Bump in the Country Road

In the middle of every difficulty lies opportunity.

Albert Einstein

Nothing can ever just go smoothly can it? Of course not, and our situation is no exception. Unfortunately for us, Charlie lost his contract job today. So that is one less thing to worry about because now it has already happened. Of course that introduces a whole host of new worries.

We had plenty of warning that this might be coming, so we tried to do some decision making before hand, but follow through is not so easy. We decided that it would be better for us to be looking for a job from the East Coast because it seems there are a lot more jobs out there. That said, the competition for jobs is quite a bit stiffer these days. It is very risky to be signing a lease knowing full well that we can only cover it for a few months. The only ray of light here is that the realtors found tenants for this house, so at least I don’t have to worry about covering the mortgage for this house as well as paying rent, small miracles.

So the plan right now is that we are moving to NJ even though we now have no job there. This is highly risky, but we are going to do it anyway and hope for the best. There are other considerations to take into account, chief among them is that we will be close to family, there seem to be more jobs available in the East, and this farm is nicely located between Philadelphia and New York City.

We will be making a few changes to our immediate plans due to this turn of events. For one thing, we will be putting off any large livestock purchases. (We had really wanted a cow.) We also will not be using a professional mover, and lastly we will be going on a leisurely drive across the country vs. a mad dash. I will keep the blog updated, so you all know what’s going on. Keep your fingers crossed for us!

Mother's Day 2009

Aren’t you just curious to see how it will all play out?

Sylar to Noah in Heroes Volume 3, Episode 3 One of Us, One of Them

It is appropriate to start this blog on mother’s day even though we have not moved to the farm just yet. My reasons for wanting to go there in the first place is all wrapped up in motherhood, my own motherhood and that of my mother, her mother and my father’s mother. For the record, my own mother and father were not raised in rural areas, their parents, however, were. My Irish grandparents and my Slovak grandparents came from farming areas. I have been to the site where my Irish grandmother’s house once stood in Meenbane, County Donegal, Ireland (pictured to the right), and even today, it is considered out in the sticks. I have not been to the town where my Slovak grandmother grew up, Sedlice, Slovakia, but I have found it on Google Earth and it too, is a very rural area, even today (pictured below). So even though neither of us has recent rural roots, if you go back but one generation, you find farmers on all sides, go back another generation, even more farmers. So it is there, in the genetics, you just have to go looking for it is all.

Both Charlie and I have parents that clearly remember the great depression. For most of my life I considered having older parents to be something of a disadvantage. While other couples were dropping their kids off with the grandparents so they could get away for the weekend, our children’s grandparents—on both sides of the family—were way too old to be caring for small children. My husband and I are both on the younger end of our large Catholic families; we were “late in life” babies for our mothers.

However, as the recent financial crisis wears on, one thing I noticed about Charlie and I was that we seemed to instinctively deal with it in a different manner than other people around us that were our age. It turns out that in this economic climate in which we find ourselves, being the late in life child of a depression baby is a tremendous gift.

This is not to say that we are on any better financial footing than anyone else, or that we somehow knew how to avert disaster. Like everyone else, we are over-mortgaged, under water and lost a big chunk of our savings and then lost our jobs. We have found though, that by imitating our parents before us, we did know how to live on significantly less money, and we took steps to live on less almost without thought. Bread began being baked at home. Charlie began doing yard work and home projects himself. Laundry began drying outside. Eating out was scaled way back. Cash became king. The garden became more than a hobby. We began bartering with and buying from neighbors for things like oranges and eggs. Birthday cakes and pizzas were baked at home. We began scouring stores for sales on staples (did you know that flour almost never goes on sale?) Craigslist became our new shopping mall and our storefront.

As I write this post, the economic depression of my generation shows no sign of letting up. I know scores of people out of work. In this very family we had a solid 4 months with no income of any kind. I feel blessed that Charlie was able to find a job after so many months of unemployment, but the job he has is very insecure contract work. Also as I write, a pandemic flu is festering in the population.

All of which brings me to the farm. A farm is something Charlie and I have talked about and dreamed about for years. We have wanted to “drop out,” to use a 60’s turn of phrase, for a long time. We each had different reasons for this, but we came to the same conclusion. This happens a lot with Charlie and I; we arrive at the same intellectual point even though we have wildly divergent paths to get there. We want to grow our own vegetables, raise our own meat animals and just generally live a totally different kind of life. For Charlie this means opting out of what he calls the Obama-Economy, for me it means dropping out of the formal economy and dropping into the informal economy. For both of us it means learning about a more self-sufficient and meaningful way of life that might serve us better if things don’t improve with the economy.

Either way you look at, we want to ease into a new life where we spend more time with our children, less time at our desks (although at least one of us will have to work in the formal/Obama economy for a while). We will know exactly where our food comes from, not wonder exactly how much high fructose corn syrup we are ingesting without realizing it. We will know our eggs come from chickens that lived in humane conditions. Our beef and milk will come from a cow that ate the grass in our field, or that of a neighbor. If the flu becomes a full-on pandemic, we won’t be living in a high population density area, and if a long emergency really happens, we’ll have our storage food and whatever we can put up from this year’s harvest to help us get by.

If there is any fear I have for my generation and the generations immediately after mine, it is that we are so grossly unprepared should this turn into the second great depression, should the swine flu turn out to be a repeat of the Spanish flu pandemic. Few people in my generation know anyone who remembers the great depression. In honor of our depression-baby parents, I want us to be at least a little bit prepared; I want us to have some food stored; I want us to know something about self-sufficiency, conservation of things and money. We have been as spoiled as everyone else in our generation. We have never worried about where our next meal was coming from. But at least we are intimately familiar with people who have had this experience, and I would like to believe it is what we learned from our parents that brings us here now. Finally I would like to pass on to my children the survival skills that might come in handy, should a crisis situation arise in their generation. I want to pass on the knowledge our parents gave to us about survival, so that they might weather their storms just a little bit more securely.

I will be blogging about our experiences over the next year as we move from our suburban Phoenix housing subdivision to an 18 acre farm we rented in a rural section of New Jersey. This move has been in the works since just before Easter and as moving day (May 21) draws near, I find that bringing forth this dream of living on the farm has been about as painful as the birth of a child. It is emotionally draining on everyone in the family. We are torn apart because Charlie (who is Daddy to 5 people in this house) is not with us. He is already in New Jersey. It is frightening for the kids to envision this big change to a new life in a new climate, with a “new” extended family they don’t know very well, on a farm that they even imagine, in a house that was under construction before George Washington even became president. The uncertainty associated with Charlie’s job and the difficulty we’ve had in actually finding a farm to rent (not to mention single parenting 5 anxious children) have caused me to become so stressed that I have felt physically sick for the last two weeks. However, now that the farm has been located and details between Charlie and the owner have been hammered out, my stomach has settled at least a little bit and I’m not gritting my teeth to the point of a headache.

I hope you will enjoy reading this blog over the next year, and I hope that it works out for us and that it will be the experience of a lifetime for our thus-far-suburban-raised children. Come along with us for the journey.