Maybe I Won’t

The cabin jacked up to pour a foundation for it and the addition. It was like this for nearly three months.

Last night our friend Bob stopped by, carrying the two major summer food groups: Beer and ice cream. The boys dug into the ice cream while Bob and Penny and I chatted in the kitchen, then Bob and I took up our beers and strolled outside into the late day sun. It was as nice a late summer afternoon as I can remember, the sun mellowed by the approach of fall, everything soft and lush and fertile. The cows were grazing down the field, the windmill spun lazily, and we could see across the valley to Morgan’s farm, where his 60-odd girls were busy getting their udders drained.

Bob is the fellow who helped us build the addition onto our original cabin. He’s a good builder; been a builder all his adult life, mostly working 6 or 7 days a week. That was how it was when he worked with us: He’d work his usual 40 hour, Monday-Friday gig, then come work with Penny and me on weekends. I think he charged us $22/hour. Maybe it was $23. This was 13 years ago, but still. He worked pretty cheap.

We had fun building this place. We really did. Other than the time I fell down the open stairwell and was nearly smote by the staging plank that followed in my descending path (close call, that one), I can’t remember ever feeling particularly stressed. Penny and I were so accustomed to living in sub-standard conditions that we didn’t mind inhabiting a construction zone in the least. Why, just a couple years earlier, we’d been living in a tent on friends’ land, saving our meager wages toward this property. I was making $8/hour at the time; Penny might actually have been making a bit more than that. $9, maybe. We saved $15,000 on those wages, in no small part because we stayed in that tent until early December, until the first snow threatened to collapse it on top of us. Then we moved from the tent into a hovel of a cabin with no running water for which we paid a $600 lump sum for 6 months of rent. So yeah, living in the midst of saws and sawdust and construction detritus didn’t bother us in the least. For one thing, they were our saws. It was our sawdust. For another, we’d framed the roof of sturdy 2 x 10’s, on a 12/12 pitch. There would be no snow-related collapse. And we had running water. For a good while it only ran cold, but still: Running water. Imagine that.

I don’t know why I got to thinking about all this. Partly because of Bob’s visit, of course. But I think also because I felt a little irked by one of NPR Audie’s questions about privilege. And maybe the reason I was irked is because it wasn’t the first time someone’s asked that question, which I suppose is meant to underscore the fact that not everyone can choose what we have chosen: To work at home. To be with our children. To experience the million and one other pleasures of our small lives on this land. I guess that in becoming something of a spokesperson for this way of life, it has become my duty to explain how it can work for everyone. Or at the very least, to apologize for the fact that we’ve been fortunate enough to make it work for ourselves.

Anyone who’s read this space for any length of time knows damn well that we consider ourselves enormously privileged. And when privilege has failed us, good fortune has often stepped in. You will never hear me say anything other than I have been one of the most privileged, luckiest fools to walk this great, green earth. Penny feels exactly the same. But I’m starting to wonder if the next time someone asks me about privilege and what I think about the fact that not everyone can emulate our path, I might mention that tent and the way its roof sagged under snow. I might mention heating water on the wood stove for sponge baths. I might mention selling our car for $600 so we could buy a truck for $200, in part to haul building materials and in part to pocket the cash difference.

Or maybe I won’t. Because the funny truth is, we consider ourselves pretty lucky to have had these experiences, too.