Summer Towels

One of the time honored traditions of living in the country is the ability to hang your wet stuff out to dry without worrying about the homeowners association throwing a fit and issuing a citation.

Our houses are generally smaller out here.  We don't have the room inside our houses to hide every bit of evidence of our daily living - like vegetable gardens, wet laundry, piles of mulch, all the kids' toys, the occasional dead mower or herd of dead cars.   Sometimes, folks let it all hang out.  We're not always thrilled, but we do believe in minding our own business and letting them mind theirs.

In Michigan this summer, some poor woman was being threatened with jail for building raised garden beds in her front yard and planting vegetables.   It's not just against the homeowners association rules, it's against the law.  Let me make this clear:   In Oak Park, Michigan, it is illegal to plant vegetables in your front yard because....it's unsightly.  Growing your own food is considered unsightly. 

Suffice it to say that out here we feel differently.   We know where our food comes from and like to have it convenient to the house.   We save energy by drying our laundry outside in the free fresh air.  We keep that old mower for parts.  It's better to recycle parts from it than to dump it and buy new.  When the easy parts are all stripped, we'll sell the carcass for a few bucks to old John Smith down the way and he'll finish stripping the good parts out of it and then sell the rest of it to the scrap metal place for food money - the man is destitute, but not a beggar.

No one around here is going to be harassed for showing evidence of what it takes to live life.

We hang our towels to dry on the front porch railing.    We have giant piles of sand and gravel and mulch visible all the time.   You can see our vegetables from the street.  

Our neighbor had 9 trucks parked on the other side of his barn next to the road to use for parts.  

Another neighbor has two spare mobile homes parked on his place that he uses for parts - and a chicken coop.  

Another neighbor has a permanent yard sale set up. 

Another neighbor has assorted large machinery parked by the road.   His goats climb on it and sleep under it.  

Another neighbor collects old bikes and hand plows and uses them to decorate his chain link fence.  

Another neighbor's place is in a constant state of construction, with piles of lumber and shingles and debris everywhere - for the last 10 years.  

None of that matters to us.   We figure it's none of our business.

Some of our neighbors even have homes that look like they came right out of Country Living magazine.   But we don't hold it against them.   We figure that's none of our business, too.

Moving to the Country - more things to think about

 A friend of mine is contemplating a move to the country and asked me about the pros and cons.   So I sat down and made a list – in no particular order.  Forgive me if some of this seems obvious.   In the end, it’s not really about pros and cons, but about how much of country reality can you tolerate.   We and our neighbors tolerate this stuff pretty well – we just wish there were more hours in the day to get everything done.

Socially Acceptable

On my way to deciding to move to the country, I slowly began to do 'country' things at my city home.  I use the word city here only as a comparison to the rural home I live in now.   Our nearest city is a university town, which ensures a lively mixture of people from diverse backgrounds and with diverse expectations and assumptions of what life is all about.   These expectations and assumptions lent great interest to our gradual transition to the country. 

Our first house in the city was on the not-very-fashionable, really-run-down-falling-apart west side.  You know, the area of the city where people pause and say, "Oh, Walker St.  Now where IS that?  Oh, yes, the WEST side."  Like we speak another language on the west side.  Our neighborhood was old and many of the people there grew up in the same area and remember when our house was built, in the 1920s during the depression.  While remodeling and ripping out wall plaster, we found that they had used what looked like horse hair in the plaster to help it go farther.  The insulation in the oldest parts of the house was either wool or cotton; it was black with years of dust and the mice had loved whatever it was.  The house had no foundation, but was built up on old limestone piers and blocks.  My husband said some of them had been carved on and looked like old used tombstones.  Since the crawlspace was about eighteen inches high, I took his word for it.  Our closest neighbor had lived right down the street when she was a child and remembered when our house had been one large square with four rooms, one room to a corner, each with a connecting door to the adjacent rooms.  She had come to play with the children living in our house and they used to run circles in the house from one room to the next, around and around until they were banished outdoors. 

Role Models

Why did I really really want to move to the country?  It was time for a change.

The idea to choose the kind of life that would allow me to avoid the pretentious rat race that exists in most cities is not a new one.  Everyone who has ever packed their bags and headed for parts less populated has more or less had the same idea.  I first started thinking about this type of life choice for myself when I picked up a copy of Cross Creek, by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. [Links at the bottom of the page]  She wrote about her decision to buy, sight unseen, an orange grove in central Florida during the late 1920s.  The book is a long description of the changes that occur in her philosophy of life as a result of her decision to trade her upper-class New York lifestyle for the rigors of tending an orange grove scraping out a living in the wilds of Florida to give herself a chance to become the writer she has always wanted to be.  It is clear throughout the book that her new life is very difficult and that her troubles didn't magically go away just because she moved to the country.  However, it is also clear throughout the book that the experience allowed her to identify and develop untapped abilities and grow in unexpected ways, mostly as a result of having to depend on herself and her own judgment to survive.  I admired that.

I love books about the rural south and find myself rereading them often.  I have worn out a couple of copies of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, which is also about people who, due in part to the Great Depression and in part to personal philosophy and a regard for the hardships of others, have chosen a less pretentious, simpler way of life.  A Place Called Sweet Apple was written by a woman (Celestine Sibley) who also chose to escape the rat race and find a few quiet acres on which to plant a garden and listen to and nurture her inner self.