Winter has come to Vermont. It is beautiful, and tough. But even these California bones are feeling alive every time the bitter wind hits my nose as I shovel heaps of snow, light and fluffy like billions of tiny feathers.
We’re doing it.
What is “it?” It is: tracking the ever-changing weather extremes. Responding to the consequences of those extremes with things like chopping firewood, building fires in the stove, scraping ice off the car windshield. Mindfully experiencing sub-zero (-15°F today) temperatures then listening to snow melt down the solarium windows and slide off the roof in sheets. Driving the toddler to preschool if the roads have been plowed, getting outside with the dog while ensuring he doesn’t run off to the neighbor’s land (then fishing the ice spheres from between his paw pads with my fingers), mutually checking-in with the neighbor when a weather event occurs.
And most of all, "It” is: adapting.
There are pangs of longing for my old life, to be sure. Living and loving a place for 25 years creates strong roots I don’t want to just sever. City life is, in a sense, the optimal mode for modern humans. The remnants of that life, for us, are still very present and will no doubt will be for some time. And the weather was perfect for me in San Francisco. Never cold and almost never hot. The basement of our home just had a forced air heater in it. Now we’ve got a heating oil tank, a propane tank, a boiler, a well pump and water filtration system, a septic system, a radon pump, plus a bunch of other little devices I’m not even sure about yet.
But things are getting figured out. Something that seems to have real momentum now is a sense of what we might be doing with the land come Spring. The conversations amongst Doomer Optimists are helping a lot with that.
Participating in the 1.0 version of the Homestead Incubator course is another rich inspirational resource. It’s a fantastic network for collective wisdom within the homesteading niche and is clearly going to grow tremendously in the near future. I feel really fortunate to be plugged in at this early stage for answers to questions about land acquisition, energy and water, farming (of course), building community, systems design. There are students who haven’t started their homesteading journey yet, and others who have bought land but don’t have a house, and others like us who have landed but are still assessing the possibilities — and instructors and mentors who have been homesteading for decades.
Perhaps the biggest sign of encouragement, though, is that the family is just, well, doing it, just living in this completely new environment. This likely will not go down as one of the more challenging winters we will face. Nonetheless, we’ve adapted a great deal and are still able to appreciate the beauty around us. Even when it’s clearly trying to destroy us.
I’m framing this first year as the honeymoon, with the real sense of what life will be like in this place and in this mode becoming clear only after a full annual cycle. Because that cycle is one of the big reasons we did this, to feel like we are living in nature instead of adjacent to it.
I’m hopeful that our ability to appreciate the aesthetics of the effort required to make it through that cycle indicates resilience. Stay tuned…
