There's No Place Like Home

Once my husband and I decided we had to move we began the process of fixing our house up for sale and looking for our next one. This was a huge undertaking. We chose to paint the exterior of our house by ourselves and spent an entire summer climbing ladders to finish the job. Our suburban home is a trendy split level with a walkout basement making 3 of the 4 sides very high. I got over my fear of being on the ladder quickly but to this day when I look up at the house I’m shocked I ever talked myself into doing it. We fixed siding, replaced appliances, cleaned carpets, and painted the interior, all while keeping our 2 children occupied. The thing is that getting our home ready to sell didn’t mean there was one ready for us to buy.

We looked at several different homes, mostly in rural Kansas. We visited several small towns, drove hundreds of miles of highways and other roads that are definitely not highways. We checked out little manufactured homes plopped down on large acreages, beautiful old farmhouses, bungalows, and one-of-a-kind houses that seemed more like mazes than homes. We daydreamed about chickens and goats, barns and bonfires. A couple these homes really spoke to us.

One was an old farmhouse that someone began renovating but left unfinished. It was a bizarre mix of old and new with some questionable additions that I couldn’t wrap my head around. Why would someone build a huge living room onto an old house but not fix the very shaky foundation? Why are there so many ceiling fans? Why the very expensive wood floor in the kitchen when there are obvious leaks in the ceiling that need attention first? I was willing tackle it though. I wanted to. I wanted the wrap-around porch and crumbling silo, and the acreage surrounded by farmland. After a little time the price on the house suddenly dropped surprisingly low and we put a bid in on it immediately. Our bid was accepted but within a few days we discovered an issue with the well that our bank declared was a deal-breaker. We walked away, sad, but only for a short while. Change happens even when you think your life just got put on hold.

When I found out I was pregnant with our third baby we were surprised. All of my ambition for moving disappeared as I saw a future household in boxes and transitional living. We took our house off the market for the holiday season and regrouped, deciding if we couldn’t sell it quickly after the holidays then we would just wait until after the baby was born. The stress during this time wore me down and suddenly my dreams of living in the country seemed insignificant compared to my dreams of bringing my new baby home to an established house. But we kept looking for a new home anyways.

The last house we gave a piece of our hearts to was a two-story box painted robin’s egg blue. No covered porch. Nothing outside to make it exceptional or architecturally interesting, but it was genuine. It was surrounded by miles of grassland and fields, with no windbreaks other than a couple ancient trees, but walk inside and there were wood floors, and a beautiful wood stove, a happy dining room, and a single bathroom that spoke to an era when one bathroom was a luxury most folks longed for. We walked the land around it and character crept out of the seemingly barren landscape. My daughter ran into a dried up pond bed and found shells that are still in her fish aquarium. We could see ourselves planting an orchard and discussed how we could make the small house fit our growing family. And the price was right! It was a very good deal because it was so far away. Too far away. We left the house realizing that we needed more than a cute house and some land. We needed a place that captured not only our imaginations but our loyalty. The houses we visited were special but they left a hollowness in me that I couldn’t define or explain. I convinced my husband that we should take our house off the market and wait.  And it’s a good thing we did.

Kissing the Suburbs Goodbye

We are embarking on a new adventure. It’s the same adventure many of our friends long for and many of our peers across the country have also joined. We are returning to the soil, to the farm, and saying goodbye to the suburbs. It seems to be a phenomena with my generation (those misplaced children of the 80s). Raising kids in a place and time where the safety and quality of our food is in question, and the excesses of rampant consumerism have left many of us feeling sick to our stomachs, and our bank accounts, certainly must be part of it. All I can speak to is why my family is longing for this change. First is the problem with the suburbs.

As I type this I am sitting in the suburbs. My parents refer to this house as being “in the city,” but it really isn’t. It is in the desert that is life between the country and the city. As a youth I longed for this life, but I didn’t really understand it. I’m a true farm kid from an independent family dairy farm my grandparents began back in the 1950s. As a rural kid, I had no idea how unique this type of upbringing was becoming, and I certainly didn’t fully appreciate it. The city seemed like a great escape from the monotony of the farm. I daydreamed about being able to walk somewhere other than my grandma’s house, or to be within a few minutes drive of everything culture had to offer.

The suburbs seemed promising. A compromise between the “dangers” of urban life but still with the convenience of the city. As I sit here I can now say this did not prove true to me. I could complain about our house itself, a poorly designed copy of every other house in the suburbs, but I believe I could make any house work. It's not the house, it's the location. The suburbs are not neighborhoods with conveniently located grocery stores and shopping. I can’t walk anywhere. There are no bike paths or neighborhood cafes. There is no sense of culture or neighborhood identity. The suburbs are miles of residential pockets that still require a decent drive to get anywhere. I thought living outside the city would provide some privacy, but it doesn’t. You’re still stuck between houses full of people, just as you are in a row of houses in the heart of the city. I also thought the suburbs would at least give me a yard to landscape and room for my children to play, but my yard is too small to fully utilize as a garden and the lack of privacy in our yard makes it hard to fully enjoy being outside. I’ve had 7 years to realize this. 

Over the past few years this reality of the "suburban desert" has closed in on us, in no small part to our growing desire to cut expenses, cut our carbon footprint, and get away from my neighbor's crazy dogs! This was what drove home to my husband and I that we had to choose between the rich culture of actually living in the city and having a real neighborhood with shops in walkable distance that makes the lack of privacy worth it, or to do the opposite and move away from our metropolitan altogether and commit to a long commute in exchange for privacy and a chance at attempting a more sustainable lifestyle. Choosing between these two options was easy once we began to explore rural homesteads. Standing out in a field in the open spaces of the Midwest watching my daughter pick up fossils in a dried up pond bed made it clear to me. I need to go home.