Freedom Is Not Just Another Word

Personal economics played a large role in our decision to do what we are doing.

It wasn’t that we couldn’t keep doing what we were doing. We could have. Doing what we were doing to maintain a traditional sticks and bricks, in a mostly nice and comfortable neighborhood, was doable if we wanted to keep ourselves chained to the monotonous and mundane grindage inherent in what is viewed by most of the populace as the normal way to go about living life.

That grindage was more than we could accept. Especially at this stage of our lives. Continuing to grind away was simply a compromise that we were not willing to make. Why stay tied to a whipping post that demanded stripes on our backs and consumed our earnings as the reward of suffering the stinging whip. Why keep doing something that left us with pitiful little time to enjoy the better things in life that are important to us?

The economics of the deal involved a lot more than the dollars and cents of the matter. The dollars and cents part did have a place in the equation. There was a lot of important more, other than the dollars and cents involved, that prompted us to begin the reduction process those several years before we let the cat out of the bag and anyone had a real clue about what we were doing. We mentioned our interests to a few people. Most of the few stood there looking at us as if we had suddenly grown huge warts on our noses. So we kept our interests to ourselves and kept stepping the steps until it was time to jump.

The important more?

It involved the issue concerning the outflow of life-energy in comparison to the inflow of the essential life-elements that generate and create the margin within us that allows us to live as humans being rather than humans doing.  Realizing that we were coming up WAY short in this department, coupled with being fed up with the stinging whip, were the essential motivational factors that presented themselves to us.

Positive change rarely happens on its own.

Negative changes have a way of throwing themselves on us regularly. We adjust to the negative changes and often consider them part of the normal flow of life. Positive changes are calculated, the angles of adjustment carefully thought through, adjusted from time to time to keep headed in the desired direction, and stepped out one step at a time.

We will, on March 21^st, have been full-time here at this little cabin in the woods for 5 months.

It’s far from anything that remotely resembles a glamorous cabin. 

It’s definitely not something you’ll see advertised in the glitzy cabin fad advertisements. There are a few finishing projects that await our attention. But, in moving to the cabin with its overwhelming 288 square feet inside the walls (336 square feet if you figure the small front porch into the total), we are discovering a contentedness that we’ve not know before. The words, “I love our little cabin,” are spoken often here by one or the other of us.

We readily admit that culling through and getting rid of stuff … downsizing … either through yard sales or outright giving away … was a challenge that we had to step up to and meet head on. It was really tough at first … watching stuff leave. It didn’t take long for it to get easier. The more the stuff left the less encumbered we felt. And, truth be known, we still have more than we honestly need to live comfortably. This reality presents us with another challenge … another round of sorting and culling to further simplify our lives here at the cabin.

It’s paid for. It’s ours. And it affords us the opportunity to pursue important personal common interests.

One of those interests concerns this nomadic nature that the two of us share as personal character traits. This aspect of our characters was very difficult … practically impossible … to entertain as long as we were shackled to the post that I mentioned earlier.

Sure.

There were occasional little short trips and weekend excursions that we went on. But there was always that strong iron chain padlocked to our collective ankle with its other end strongly attached to something that owned us. We always enjoyed our short trips and excursions. Everybody needs a break from the humdrum and grind. What we noticed is that every short trip and excursion fed fuel to our nomadic natures … fuel that made the fire burn hotter. Short was never long enough. Short was never good enough. Short was always a compromise.

We looked at an assortment of options that would help satisfy our nomadism.

We spent years considering and studying how we might go about helping our nomadism find fruition. There are several viable options to choose from. There are a lot of people with this jones so none of us have to think we are pioneering in this area. We thought of ourselves, at first, as an odd couple when we started talking about doing this. Discovering that a lot of others are out there on the road, some of them full time and have been for a LONG time, took the oddness out of it for us. We were, in fact, studying on this only months after signing the papers on the other house in the mostly nice neighborhood. That’s when we came to the stark realization that we no longer had the freedom to simply jump and go at the drop of the hat.

This is where Fred, our paid for 1993 Chevy G20 high top vehicular friend and road home, comes into the picture. Fred is mostly ready to hit the road. The major interior conversion work has been done and we are down to simply doing some tweaking to a few things before heading out on a long and unhurried mosey.

Spring Buds

Winter, for all practical purposes, is behind us in this part of the world.

Truth is, winter never really found us this trip around the sun.

We had a couple or three episodes of, what for us, was the cold stuff. There were several short spells where that extra underlayer felt good when the wind was chilly and blowing out of the Northern Regions.

But for winter? It wasn’t much of one.

Except for the triple back to back to back bouts of Upper Respiratory junk that hit us like sledge hammers.

It’s not unusual to have a mild winter like we’ve had this time around. It is, however, extremely unusual for us to find ourselves traipsing back and forth to Urgent Care. Oh. And the deal with the injured Peroneal Nerve that has made a significant … hopefully temporary - going on three months now and still hobbling and limping … alteration in this important thing called Bi-Pedal Locomotion.

It’s great to see things turning green. I was thinking that we were having a False Spring but it sure looks like an Early Spring in the making.

It was the Black Willows that started greening up first. The first leaves of the Red Maples are popping red color as the leaves emerge before turning green. Some of the wild huckleberries are still blooming. Some of them, especially where they get a lot of sun, are completely leaved out. There’s more than enough tree pollen causing a lot of sneezing, wheezing, and cussing. Tree pollen. The downside to Spring breaking loose.

We are not completely done with the cool stuff that filters down before dissipating. A light frost shone on roof tops this morning. There could be a couple more of those before the middle of April.

If we were holding ourselves to a set schedule to get some needed projects finished, and others started, we would be several months behind schedule. Between these winter bouts of URI, and learning to get around on a foot that doesn’t receive instructions from the brain properly, pushing any kind of self-imposed schedule in and around the cabin really hasn’t been practical. It’s been enough to manage and maintain our 4-day commute finishing up what we’ve been doing in the employment department. Those LONG days are soon to be wrapped up and stored away in the historical section of the David and Shirli life-library.

I started tilling the new garden spot a week after that first bout with the URI thing. (It was during that bout that I rolled my ankle and did the nerve damage.) I must have looked something like Chester Goode (Dennis Weaver) on the early episodes of Gunsmoke wrestling that tiller around. We have three rows of potatoes planted in the new ground and are waiting on getting closer to late March and early April to plant some other things that a possible frost would make a mess of.

Just below the rows of potatoes are some thornless blackberry plants that we salvaged from our other place.

We also, somewhere in experiencing our contrary winter mix, managed to form and dig what will eventually become a raised garden bed in front of the cabin. We’ll start planting it like it is, keep adding carbon rich soil building material in a lasagna fashion to it as we go, and gradually grow a nice bed of soil.

Moving to a new area is an interesting proposition, especially when it is a small community. New faces stand out in small communities where everybody knows everybody from way back there. Small communities can tend toward being clannish and closed. We’ve not found folks to be rude, unfriendly, snobbish, or stuck-up. Curious and careful? Yes. And rightly so. We respect that. It is, after all, a crazy world we live in these days and it seems the craziness is only getting crazier. The thing about a small community like this is that you either came here by birth, married into the community, or (like us) chose to leave the hustle and bustle behind and moved here for the solitude and simplicity.

It’s all good.

Locals aren’t in a hurry to get to know us.

We aren’t in a hurry to get to know the locals.

We consider it a mutual respect thing.

We didn’t move here to try to persuade anyone to our way of thinking. That’s the quickest way, in a small community, to shoot yourself in both feet. And we’re too dang old and set in our ways for anyone with a grain of sense to bother with wasting their time trying to persuade us to their way of thinking.