If we were to do it all over again, I’m not sure we would have decided to buy our house. I mean, we love it… but it’s missing a few key components that would be helpful to have in our lives. Southern sun exposure and a fireplace being two of the wanted fixtures we’d like to make use of in our day-to-day lives. We have neither.
Yet it’s our home… fully meshed and evocative of our personalities and values. I’m okay with the fact that we have more books about food, cooking, gardening and soil on our bookshelves than are needed between any pair.
We are farmers of a different breed, perhaps better referred to as city dwelling intensive (obsessive?) gardeners than farmers. Right now, I’m daydreaming about our hugelkultur bed. In it’s first season as a squash bed it withstood a week of 100^ temperatures without a blink. Looking ahead to the winter and the snow that will inevitably fall, I think of the water molecules seeping into the earth to charge the soil and contribute to the decay of the buried wood. We’ll most likely plant another unreasonably large squash bed for what will be our third season of growing vegetables for more than the two of us.
You see, we have a home in a place I like to refer to as an agriculturally permissive city. Slow to embrace development, our city wrote height and density limitations in the city charter, thus pushing expansion-minded companies seeking to build high-rises to another place and retain much of its character and independence even on the cusp of an urban metropolis.
Even in our little oasis, it is unfortunate that so much of our city creation has centered on the car. With a little foresight we would have put multi-nodal transportation in place from the start instead of retrofitting the existing car-sized infrastructure to accommodate pedestrians, cyclists and strollers.
We have one planet on which to survive. We require air, water and land to live. It only makes natural sense to tend it carefully if only for the sole reason of self-preservation. We are nothing without our home.
