We're Moving (but Not Yet) | Practical Self Reliance

On Permanence, and Crafting a Life in Transition

About a year ago, we decided that we needed to move, to leave this land that we’ve been stewarding for the past ten years. For various family reasons that I won’t go into, though we love this land and all we’ve put into it, it just won’t work for us in the long term.

As soon as we came to that decision, we started looking for a new plot of land to call home…but it also meant that we found ourselves living in what would soon be someone else’s house.

We’ve moved here with the thought that this would be our “forever home,” and everything we’ve done here year after year was done with the idea of permanence. No short-term fixes to the house, no quick patches here or there just to get us through.

Fifty years from now, if I’m still alive, this is where I’d be.

That kind of commitment to a place, that kind of investment, is good for morale when you’re spending most of your time building, fixing, toting, hauling, planting, and tending. This is my land, and everything I do here is a gift to my future self, even if it’s something as simple as planting a patch of bee balm just off the porch, where I’ll watch the hummingbirds play on cool summer evenings when I’m 80.

For me, that kind of investment in a place is important, and as soon as my mindset changed, it was hard to find the motivation to “tend someone else’s garden.”

Not so much because I wouldn’t gladly turn my gardens over to someone who’d love them as much as I do…but because you never know who will buy your house. Will they just tear it all out? Will they even care about what we’ve cultivated here in the past 10 years?

The thoughts and wants of some imaginary person suddenly enter into every minor decision. The kitchen needs painting, but will “they” like the color?

It’s time for new batteries for our off-grid system. But will “they” want batteries? Maybe we should just take out the whole system and sell this place as a “normal” house.

The attached greenhouse needs work, but should we do it when “they” might not even want a greenhouse? Maybe they’ll just tear it down and put on a deck anyway.

Even beyond planning for a hypothetical “they,” our basic way of life becomes tricky when we’re not hunkering in for the long haul.

We keep a years worth of basic shelf stable food and supplies on hand at all times. From buckets of flour that we use to make bread, to spare parts for the tractor and the raw materials for making soap, herbal remedies, and countless other things.

We’ve always done that, continuously turning our inventory and just replacing our stocks as we use them in our day-to-day lives.

When the pandemic lockdowns happened, it didn’t really impact us at all. Stores are closed? No worries, we just didn’t leave our land at all for three full months, and none of us really even noticed.

When we found ourselves faced with the reality of physically moving everything, we decided to stop replacing things and just work everything down. A year later, we’ve spent very little on groceries, which is nice given the price of everything these days, but the cupboards are nearly bare.

(Not a good place to be when supply chains are increasingly fragile, and every news outlet is talking about the prospect of global food shortages.)

Beyond that, we didn’t start new projects of any sort. Why start clearing land for a new pasture…when you might never finish?

Handing over a woodlot is a lot cleaner than handing over a half-finished project with trees on the ground. Ironically, that’s what we inherited when we bought this place, downed trees, partially constructed buildings, and half-finished just about everything everywhere.

I know how hard it is to pick up from that, and I didn’t want to hand that to someone else.

But for a family that’s used to spending every spare moment building, doing, and creating…it’s been a hard year. And, quite frankly, a depressing year.

We need projects to stay sane, we need work to feed our souls. The work of creation, and crafting out life here with everything we build.

Sure, there have been benefits to taking a year away from planting flower beds and fruit trees to feed our 80-year-old selves.

We’ve taken a lot of long walks in the evenings and lingered around the farmer’s market every weekend. The time that normally would have been spent building our life here, was spent quietly observing life go on around us.

I’ve done more foraging this year than ever before, and tested out countless new recipes to use up our stored food.

Even not building, we’ve learned so much in this year we’ve spent homesteading in someone else’s house.

But that’s what we call it now. Someone else’s house.

For me, as someone that craves a sense of permanence and thrives on building for the future, living in someone else’s house is incredibly difficult. But that’s how we’ve been living.

Once we found our new home, we’d be moving, and that could happen at any point. Or, at least we thought it could happen at any point.

Anyone whose looking for a home or land in this housing market knows how impossible it seems to find something affordable.

Just look back at the sale history of almost any property, and you’ll see the same thing. Assessed Value of X, and a current sale price of 4X. Or purchased for X in 2020 at what I would have assumed would be the height of the rural housing market as people fled the cities, and now for sale for 2 to 3X just a year or two later.

Things are crazy to say the least, and it’s a horrible time to buy a house.

At mid-summer, it’s becoming more and more apparent that we’re not moving this year. Anything could happen, of course, but it’s not looking promising.

While it’s been hard on the adults, I assumed that my kids actually enjoyed a summer of less responsibility. What kid wouldn’t want to spend summer afternoons splashing in the stock tank pool instead of tending the animals and gardens?

Walking by our empty barn this past week, my daughter looked up at with a pleading look just short of tears and said, “I wish we could have chickens again mama. I miss them so much.”

My husband and I looked down at her, and we both just broke. We were tired of this life in transition, this life on hold…but we didn’t realize how much she missed the little things too.

When we’d decided on moving, selling off all our chickens was one of the first things we did. One less thing to tend to as we prepared our house for sale, one less thing to move, and it let us use the barn for storage as we sorted through all our equipment to decide what to keep and what to sell.

We both just looked down at our pleading 7-year-old and together said, “Of course, we can have chickens again.”

And just like that, our life changed. Or, more accurately, went back to the way it was. We have a project, a new mission. In our house, on our land.

We’re working as a family preparing and clearing the land for a new chicken pasture, which you’d assume would be an unwelcome chore, but everyone’s filled with excitement. My kids spent all afternoon yesterday skipping around picking up downed branches and limbs to help us get ready to put up new fencing.

“I’m the strongest wood truck in the world,” my 5-year-old son declared as he dragged a limb through the woods.

They had the time of their lives, and working, toting, hauling, and creating.

They could have been splashing in the stock tank, digging in the sandbox, or really anything else. Work is always optional for our kids, but it’s amazing how they almost always choose to participate when they know the goal.

They want to be there, working as part of the team, building this life we live together.

These are their chickens, that they will tend, and whose eggs they’ll eat. If it’s anything like last time, they’ll voluntarily spend their afternoons hunting snails in the garden for chicken treats, knowing that bugs make for the tastiest eggs.

My daughter even had our rooster trained to do tricks for sweet summer berries.

Adults aren’t the only ones that crave a sense of purpose, and while getting a house ready to sell is a “task” it’s not exactly an inspiring one, and it’s not something that screams, a “purpose-driven life.”

So we’re done. We’re no longer living in someone else’s house. This is our house, until we leave it.

If “they” don’t like the color of the paint in the kitchen, “they” can paint it. If “they” don’t want a chicken yard, they can take it down.

This is our land, even if we know it won’t be when we’re 80. It is ours today, and it’s amazing how going back to living with a sense of purpose can change your whole outlook on the world.

There’s an old saying that’s repeated often these days. It comes in 4 parts, but these days people usually only say the first three:

"Dance like nobody's watching.
Love like you've never been hurt.
Sing like nobody's listening.”

The fourth part is, “Live like it's heaven on earth."

That last line should say, “Live like you’re creating heaven on earth.” Less catchy perhaps, but more meaningful. Living in that act of creation, whether you’re living in a place for a day, a week, a year or a lifetime, means living with purpose, and that can make all the difference in the world.

Now, if you’ll excuse me…my garden’s calling, and I’ve got a chicken yard to fence.

Until Next Time,

Ashley at Practical Self Reliance