilet paper? Who is going to grow your food, make your clothing (what’s that? Chinese children? Ah, I see. No worries, then), fix your car, unclog your septic, maintain the playground with that neat merry-go-round your kids love so much? Who’s going to play the music you listen to on your way to work? None of these require college degrees. Not a friggin’ one. All are essential, honorable work. Way more essential and honorable than creating apps or yet another platform for posting selfies on the internets. Probably even more essential and honorable than writing for a living, though I’m loathe to admit as much.

Hey, I got an idea for ya: What if we, as a society, stopped worrying so damn much about our nation’s ability to compete. About our children’s ability to compete. What if we recognized that, sure, college can be a great thing for some people, and we should do what it takes to make college accessible to those people. But what if, concurrently, we stopped creating this manufactured stigma (is there any other kind?) about those who choose differently, and furthermore, we started paying them a wage commensurate with their role in keeping our society on its feet. Maybe then the commenters father/uncle wouldn’t have had to take all that overtime. Maybe then his body wouldn’t hurt so much when he wakes up in the morning. Maybe then children who are not cut out for college wouldn’t feel like second-class citizens. Maybe then they wouldn’t be treated like second-class citizens. Maybe then we’d stop destroying the biosphere in our clawing, kicking, screaming scramble to compete with other nations. With other humans.

I know many people who went to college, and many who didn’t. Maybe it’s just the oddball folks I associate with, but I honestly can’t say that those who graduated college are doing better than those who didn’t. Might be making more money, sure, but are they overall enjoying their lives more? Not that I can tell. Are they engaged in honorable, even righteous work? Many are. But are you telling me there’s something more honorable than selling firewood? Than milking cows or building houses? Fuel. Food. Shelter. Seems pretty damn honorable to me.

When people ask if I’m concerned about my children’s ability to gain entrance into college, I can honestly say that I’m not worried in the least. Partly, I’m not worried because I know that if they want to go to college badly enough – if there’s something they are passionate about learning that can only be learned in such a place – I know they’ll figure out how to make it happen. But the other reason I’m not worried is because I have seen with my own two eyes that it is still possible to build a good and worthy and fulfilling life without a college degree. Is it getting harder to do so? Yes, I believe it is. But of course the primary reason it’s getting harder is because we are gullible enough believe the stories we are told about education and competition. We listen to programs like the one I heard and we lament right alongside the invited guests and the call-in listeners, and our lament leads to worry, and so we bundle our kiddos up and put them on the college train without even considering whether or not they’re the least bit interested in the destination.

I believe that laments like the one I heard on the radio are built around a myth, one that is perpetuated because it serves broader stories of economics and success. This myth loves nothing more than people competing against one another for their share (and more!) of the resources our industries churn out. Like so many of the stories we are told and sold, it’s a myth that’s become so pervasive that we are no longer aware it’s anything but the gospel truth. And that, more than anything else, is what makes it dangerous. As ever, the things we should be wary of are generally not the things we’re told to be wary of, but rather the things we don’t even know to look out for in the first place.

Damn. All that and not even 5:30 a.m. It’s gonna be a hell of a day.

It’s Enough

I call this one “Earning His Keep”

Rain again this morning. There has been no shortage of rainfall over the past few weeks, though I’m loathe to lament. I’ll take deluge over drought any day of the week, even if we have a house and barn to build over the next few months. Besides, the forced breaks from building are essential to maintaining any semblance of order ’round here. On Sunday we split and stacked what wood we’ll need to get us through the end of October, when we transition to the new land, and then – in my third change of clothes, the other two heaped in watery piles atop the mudroom floor – I dropped a massive, half-rotted sugar maple to block up for next year’s stove wood. This morning, I spent a soggy couple of hours dragging logs I’d felled last winter and running fence. It’s not bad working in the rain. Like most things we tend to consider less than ideal, its desirability (or lack thereof) is relative. Besides, you know how the saying goes: Necessity is the mother of motivation.

I call this one “Michael and Me”

The building is going great. With any luck, we’ll be raising barn rafters by week’s end; if not by then, certainly by next. Sheath the roof, then tin, and voila! Dry storage. Then onto the house. It’d all be much faster if we were using plywood, but the pleasure of working with rough sawn boards is of greater value to us than the expediency of manufactured wood products. To say nothing of the manufacturing process itself, along with the aesthetic toll, along with the fact that utilizing rough sawn means buying from a local mill. Thus far, we have used no concrete, no plastic, and no glues in construction of the barn. I suspect we may use a wee bit of caulk here and there, and maybe a little spray foam round window/door jambs (we do plan to insulate the upstairs for use as winter work space, so some air sealing is called for) hopefully, that’ll be about it as far as baby-seal-clubbing materials.

It is good to be working so much, and by working I mean working, none of this white collar, desk-bound, pontificating bullshit. Up at 5 and outside, and most days staying there until near dark. A dozen, even 14 hours per day, seven days a week, with the exception of obvious breaks like the one I’m taking now. My winter-larded belly has been reduced by two belt holes over just the past month; if I stand at just the right angle, sucking in hard enough that it feels as if something inside me might burst, I can almost see the outline of my abdominal muscles in the mirror. Wait… did I just admit to what I think I admitted to? Forget it. Never happened.

I call this one “Yum”

I will tell you something else, though you probably know it already: The physical work is as good for mind, emotion, and spirit as it is for body. We tend to forget this, I think, in our rush to extricate ourselves from discomfort and danger. We forget the simple pleasure of true fatigue, of something have risen or been raised by our calloused hands. Maybe not everyone cares to know that feeling anymore, or maybe they never did. Maybe they’re after something more, something prouder and more enlightened than this peasant’s labor.

But for me, at least, it’s enough.

You Won’t Regret It

I call this one “Goat on logs”

Warm and rainy, perfect day to cut firewood. Still waiting for a long enough dry spell to make some dry hay. Massive progress on the barn, now framing second floor, rafters next week. Amazing how fast this stage of building happens. Everything going according to plan and within budget with the exception of burning through our stash of homegrown lumber faster than anticipated. Hence the logs in the above photo.

I wanted to alert you to a series of workshops our friends Hart and Michael are hosting at their amazing homestead in nearby West Danville. We’d intended to hold an “Establishing a Homestead” workshop this summer ourownbadselves, but it’s finally dawned on us that maybe we have other fish to fry. It was one of those ideas that seemed real good in the depths of winter when all you have is time to sit around dreaming of all the things you want to do come summer, but once summer comes and you’re actually doing those things you dreamed about and you suddenly realize that even 16 hours of daylight is about four or five hours too few, well…

Anyway. Hart and Michael’s place is amazing, and they hold vast reservoirs of experience. Go. You won’t regret it.

It Won’t Be the First Time

Over the past week, we have finished framing and decking the barn floor, framed and sheathed two 12-foot-high by 30-foot long side walls, erected said walls, and even attended a Waylon Speed concert, at which the boys witnessed first hand the tragicomic effects of rampant alcohol consumption in otherwise sane adults (don’t worry: Not I. Stone cold sober for the entire show, though the boys and I did share a celebratory root beer).

We had many hands on our side. Michael, Blake, and Bob all pulled and pushed their share of the load. And lo-and-freakin’-behold, even the fellas chipped in a might bit. Penny and I long ago decided to ask little and expect less, which we’ve found to be a pretty reliable technique for managing our expectations. Besides, we figured compelling them to help was a one-way street to the particular hell that’s populated by bitter and disappointed parents, so instead we crossed our fingers and hoped they’d get caught up in the excitement.

So far so good, and it occurs to me that of all the benefits to building these structures, the greatest might be the one we hardly anticipated: That the process will imbue the fellas with an evolved collection of building skills. I am trying to follow my own advice and include them in all steps, despite the toll on my patience, from pulling diagonals to check for square, to laying out the walls, to calculating the number of board feet worth of sheathing necessary for roof underlayment. If I were half as savvy as I’d like you to believe, I woulda turned this whole damn project into a summer-long children’s construction camp, charged a whomping tuition, and then sat in the shade with a sixer and a super-sized bag of pork rinds, whilst your little preciouses toiled under the high, hot sun as I screamed instructions at them between dispensing bandages and initiating them to the sort of gallows folk humor that prevails on male-dominated construction sites. Alas, only now does this occur to me.

Joking aside (I was joking, wasn’t I?), it occurs to me that the failure to teach our youth such fundamental skills as framing a house is yet another shortcoming of the contemporary institutionalized education system. Yeah, I know, I know: Not everyone wants to or even should become a builder. Then again, pretty much everyone needs a place to live, and it seems prudent to me that children have at least a rudimentary understanding of how the roof over their heads got there.

I don’t know. Call me crazy. No doubt it won’t be the first time.

A Million Ways in Which Your Life is Easier Than Strictly Necessary

We are making about four pounds of butter every other day, which is almost twice as much as we eat. This is good. We maximize our butter making during the spring months, when the pasture is peaking and the cream is highest in vitamins and minerals. You can see it in the butter; it is more than yellow.

We churn by hand. I like it, except when I don’t, which honestly isn’t very often. Maybe if I’m in a hurry. Making butter means doing lots of dishes: The jars we store the cream in (it takes about 6 quarts of cream to make 4 pounds of butter), the churn itself, the bowl we use for washing the butter to get the remnants of buttermilk out of it. From churning to clean-up, it takes me about 40 minutes to make four pounds of butter, maybe a little less if I’ve got some good tunes on the hi fi.

We’re in a cloudy spell right now, so our solar collectors aren’t doing much, which means heating water on the cooking range for dishes. It’s sort of a pain, but the thing is, it’s not, really. We live in ridiculous abundance. We are lucky just to be alive. I can think of a million other ways our lives are easier than strictly necessary, and when I do, heating water on the cooking range to wash dishes suddenly ceases to seem like much of a burden. I actually think this is the biggest secret to a contented life: The ability to think of a million other ways in which your life is easier than strictly necessary. Seriously. Try it. And if that doesn’t work, pick up a copy of this anthology. Reading about slurping the cold jellied remains of boiled dog bones in a wall tent at -40 with your toes falling off from frostbite is bound to put a shine on your current state of affairs. Plus, there’s an Edward Abbey piece in there. Can’t hardly go wrong with Abbey.

We’ll milk two cows twice per day for maybe another 10 weeks, at which point we’ll transition to once per day. This is in part because we’ll have a nice stash of butter by then, in part because it’ll be time to start weaning the calves off milk, and in part because we’re lazy. Plus, by then it’ll be about time to start harvesting all sorts of garden-y goodies, so it’s a swell time to free up the evening milking period.

The calves are doing great. We feed 4x/day, a half-gallon each per feeding. Most the boys do the bottle feeding, but sometimes it’s Penny or me. It’s nice, bottle feeding a calf. I mean, yeah, sometimes you’d like to move onto the next thing, but the thing is, you can’t. You gotta wait until those confounded calves are done sucking the last foamy dregs outta those bottles, like an alcoholic nursing his final round beer. Truth is, I sort of like tasks that force me to slow down. To stay present. I need something to keep me on track.

We’re eating like kings. Fresh butter. Kefir made from cream. Haunches of lamb and pork. Salads at least twice each day, topped by Pen’s homemade cheese. For breakfast, eggs and sausage and thick slices of Blake’s bread. Brook trout the boys bring home. We all drink straight from the jar of milk in the fridge whenever we want. There are even still blueberries in the freezer. It’s all super simple and insanely good, and we try not to take it for granted but of course we do.

Despite the homestead abundance, we’ve been buying more convenience foods than is typical for us, a concession to everything we’re juggling. Apples. Hard cheeses. Raisins. Last week, Penny even picked up a bag of some sort of sweet potato chips and the boys were beside themselves. It’s nice to have a treat once in a while. It’s good to be reminded how much groceries cost, too, especially if you’re inclined to get the good stuff, which we are. But holy moly, it adds up real quick. We actually budgeted for this when we did the finances for the building project, and it’s a good thing we did, or we’d’ve been caught off guard.

Raining again. Good day to work in the woods, saw some lumber. Got me a house and barn to build. And more butter to make.

What I Have to Say About That

Are you there, God? It’s me, Goat

The rain came in while we slept, a soft rain, the sort that cultivates those sweet and hazy morning dreams, the ones at the very precipice of consciousness, never less sure of what is real and imagined. And if it matters, anyway.

It is fair to say that our lives are a bit intense at the moment. Last week, Jimmy and I installed the leach field; after that Pen and the boys and I set the foundation stones for the barn, the completion of which was followed in short order by the framing of the perimeter band joists with our friend Blake, who’s working with us two days per week. It’s great to have him, and I’d be saying that even if I didn’t know he reads this space: He is young (not even 30!! Can you even imagine?), cheerful and conscientious, at least half as rugged as me, and furthermore brings us loaves of the dense sourdough rye bread he bakes. We eat it with the butter we churned the day before, and the contrast in colors – the almost-orange of the spring butter, the deep earthen hue of the bread – is something to behold. I’d say it’s too pretty to eat, but the evidence suggests otherwise, so I won’t.

For the barn, we are utilizing a BFR foundation. The “B” stands for Big, of course, and the “R” for Rock. The “F” meanwhile, stands for… well, I’ll leave that to your imagination. The BFR was suggested to us by our friend Paul. It’s cheap, environmentally benign (unlike concrete, for instance, which is pretty rapacious stuff), requires minimal soil disturbance, and, with proper drainage, should prove exceptionally stable. Time will tell, I suppose, but so far, I’m feeling real good about it. I think it’s certainly better than piers of wood or concrete, both of which are prone tipping and tilting as the frost works its rude magic.

Oh, and what do I think about God? I believe that just like spirituality, God can be many different things to many different people. To some, the one creator; to others, the feel of soil in the palm or the sounds of cows grazing; to others still, us. I believe that organized religion is often held up as an answer to questions that can seem unanswerable, and that surrendering the mystery of these questions is a great loss. I guess I appreciate a certain amount of mystery in my life. If nothing else, it keeps me on my toes. I like being on my toes.

I do not believe the world is wicked. Nor people. Indeed, I believe precisely the opposite: That the world is almost unfathomably kind and generous. In my experience, the same can be said of people, and on those occasions when it cannot, it is almost always the result of people feeling compelled to behave in ways that are inherently contrary to their nature. I believe this contrariness is the cause of much current malaise, be it physical, emotional, or spiritual (as if we ought make these distinctions at all).

I think one of the great tragedies of the industrialized economy is that it too often it forces us to treat our fellow humans (not to mention all that is non-human, and this is yet another distinction we might reconsider) with something less than the reverence they deserve. I once heard someone describe capitalism as a sociopathic construct, and I believe there is some truth to this. Maybe a lot of truth.

And that’s pretty much what I have to say about that.

You Do it Every Day

We are milking two cows, twice per day. We milk by hand, in a corner of our humble pole barn. For the past couple of days, we’ve milked to the patter of rain on the tin roof, and that’s been real nice. Penny does most of the milking, though I pinch hit from time-to-time. From beginning to end, including a mid-milking break to feed the calves, it takes about 40 minutes. We both like it. It’s not a burden, though obviously not for the uncommitted.

Milk is the cornerstone of this little operation. It makes our butter, our kefir, our soft cheese. It makes our beef and this year, with a beautiful heifer on the ground, perhaps it will generate a little income. We feed the skimmed milk to our pigs and they are kind enough to convert it into chops and bacon. Good piggies. Thank you.

Of course, our milk comes from our cows, so perhaps it’s actually the cows that are the cornerstone of this little operation. They make the milk, they birth the beef and heifer calves, they graze the grass, they give us something meaningful to do for 40 minutes at the beginning and end of each day. No small point, that last one. It’s actually pretty damn important.

Of course, the cows couldn’t exist without the grass they feed on, so maybe the cornerstone of this little operation is grass. Funny to think about, isn’t it? Grass. The prey of lawnmowers the world over, which is crazy, because it’s actually one of the most abundant perennial food crops in the world. You think you can’t eat grass? That’s nuts. Of course you can eat grass. You just gotta run it through the digestive system of a ruminant first.

Except, well, the grass doesn’t grow without the sun, the rain, the soil. So I guess I was wrong before: These are the cornerstones of this little operation. They make the grass that feeds the cows that make the milk that makes our beef and bacon and butter and (!!!) ice cream. You think you can’t eat sun, soil, and rain?

Truth is, you do it every day.

The Big Here

And then there were two

I flew out to Sun Valley, Idaho for the weekend, to give a talk at a conference about kids and education and whatnot (that’s what my talk was about, not the conference as a whole). Holy shit is it beautiful out there, I mean really. Just stunning, all sky and mountain, everything stretching for what seems like forever. And the speed limit! 80 mph, but you can set the cruise at 90 and just about take a nap, the roads are so straight. Crazy.

After my talk I hiked from the conference center through a pleasant neighborhood and to the top of a ski hill and then clambered up onto a rock outcropping and got that feeling you get when you see a SUV commercial on TV and the camera’s circling at the very height of the land, a swirling, 360-degree aerial view. You know the commercials I’m talking about. You know the feeling: A little disorienting, that soft butterfly flutter in the stomach.

Sometimes when I travel, I get sort of overwhelmed by all the possibilities of life, and furthermore, the seeming randomness of it all. I mean, hell, given slightly different circumstances, I might’ve ended up living in Sun Valley, or a million other places for that matter. Considering it is for me like standing at the top of that outcropping: A little disorienting, a little fluttery, and I wonder if that sense of disorientation is the very reason conferences like the one I spoke at exist in the first place. It was a wellness conference, focused primarily on the spirit. Elizabeth Gilbert was there, but that was the day before I arrived, so I didn’t get to see her. A fellow named Rich Roll, which is a great name for a guy who transformed himself from recovering-alcoholic, Big-Mac attacking couch potato into a vegan competitive ultra runner in his mid-40’s, an age that of late seems particularly relevant to me. I listened to some of his talk. It was good. Very inspirational. Heck, I might not’ve gone hiking otherwise, and that night at dinner I even passed over the steak in favor of something a little less bloodwet.

That disorientation. It’s like, how do you decide? Everyone at the conference was, as implied by their very attendance, affluent. Maybe not 1% affluent, but you know what I mean: These people have the world by the balls. You could see it: They were all gorgeous, slim, bright-eyed, curious, articulate, almost deferential in their politeness. The buffet of their life choices, while perhaps not infinite (and whose is?), is certainly more bountiful than for most. But it must be sort of confusing at times, too, all that opportunity. Has to be. Is, I mean. I know, because while I was surely on the lower end of the conference attendee’s socioeconomic spectrum, it’s not like I don’t have my share of choices. More than is strictly healthy, I sometimes think.

The night after my talk, I went to Mark Nebo’s presentation. I’d never heard of the dude, but I figured why not. I was there, I was hanging out with some people whose company I was quite enjoying and they were going, I had a complimentary ticket, and besides, I was feeling a little knackered from the hike and furthermore regretting my decision regarding the steak dinner, which came with some sort of blue cheese (blue cheese!) reduction sauce and which, if not for the tempering influence of that confounded vegan-runner dude, who was 49 but looked at least 28, I surely would’ve ordered.

Anyway. I guess Nebo’s pretty famous; Oprah’s a big fan and that sort of launched him a while back. I’d assumed he’d be a little slick for my liking, and his talk was titled “heart work in a spirit world,” and it’s not like I’m opposed to heart work or spirit worlds or anything, but, well… you know. But honestly, I could see the appeal. He talked some and read some passages from his books and a few poems he wrote, and lo-and-behold, he’s a fantastic writer. Good enough that if you were a writer yourself, you might find yourself thinking hell’s bells. And he didn’t try to whip us into a frenzy. He wasn’t trying to convince anyone of anything. He was just offering what he had to offer in an unassuming way. It was very endearing.

What did he have to offer? A lot, way more than I can remember. Except one thing, something pretty obvious, I guess, but still: Not something I’d thought much about (a well-provisioned category, this one). “Remember,” he said, toward the end of his talk. He widened his eyes just a bit. “Remember how rare it is that you are even here.” He didn’t mean “here” as in in this room. He meant “here” as in here. The big “here.”

The first thing I thought was Rare: Like steak.

The second thing I thought was Damn: He’s right.

How We’ll Get There

Bilbo, an hour old

Last night I dreamed I was driving, and it was strangely thrilling in that way dreams can heighten the senses, transform the mundane into something novel. A little-traveled gravel road, an unfamiliar car, the sense of speed amplified by my sub-conscious, the metronomic ping of small stones against the rocker panels, dervish of dust in my wake. Destination undetermined, but anticipated.

I drove until I awoke (perhaps that was my destination: Wakefulness), and when I did it was not fully light and below freezing, so I started a fire in the cook stove and made coffee, before walking down the field to retrieve Pip’s day old bull calf, Bilbo. I’d spotted him, barely, from the kitchen window. The little beggar had squeezed through a gap in the barn gate. He’s a beauty, a Shorthorn/Jersey/British White cross, a little half moon of snow white under each eye.

I’ve been thinking lately about contentment and what, exactly, is compelling us to move. Because we love this place and our work here. We have no particular expectations for how our lives will change; this is not about the realization of a long-held ambition, or a belief (which would probably be naïve, anyhow) that this transition will shift something, fulfill a resolution or fill a void. The funny thing is – and I’ve mentioned this before – the moment we realized we’d be perfectly content staying put was the moment we felt liberated to pull this off. I realize that might not make any sense, but that’s ok. The older I get, the less logic seems to matter.

Stay tuned for Bacon Camp: A full weekend of farmstead pork butchery!

Speaking strictly for myself, I am at the moment held in thrall of the challenge, which is not to say there are not other moments I don’t question the wisdom of it. Don’t get me wrong – there are pragmatic reasons for the move, but in truth, there are also pragmatic reasons to not move, to stay right here, in this place, never more enticing than now, the grass at its annual peak of lushness, the pond still clinging to its winter cold. You jump and when you land, your breath catches hard. A beeline to the shore, clamber out, shake it off, dress. Renewal.

So, no, I don’t expect to be any more (and hopefully not less!) content in our new, yet-to-be-built home. I do not expect to be fundamentally changed by the transition, and after all, it’s not like we’re moving to New York City. Or even New Hampshire, for that matter. Eleven miles due north, that’s all. It’s not much. I could leave now, on foot, and be there by dinner, and that’s with stopping for a nap along the way, which of course I would do. I know exactly where, too. I’ve got it all suss’d out.

In some ways, I suppose it’s a bit of an experiment: Can we do this? But then, I already know the answer: Of course we can. It’s not like we’re reinventing the wheel, here. Plenty of people have done what we’re doing, and under far more challenging circumstances. We’re not unique; this is not some great hardship, particularly with all the good people we have helping us. We’re incredibly fortunate that way. Otherwise, I’m not sure we pull this off. Wouldn’t be half as much fun, anyway.

Maybe it’s enough that we’re enjoying ourselves, and in the process, stretching a bit. Strategizing how to pare down our belongings and then actually paring them. Figuring out how to fit our lives into half the space – certainly not a tiny house (and when’s that bubble gonna pop, anyway? I’m predicting a whiplash reversal in 2017, the market suddenly flooded with 200-square-foot shacks at pennies on the dollar, their former owners, suffering acute claustrophobia, fleeing to the suburban McMansions they once scorned. Hell, you can buy 5 of them, stick them together, knock out a few Lilliputian walls, and you’ll have yourself a livable space) – but still: Half the size of our current home. Determining which comforts we’ll retain and which will go. Penny wants just a hand pump in the house, no pressure tank, no faucet, no hot water but what can be heated in pots atop the wood stove. Why, I asked her the other day. I don’t want all that stuff, she said. It just breaks eventually. It just needs to be replaced. I thought about it for a moment. Fine, I said. If you do all the dishes. She didn’t reply, but I’m predicting running water. Generally speaking, I don’t believe in radical, transformative change absent crisis or catastrophe (and in many cases, not even then). I think that for all the New Year’s resolutions, all the grand promises people make to themselves to do this or quit that or start something new, the majority of change in our lives happens slowly, incrementally. Imperceptibly, even.

Maybe, then, that’s ultimately what this move is about: It’s a piece of our slow march toward an even quieter life. Despite the near term bustle of the physical transition and all it entails, it feels as if we’re winding our lives down a notch or two. One could view this as a sign of decline, I suppose, an unambitious glide path into the second half. When I was a boy, my father used to make what he called “coaster cakes,” the pancakes he half-cooked on the cooling pan after he’d prematurely extinguished the burner to save money. They weren’t bad. A little slimy in the middle is all.

So maybe that’s what we’re doing: Coasting until we’re done. Or (and admittedly, this is my preferred view) one could see it as incremental evolution, as our awareness of how little we really need sharpens, shaping our lives in ways we have yet to imagine. I’d like to say it’s like that dream I had: Destination undetermined and yet anticipated, but that’s not true. We already know how this ends. It’s not if we’ll get there, it’s how we’ll get there.

Which I suppose is exactly why it’s so damn much fun to be alive in the first place.