Of Lavender & Longing: Fantasies of a Would-Be Homesteader

Blame it on lavender jelly.

About six months ago, I started research on Homesteading, also known as the back-to-the-land movement. In the 60s and 70s, there was a huge surge in Americans desiring a migration from the concrete chaos of urban life to the simpler, self-sustaining existence of the country. It appealed primarily to hippies, disillusioned with the materialism and capitalism of big city life, but also to free-thinking and open-minded professional urbanites seeking a quieter, less encumbered reality.

John and I fall somewhere in between these two types of people. While we are certainly members of the workaday world, collecting our paychecks and attempting to get by in the most costly city in the country, we are also unquestionably hippieish. However, we are less "classic" hippie and more "postmodern" hippie. For example: we bathe, rarely go barefoot, and do not make hemp jewelry or psychedelic T-shirts. We are not the stereotypical hippies of forty years ago, but the contemporary hippies of today, embracing the philosophies and tenets of the hippie life while eschewing the physical manifestation of the traditional. To put it simply, we think like hippies but do not look like them.

Scott and Helen Nearing were two pioneers of the modern Homesteading movement. Before it reached its zenith -- indeed, long before anyone even knew what it was -- The Nearings were living the sustainable country life and educating the public about it. They wrote two now-classic books, "Living the Good Life" in 1954 and "Continuing the Good Life" in 1979. The couple devoted themselves to their teachings and their land, starting out in Vermont and eventually ending up in Maine.

Homesteading can be defined as the acts undertaken by a person or persons seeking a self-sufficient lifestyle, a "living off the land', if you will. Homesteaders usually own their own farms, which don't typically consist of hundreds of acres, but rather a few acres of manageable land. They grow their own food, work their own fields, and tread lightly upon the earth. Some are fortunate enough to have careers directly correlated to their homesteads: selling their produce at farmer's markets or to local grocery stores, making and marketing their own candles, soaps, or handiwork, or writing and educating the world on how to live the good life.

I can't even begin to tell you how attractive this whole concept is to me. I've lived in Boston for three years now, and with each passing day, the desire for a simpler life makes itself more and more plain. But heading back to the land is not a simple task; I daresay it's downright impossible in contemporary America. It requires an exhausting trudge upriver while the water is flowing downriver. We live in a society that values money and prestige and physical evidence of those "values". Homesteading requires the polar opposite: it is a simplifying, a great letting-go of the material and the monetary in the name of something bigger and more fulfilling.

But the bitter truth is that homesteading demands money just as every other facet of modern life demands it. Mortgages, utilities, insurances, vehicles, and credit card bills are not suddenly nonexistent because you switch the focus of your life and go against the grain.

And this is the crux of the matter for me. To even get started and take some initial small steps toward self-sufficiency, money is a necessity. Though John and I make decent money at our current jobs, we barely squeak by, living where we do. The prospect of saving money, any money at all, is an unreachable fantasy. To resettle our lives in the country, we would need a vehicle or vehicles, a down payment for a house, and the assurance that we would be able to make enough money to pay for everything.

There's also the rather obvious dilemma that neither of us are farmers. While I did grow up in Iowa, we always lived in town. I couldn't tell you the difference between a tractor, a combine, and a seed bell if my life depended on it. John has a much better grasp of how to plant and grow things, but he is by no means an expert in the field. It's frustrating that there is not a class called "Farming 101".

So as quickly as I began my research, I abandoned it as nothing more than a daydream, an unattainable fantasy that the great majority of us can never come close to. But then last week, I found a recipe for lavender jelly on a homesteading blog. It was just a recipe, explaining how to make jelly from freshly-collected lavender blossoms. For reasons unknown, this simple thing has reignited my desire to be a homesteader, with a passion bordering on infatuation. I am desperate to make this happen.

This is what I want. I want an old farmhouse on a few acres of land. I want to wake with the sun. I want to wake refreshed. I want to wake. I want to stop shaving and plucking and caring about how I look and smell. I want to tend to the land as the first flurries of flaxen morning crown the hills. I want to sing softly to myself while I plant, harvest, reap, sow. I want the wind to carry my song through the open windows of the room where John lay sleeping. I want to run through fields with the dogs. I want room to create plants and poetry. I want the courage to share my work with the world. I want to be a working writer. I want to be a working farmer. I want to be a homesteader. I want my life and my work to be one entity. I want to hawk my writing to publishers. I want to hawk our bounty at farmers’ markets. I want no discrepancy between who I am when I am at work and who I am when I am at home. I want to answer to no one. I want to be done with corporate bullshit, petty bureaucracies, ridiculous hierarchies. I want to work for nature and for art.

I want to be carried on the tide of the day, meeting the demands of the earth and the demands of the Muse. I want to take a nap in the afternoons, like they do in more civilized countries. I want to make my husband grand dinners eaten by candlelight. I want us to read e.e. cummings to each other, with the cats in our laps, by the beacon of the fireplace: a beacon leading us home, to one another, to the bed we share that is clogged with so much love. I want to fall asleep in John's arms to the lull of his snoring, the rhythm of his heart, the warmth of his belly. I want to look out the window just before sleep finds me, at the great round silver moon and the sky pearled with a million stars, and think to myself:

Yes. This is it.