Fumbling Toward A Simpler Life

I've been in a funk lately. Not so much a gardening funk, because I'm keeping up with the gardening, but a life funk. I know I've made good (not great) strides towards leading a more sustainable and eco-friendly life.  I work from home, drive very little (usually to the grocery store), and when I do it's in my Prius.  I'm regularly baking bread and cooking with local and/or organic products, composting our vegetable scraps, coffee grounds, egg shells, and other compostables, recycling whatever our city will take, using rain barrels to water the garden, and always looking for ways to simplify our life.  But I realize, too, there's lots more I want to do, and I think it's my perpetual impatience that has me in this funk.

I truly want to be living on our family property in Tennessee.  It's definitely a doable venture.  My mother-in-law has lived on the property for years. And she's done it as a single woman, living on 176 acres in a cabin, for the most part alone.  She definitely has friends that help her, and that she in turn helps, but, in the grand scheme of things, she's done it alone.  She has what she calls a "garden" every year - most of us urbanites would probably call it a small farm, though last year she did cut back on size a bit.  Gone are the days where she and her friend Herman plant 5 acres of anything.  And she stopped having wood chopped for her pot belly stove a couple 2 or 3 years ago, relying totally on propane, but she's still able to fill up 2 large freezers with produce and meat every year to feed herself.  The meat often times comes in the form of deer that are on the property.  She allows 1 or 2 people to hunt there every season and in return they supply her with deer meat.

So I know there's no reason that we can't do it.  We just have to be able to get past our obstacles of paying off our bills, which we work on diligently and they are going down, being able to provide ourselves with health insurance, which I have to have because of chronic illness, and being able to sell our house here at least at a break-even point, which in south Florida's current real estate market is impossible, and we were even lucky enough to have purchased before the prices went sky high and crashed.

I don't see it happening for a few years yet, but while we wait and prepare, there's so much more we can do here in our urban dwelling. We can maximize our garden space. Watch out front yard, your grass is getting ready to disappear. We can de-clutter our home, which should be a huge step in de-cluttering our lives. And there's certainly a host of eco-friendly projects we can take on here in the house that will reduce our carbon footprint and our bills at the same time.

Tennessee, here we come.