Online inspiration - Radical Neighboring - What do humans who aren't consumers look like?
We brought some of our animals with us to this one acre lot (with a bit of the land including a slope down to a brook that isn't usable) - 6 goats, 8 chickens, 2 ducks and our guinea hen. Already on the property was a cinderblock building (used to be a chicken incinerator when meat chickens were a huge thing in the is part of Maine) with a large overhang. Mike and I drove over to Maine a week before closing on the house to make two stalls under the overhang for the goats and also build a simple greenhouse structure for the birds.
The animals had to wait until our new septic system could be installed before we could work on their permanent housing and fenced in area. In the meantime Mike added a small bit of fencing on each side of the stalls for the goats.
Before the new barn was finished my sweet goat of 14 1/2 years, Madeline, died. Sad for sure but she lived a long and healthy life until the end.
Here is the barn that Mike built. It has three sections - two for goats and one for the chickens - and is 12' x 12"
Off the front is a large fenced in area that the small goats, chickens and ducks share.
In a phone conversation with my 75 year old father yesterday morning he commented that he needs to plan his next vacation trip this fall instead of waiting until the spring because he turns 76 in late October and no man in his family has ever lived past the age of 76. I told him that he will be the first and no matter how old we are, all each of us has is this very moment.
Later the same day I was face timing with a friend who turns 70 this year and although she has a strong faith and is generally optimistic, she admitted it is hard not to think about her "shelf time" getting shorter.
Myself, I will be turning 56 next month and will be closer to 60 than 50. Maybe it is hormones, maybe it is getting older and these thoughts are normal - but I also feel a bit of selfishness creeping in about how I spend my moments.
Last night was date night - as it has been for years. On date nights we tend to get a little dressed up and pay a little more attention to how we look - generally the only night I will put on more than just mascara. Through the years with young children it would mean getting them fed early and watching a movie, while we would enjoy a quiet dinner and then get them to bed and enjoy wine and a movie ourselves. Now that we live close to a sweet coastal town, we have been generally going out - hoping to get seats right by the water and have a locally made beer with some live music playing.
Last night was one of the rare nights where the air was even warmer than 12 minutes inland where we live and the sun was shining and the sky a clear blue with a warm breeze blowing - truly perfect. After we left the wharf restaurant we walked a bit and found some more local music playing at another restaurant outside. We were able to stand on the outskirts with the bay behind us and the sun setting on our right side and Mike (my husband) was standing on the curbing elevated behind me, massaging my shoulders. For those moments everything felt perfect - like a slice of heaven.
Our family moved from our small farmstead in central Vermont back to midcoast Maine on March 31. We now live just a 12 minute drive from our daughter, son-in-law and 19 month old grandson and about 20 minutes from where we lived in Maine 6 1/2 years ago (albeit for only 2 1/2 years).
This was a very hard move for me. I was dearly attached to our home in the rural town of Vershire, Vermont. The house was built in 1839 and the property was very beautiful having a stream as the back border, an acre of fenced in pasture/yard, and a perfectly flat meadow that we converted to our market garden. Oh, and the “sugarshack” - this we converted to a farmstand, a place to set up food for gatherings, and a small private guest room complete with a woodstove. We had spent 6 seasons lovingly cultivating the property - building a greenhouse, improving the soil each season, adding perennials and more. The even harder part about moving was leaving dear friends. Never in my adult life had I had such strong friendships. These are wonderful authentic people that formed a small community when covid hit and our home was the meeting spot for regular potlucks. Because our house was along a main room, we also had friends stopping by frequently to drop off a plant, say hello, ask if our daughter might want to join them on an outing. These are individuals that I trust, love, and admire for their strength, wisdom, courage, and thoughtfulness.
Back to our move….
With the housing market seemingly nearing a peak in central Vermont we realized that we could probably sell our house and buy a fixer upper for cash near our daughter in Maine as well as pay off our debt and spend 6 months fixing up the house. We decided to put the house on the market in February because we wanted to take advantage of having as much nice weather as possible to spend fixing up the house we would buy. Within 5 days, we had an offer on our house for even a bit more than we were asking. Our next job was to see what we could find in Maine. This is when the sadness began to really creep in for myself. It became clear that to find a house for the price we needed to follow through on our plans, the house would not be very nice at all and it may be impossible to find something with land as well, and be with a 15 minute drive to two towns for each of our children’s needs. Later I would learn that being just a 12 minute drive to Belfast would fill one of my own needs.
Mike and I made 3 trips out (a five hour drive each way) to Maine as soon as our house went under contract in Vermont and after our 3rd trip, we were very discouraged. The next day I noticed that one of the houses we had looked at had been reduced $50,000. This put things in a new perspective and although we had only seen the house for 10 minutes (which I, at the time, had 100% disqualified), we put an offer on it. We had some slight back and forth, but we got the sellers to agree to $150,000 which was our goal. So we were going from 3 beautiful acres, a house perfect for hosting (which is one of my gifts), a market garden, etc.. to a very ugly house whose updates were all cheap and from at least the 1980s, just 1 acre (with some of that being a slope to a brook);no suitable barn or fencing (although we did make an out building work temporarily for the animals), very close to the road (yes, the traffic is loud), and really a house with absolutely no character.
My mental health suffered a bit in those interim weeks between being under contract and moving. Every ounce of my body kept hoping it would fall through. Our buyers asked for yet another inspection, for example, and I would think to myself “maybe this will be it”. Yet each time the buyers still wanted it. I would remind myself that God has a plan for all of this and tell myself to practice gratitude and remember all the positive reasons for moving. The day of the move was long and hard but we had good friends and family helping us. I still remember the raw feeling of that day - still mourning over all that we had left as we moved most our items into the garage as they would need to stay there while we fixed up the house. Every ounce of energy nearly drained as I helped to pull up carpet in the bedrooms so we could at least get mattresses down to sleep on that first night. (Thankfully the bedrooms had carpet that was easily removed with hardwood floors underneath. Not beautiful by any stretch of the imagination, but definitely passable. This was in sharp contrast to the very hard job of removing two layers of dirty carpet in the living room with a layer of black glue that had to be scraped.)
I will share more of my own personal challenges as well as accomplishments in the coming posts.
I wrote and published what I have cut and pasted below, on a new blog I was going to start on November 3, 2018. Over the years since, much has changed yet much remains the same. This will be more of the direction that this blog will take as my children are getting older now - Emily, our youngest, turns 12 this year. We are still on our farm in Vermont, have one grandson with another on the way and life, overall, is wonderful. But so much happened over the pandemic that has changed me in so many ways and has made me stronger - I plan to share my story, share my research, and share my quest for creating as Charles Eisenstein says, "the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible".
Here is what I wrote on November 3, 2018 -
As I sit writing from our living room on this rainy dark November afternoon, many thoughts are going through my head. It seems that so many people, including myself, take what the media says at face value and that the media has become so polarized that many of us are simply left wondering what to believe. I am starting a blog to post my thoughts and articles I plan to write as I spend time researching areas of interest. I am specifically interested in exposing hypocrisy, questioning norms, and creating thoughtful discussion by asking questions which I am sure I will often not be able to answer.
At the age of 49, our youngest child of 7 is now 7 years old. We still homeschool the three youngest and run our online handwork business and are starting a small farm on our new farm in central Vermont. Over many of the last 20 years, our family has often chosen a nonconventional path. We have been mostly home based as far as work and school and have not chosen to put the acquisition of status or stuff as a priority.
During the 2016 presidential primaries, Bernie Sanders woke me up politically. I had been only marginally following any type of governmental race in the past. My husband and I watched rally after rally. While the mainstream media were not covering them, we found them on youtube and kept up with his schedule. When we learned of the extreme corruption in the Democratic party that potentially denied Bernie Sanders the nomination, I became angry and determined to do something. With my family and business obligations taking up most of my time, I didn't do anything much concrete except reply to some tweets or instagram posts or wrote up some blog posts and social media posts of my own.
I don't know if I will run for office someday, but that is a possibility. At this time, I just want to share an alternative view that perhaps you might not hear from many other outlets.
Warmly,
Tonya
Over the weekend we worked on our property, went for a hike at Camden Hills (gorgeous ocean view), and worked on some handwork. Yesterday,...
