April 27, 2003

• Living on the Hill ~

  
  

  Writing on Xanga is unlike writing anywhere else.  I've been doing this for almost two years, but I realized yesterday that very few of the people who read my site these days have been reading for more than a few months.  It seems that in the ebb and flow of Xanga, a complete change of guard has taken place without my notice.  So I hope you will forgive me if you've read these details before, but I'd like to take this morning to introduce myself. 

  
  

  Hi, I'm Terri.  I live on a hill in Southern Indiana. 

  
  

  

  
  

  When my husband's company transferred us to this area, we had a chance to decide whether we would continue to live in urban enrivons or try life in the country.  At the time our children were 2 and 4.  I worried about the dangers and the pace of life in the city.  I wanted them to grow up in a place where they had room to run and play, where they could lie on their back and watch the clouds or chase a toad for hundreds of yards without worrying about property lines, traffic, or even whether there would be a toad to chase. 

  
  

  Even more, I wanted a change in our family lifestyle.  For several years, I'd become increasingly discontent with the compromises necessary for urban or suburban life.  The unavoidable complexity that attached to the conveniences of nearby stores and entertainment began to outweigh the benefit in my mind.  I saw my husband trapped as a wage slave to a corporation with no compunction about moving people like game pieces and then laying them off when their part was finished.  I wondered what would happen to us if that should occur.  How would we live if he lost his job? 

  
  

  So we set out to find a place where we could put an inexpensive home, surrounded by land we could learn to work in a search for some measure of independence.  Soon after we arrived on the hill, I purchased goats.  From the goats we got milk, cheese and meat.  My husband raised rabbits for meat and we learned that rabbits are the single best source of garden fertilizer on the face of the earth.  We were on our way to escape from the system.

  
  

  We were seriously derailed in our mission about two years ago.  My parents live just about 700 miles away in Southern Arkansas.  They had modified their home to accommodate the care of my grandmothers.  None of the four of them are in good health.  In the past 2 years all four of them have suffered stroke with varying degrees of negative outcome.  It became apparent that they needed help.  Of course, none of them wanted to be in any kind of assisted living facility, who could blame them?  They wanted the same thing I wanted, independence.  We decided that it was more important to make ourselves available to support them than it was to continue our farming experiment.  I sold my goats so that I would be available to travel when need arose and to stay with my parents until the crisis passed.

  
  

  You have to understand that by this time, the goats had become far more than livestock.  They were the symbol of our goals.  They were the key to making it all work. 

  
  

  Since I sold the goats in August of 2001, I've spent literally months at a time in Arkansas.  We nursed my Granny while she lay incapacitated for the last four months of her life.  Since then a continuing succession of illness, and strokes have plagued my parents and I've made that trip to Malvern so many times that the neighbors have assigned me a place in the community. 

  
  

  Living on the hill has not turned into the life I planned or hoped for when we moved here.  One year a fox ate all my chickens.  Another year, I didn't realize that I should clip the wings of my ducks and they all flew south for the winter.  (Then never came back.)  In the area to the left of the foreground in the photo above, we house deer, wild turkeys, rabbits, and other critters.  I've had my goldfish eaten by a raccoon.  The cat food resulted in a fat happy possum until I realized and moved it indoors.  Last year, long weeks of rain followed by equally long weeks of drought destroyed the garden. 

  
  

  Five years ago last week, we broke ground to build our home.  When I review the five year plan we devised at that time, I laugh.  I still fret that Tim is trapped in a job that sucks away his time and energy from our family.  I still think that simpler living is a worthy goal.  My new five year plan is to find a publisher for one of the several books I've been working on and to build a front porch for the house.  And to finish the sidewalk. 

  
  

  

  • 8:37 am
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