{Camera charger was left in Connecticut so it's been a lot of phone pics lately.}
There was man in town who painted one side of his house every year, essentially giving him a freshly painted home every four years. He was the grandfather of my friend and lived with his wife in a stately New England Colonial, in the most historic section of our small town. She was an artist; he, retired. Sure enough, every May or June you could drive by and see him dressed head to toe in tan colored Dickies, ladder pressed against the three story structure, paintbrush in hand. I was glad to see him use a paintbrush. A painter’s daughter, I've picked up on a few critical skills of the trade through the years, and I know well enough that a home should never be sprayed unless the time is taken to back-brush for proper adhesion, which people who spray don’t often do. But this man carefully brushed on a fresh coat of white, one side, per year. Maintenance. He seemed to have a good system down, his home looked beautiful and cared for, albeit practical given his single choice of white paint. It was a proper Yankee dwelling.
I have this habit of looking at homes when I’m out driving around, and mentally adding up what it would take to care for and to occupy them. Not the effort necessarily, though in part I suppose that too, but more so in the sheer expenditure of time and materials required to tend such a place year after year. How much of my life would I have to trade in order to keep up with that? The first home Adam and I lived in was an older two bedroom cottage, weighing in at a mere 765 square feet. Palatial by global standards, micro by American. I loved that house. It had as many windows as one could pack into such a compact frame, allowing sun to pour in over the length of a day. I could deep clean the entire place in a little over an hour, and you could easily see that if certain things needed to be done, a new roof for example, the job was a small fraction than that of a more typically sized house. Both in labor and in cost. I remember the vegetable garden and apple orchard on that one acre plot occupied four times the space as the home did. That house and property always made sense to me.
There is a (true) story that tells of a midwestern woman and her family living on a rural farm in the early part of the twentieth century. It was a typical homestead, providing for themselves first, and using surplus of eggs, meat, milk, and vegetables as currency within the community to acquire things they could not produce. They did not want for anything; in fact, their life felt deeply satisfying and well provided for. They didn’t know they should want for more. Their life was not simple or easy, but it was a good life. Then the prospect of electricity came to the area and local government needed the community to help pay for it. Folks were enticed with low interest loans to connect to the grid, hence funding the project’s move through the area. This family had no interest in bringing electricity to their farm, feeling life was fine without it. At a town meeting the woman was told that times were changing, electricity was a mark of civility and only the poor were without. Poor? We’re not poor, we have all that we need and then some! They were told this is the way things are now, this is progress. And it was reiterated that only the poor went without this modern convenience. Poor. Uncivilized. Shame set in, and vulnerability. So… How do these loans work, exactly? How much per month? At what interest rate?… ?… ?… ? And with that, electricity was fed to her homestead and she spent the rest of her days paying off that loan, feeling poorer and poorer, both in means and in spirit, with each payment she made.
I think of that woman often while on my daily walk, just as I pass the old house in that photo up there. Electricity never did make it down this road, there is no plumbing either. Forget internet. And yet this adorable well cared for home still stands just fine; life takes place and memories are made. I shared this photo on Instagram a few days ago and it quickly became the single most “liked” photo I’ve ever posted there. I don't think it was its off grid nature that appealed to so many of you as its manageable size. I could feel the collective sigh of relief; this home feels doable. I can't stop thinking about how telling this is. I don’t need to suggest exactly what it tells as I imagine we can all draw our own conclusions, but there's something to ponder here. I guess for me it suggests that maybe we’re living in a time when people are ready to dismantle the once ideal american dream of more, more, more, and replace it with something more attainable and sustainable, less chaotic and depleting. I don't know, maybe all those likes didn't mean that at all, but it’s nice to imagine so. I couldn't help but feel comforted by a glimmer of idealistic hope as the admiration for Posy’s cottage rolled in; a simple home that has never known connection to the power grid, but where life has carried on just fine for over two hundred years. Who knows, maybe more people are ready for this than we are told to believe.