Wednesday, August 23, 2006

An unconventional life

Have you ever dreamed of living unconventionally? For me, since I was a kid I dreamed of living off in the mountains somewhere in a log cabin. I would plant a big garden, my husband would hunt game for meat, we would fish. I would wear my hair long and live in flannel shirts, jeans and hiking boots (or Birkenstocks). We would live somewhere where it doesn’t get hot, where the snow piled us in and forced us to light our big river rock fireplace each morning and drink hot tea or cocoa all day. I would do pottery, or draw. I see this place in my mind. Sometimes we run a bed and breakfast with a six little cabins we rent out. Sometimes it is just us.

An unconventional life is about as far from what we live right now as you can get. We live in a neighborhood where the houses are six feet from each other, our neighbor’s house looks an amazing amount like our own, even though we see the subtle differences (they have four bedrooms and we have three). A kid (second on its way) and a dog, two cars (one an SUV), a mortgage, and more home improvement projects on the “to do” list than we know what to do with. We live a very good, happy life with goals, to own a vacation piece of property (hopefully a cabin in the mountains), to buy a boat, to buy or build our dream house in a few years. Some pipe dreams, some may come to pass.

But where does this place I see in my mind fit in?

This morning I was flipping through my Sunset magazine (my favorite magazine) and came across an article about a young couple who bought a dilapidated cabin in Juneau and renovated it. They boat in to their house. Their young daughter rides her tricycle on the large patio they built. I read this article with a twinge of jealousy.

My uncle has just recently retired and he and my aunt moved to Sitka in June. They bought a house on the edge of town where my aunt dreams of planting roses and my uncle fishes all day. My other uncle bought a cabin in the mountains when he was in his 30’s to be away from civilization… and well, he should be. We all prefer he stay up there for our sanity and his safety and others safety as well. I have a cousin who just located us last year (strange, long story… my maternal grandfather’s granddaughter from his first marriage – for family, Jack’s daughter) who is doing the backwoods life with three trips into civilization a year. This is the extreme… I don’t think I want to live that way. But I see this trend in my family and wonder if it is genetic. A longing for the wild, for wilderness and a sense of solitude. What is it that makes us desire the remoteness, the need to commune with nature?

My husband has it too. AB maybe even more than I sometimes. We look for houses and he talks about buying 1-2 acres just so our neighbors aren’t breathing down our necks, while I cringe at the thought of maintaining 1-2 acres in this region where tumbleweeds rule.

How do we get to the point in our lives that we can live out this dream, before we are too old to enjoy it?

What is your dream life like?

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