Drought!

I know I live in the Adirondacks, but - man, this summer has been HOT!
Air conditioning?! In the mountains??! No way. The mountains ARE our air conditioning.
But not when it's over 90 for weeks on end. Even 6 million acres of trees can't mitigate that entirely.

As I write I'm spoiled with the sounds of my dishwasher running. It's the first time this week. I decided to sacrifice my shower in return for not having to touch raw chicken juice. Our 10-foot, hand dug well, although generally reliable, is not to be trusted right now that it's less than half full.

As we move into a period of climate behavior unknown in human history, I need to be aware of ways to deal with weather extremes: flooding, freezing, overheating, and drought. And I need to stop taking our water resources for granted. This is not just a regional concern, either - California wildfires, worsened by drought, are affecting New York. Our brothers and sisters in Cape Town live with Day Zero looming over them. And what about Nestle?! There is responsibility everywhere for everyone to be good stewards, to take care of and not misuse the natural resources in their reach. 

Besides doing a rain dance outside every night after work, and religiously checking the weather radar, I've devised a few ways we can save water and hopefully keep our well from running dry.

1. Military showers

   It is just as regimented as it sounds. Rinse yourself fully, then turn the water off. Soap up, then rinse off.

2. Washcloth showers

  A sink, full of hot water. A washcloth. A squirt of soap. Easy peasy. One per person, please.

3. Wear those clothes twice!

   Or three times. I don't know anyone who has ever complained about less laundry!

4. Wash your own dishes...

   Half a sink of water (or less) will do. Wash separately - and last - any dishes or utensils that touched raw meat.

5. And don't rinse.

   Europeans don't rinse their dishes. Time to take a page out of their play book!

6. Paper plates

   Not those fancy sturdy ones - I'm talking the old-school food-will-fall-through-if-I-don't-eat-fast-enough ones. Throw 'em in the compost when you're done.

7. One pot meals

   As if you had to convince me.

8. Barbeque

   Because you needed another reason to use the barbeque this summer!

9. Only flush for #2

   It's not pretty, so make sure you close the lid so you don't have to look at it! Repeat after me: "it's better than a dry well...".

10. Wash your hair once a week

   This is not just a drought response - this is a beauty regiment. We spend serious $$ putting oils back into our hairs, after we spend hours, dollars and water getting them out. My hair stylist told me once a week is enough. The more natural the products you use, the better you and your hair will fare with waiting.

11. Capture rainwater when it's available. 

   I'm looking at some serious integrated systems, but it can be as simple as a barrel under a downspout and a bucket to move it inside when needed. (Just don't drink it or cook with it without proper treatment!)

Looking Toward the Future

I know these methods will help us get through the next month or so, because I'm fortunate to live in a place that usually has a good amount of year-round precipitation. But the future is not so bright for our stressed and changing water cycle in the northeast. I'm researching a greywater recapture system that would help us decrease our water usage on a regular basis. Thanks to Australians on YouTube, there's lots of information out there! It'll be a project, so I'll make sure to post an update if we decide to move ahead.

In the meantime, I have buckets outside waiting for their chance to help replenish our system. I'll be at the laundromat tomorrow, and a friend's house for a much needed head-to-toe washing for myself and the munchkins, who diligently rain danced on the porch with me tonight.

I hear thunder in the distance.

Accomplishments

"What if I never accomplish anything else in my life?"

This is the question that's been ruminating in my head over the past week.

It started after a two-day stretch of sunshine in the merry, merry month of May. I was working outside on the deck while my husband hung out with the kids in the yard. Blue skies lapped the top of the mountains, the trees beginning to bud and give off that bright chartreuse of new spring leaves. I sipped my tea and breathed in the wonders of the beautiful day.

Then it just popped into my head: What if I never accomplish anything else?

What if I just enjoy each day, like today? What if I take my time to breathe in the sunshine, or the rain? What if I work, watch my kids grow up, play with them after work, make dinner, relax, repeat?

What if I never finish my Masters? What if I never get a promotion? What if I don't get us out of debt ahead of schedule? What if I don't organize my paperwork, or clean the house to a sparkle, or keep up with all the laundry, or finish all these things things THINGS I have to do?

It's not about being lazy. It's not about lacking ambition. It's not about never getting anything done.

It's about ceasing to strive for perfection. It's about relaxing my grip and letting go. It's a little bit about living RIGHT NOW. With whatever is going on RIGHT HERE. It's about letting myself be free, and not feeling bad about it.

We've been in our small house for almost a year and a half, and it's irked me almost every day that my life still seems so full of clutter - stuff clutter (yeah sure, it's there) but also thought clutter and time clutter. I still feel scattered, too busy, missing the moments of my children's fleeting childhood.

We downsized our stuff, but we're still working on downsizing our life. Making time for the things that matter means ignoring the things that don't. My biggest problem in the downsizing arena now is feeling comfortable with my life - feeling valuable - even if I never accomplish anything else. I'm a do-er, I'm "task-oriented" so this is not easy for me.

I practiced this past weekend. We made no plans other than hanging out with some friends at their lakehouse, enjoying the sunshine, a random trip to the store to pick up some gardening things. We had fun. I had fun! There wasn't any stress, because there was nothing to do except relax.

This is essentially what I imagine when I think about being retired, and I have decided that I just don't want to wait until then to start enjoying my life.

What v. Who

It's 8 o'clock Friday night. Kids are in bed, and I'm ready to reeeeelax. Couch. Netflix. Snacks. Tea. You know, that kinda thing.

Wait, is that the baby crying?

I quietly ascend the stairs, hoping with each step that my trip is in vain and sleep will come without my assistance.

Not to be. My daughter sees my shadow as a sign to start talking.

"Mom, I thought my hands were dead."

"What? You thought your hands were what?" I think she said, "dead". I have no idea what to do with her three-year-old thoughts sometimes.

"I thought my hands were dead."

"Did you wake up your brother?" I try to ask without judgment, though I have my suspicions based on the fact that he was fully passed out when my husband and I left the sleeping loft only minutes before.

The Children (Photo by Donna O'Mara)

"Yes,"

"Why were you out of bed?"

"I WASn't, Mom!" As one of our friends calls it, a threenager.

"Well, how did you wake him up?" I'm more curious now than anything.

"Probably by clapping."

"Clapping? Why were you clapping?" Again, trying to keep my tone calm and bedtime-like.

"I thought my hands were dead so I was clapping them together."

Oh, my love. My sweet, sweet, darling girl. Your hands are definitely not dead.

"Ok. Your hands aren't dead. But if you're ever worried and you need to check, just shake them like this, instead of clapping." I shake my hands frantically in the dark air like I am trying to get a stuck booger off them and I don't care where it lands.

I hope she can see me. Then again, maybe she could just close her eyes and go to sleep...

I pick up the baby, whose cries have escalated since I came into the room and didn't pick him up within microseconds.

And, within microseconds, he is calm and resting again. I nurse him, and while he's eating the sounds machine turns off. That means it's been 46 minutes since I started putting them to sleep.

That used to drive me NUTS. If bedtime took a minute longer than I thought it should, my ire was up and  almost inconsolable. I had stuff to do, and things to attend to.

This is why I spent the last few years discarding a lot of the What in my life, so I had more time and space and energy for the Who.

The lack of What in my life means we live in this small house, and we don't have thick doors on big rooms for our own purlieus where babies can sleep in peace from the interesting drowsy thoughts of their big sisters. It means I can't watch Netflix when the baby is still awake. This is the truth of a small house.

But now, sitting on the edge of my daughter's bed, I take the opportunity to clasp my daughter's hand, to watch the baby's sweet little sleepy face, to rest for a moment instead of rushing off to whatever it was I used to rush off to. It was so important, I can't even remember what it used to be.

They both fall asleep, hard. There's even a little bit of snoring. I lay him down and cover her up. Sweet peace, at last! 

I slip downstairs thankful for the shift in my life that brought me less stuff, smaller house, and more connected to my (amazing) family.

And, Netflix. 

It's Not About Me, Either

So just the other night I was lamenting how much more work I have to do, and this time on my self - not on my possessions.

Already, thankfully, I have something to share. That even though I'm entering into this time where my attention is focusing inward instead of out, it's not about me at all.

In fact, it's about everything else.

It's about getting off of Facebook, shutting down the computer, and reading a good book.

It's about dusting off my guitar case, and then opening it and letting my fingers recall some of the songs I used to love.

It's about going for a family hike after work.

I have done ALL of these things since my last post. And, it feels wonderful: freeing, stimulating and rejuvenating.

This is what downsizing has given me. It's not less stuff, or a smaller house, or an edgy lifestyle, or material for a blog. It's FREEDOM.

I just have to remember not to forget.

It's Not About Stuff Anymore

So... our 21 days is up! Do you want to know what happened - what really happened?

[Ok, good. I was hoping that you would be okay with knowing the real story, and not some made-up, fancy blogpost aimed at getting attention.]

Because, nothing. Nothing happened.

Well, not much.

I mean, yeah, we found that we didn't need a bunch of stuff that we'd stored in the basement. And we found a few things that we did need: the baby's swing, some shoes, paperwork. We haven't gotten rid of all the other stuff, even though our 21 days is up. Though I do have plans to do another yard sale soon.

But I honestly thought this would be a revelatory experience, with more freedom springing up in our lives like fresh bamboo sprouts in a Japanese forest. But really, it was just living our same ol' life, with less stuff.

So I'm starting to get to the place where this whole small house living experiment is not about the stuff anymore. It's not about the house, or the size of our house, or the amount of stuff we have or don't have anymore, or the number of things we have gotten rid of or anything like that. It's starting to be about something much more personal and sensitive and maybe even private.

Because, the whole point of my husband and I choosing to live this way - giving up our belongings, our personal space, our comfortably full-sized home and our comfort zone - has been to enjoy life more. To live better. To be independent. To experience life more fully and feel alive.

And, even after all we've done to get to this place, I don't always feel too much different than I did when I had a full closet of clothes and overstuffed bookshelves.

So I realize that now is the time that I have to start working on - not my stuff, but - me. I've shaken off some of the weights that kept me living with stress and work. And now there's a lot I need to do internally, to address my thoughts, my beliefs, my habits and my behaviors that hold me back and keep me stuck in a place where I'm stressed and dangerously burdened.

I'm reading Everything That Remains by The Minimalists, and tonight I'm struck by something else Joshua writes. It's not heady, but it has my brain in a tizzy. In chapter 8, he writes that, after an intense process of downsizing his belongings, leaving his corporate job, ditching technology and simplifying his life, he gave up his goals.

As soon as I read that, my brain went, "What?!" because I.
Am.
A.
Task.
Oriented.
Person.

This is how I live. It's how I measure myself. It's how I know I'm successful. It's how I got through school. It's how I finish my work every day. It's how I know I'm having a good day. It's PART of me.

I make lists. Even if it's not on paper, it's in my head: what I want to accomplish for the day, for the morning, for the weekend.

I like numbers. I studied math. I like their reliability. I like to quantify things. I like to compare. If 75% of my list is done, I feel much better about myself than I would if only 50% is done.

But it doesn't bring me any real contentment. If anything, it's momentary, and it lasts only long enough for me to make a new list of things to do or tasks to accomplish the next day. There's never any achieving, there's only doing.

So thanks, Joshua. Thanks a lot. Because I have no idea how to do this. I don't have any idea how I could give up this thing, this way of being, that feels so fundamentally part of myself that I don't even know if I have an identity without it. I don't know to function without goals. I've always constantly asked myself what I want to be, where I want to go, what I want to do, this year, next year, the next five years. It's just what I do.

But I realize it's getting in the way. It keeps me from relaxing and having fun with my family, the thing I keep wanting SO very, very goodly. It keeps me from getting on the floor and building blocks with my daughter. It keeps me from tickling my son's tiny big feet. It keeps me from sitting on the deck with my husband staring into the night sky. I might still be doing those things, but I'm not really there. My mind is elsewhere, thinking about the other things I need to accomplish. Even when those things are dishes. Or paperwork. Or web design. Or blogging. Or whatever.

I don't know where this is going to take me. I don't know how much of this journey I'll be able to share. I only know that I have to try and go there.

I think I am going to have to be quite diligent about this. I mean, I think I actually need to focus my attention on this. In comparison, getting rid of our stuff seemed easy. We were moving to a smaller house, so things just had to go; it was a simple matter of volume. It was like trimming my fingernails: it had to get done, and it was a relief.

But changing the way I think about my own life, and how I function in it, and how I define my success, is surgery.

Keep me in your thoughts, and please share your thoughts, especially if you are also reading Everything That Remains (as I would highly recommend you do and I don't get paid by anyone to say that). You can email me privately here.

Until I'm able to write again, peace and love. Enjoy the life you have!

The (Un)Packing Party

I posted recently (okay - today, actually) about how we rented out our house on airbnb.com for the first time last week, and I thought I might share a little more about what happened when we did.

Sorry, I'm a little excited about this!

Actually, two happenings converged together in the past week to bring me to this place.

The first: airbnb. So our house is small (as you know) and it has only one closet (as you know) and we still have a lot of stuff (as you know). In order to make our house rentable, we basically spent a day doing some last-minute fixing up (like, I painted the ceiling that's been calling my name for 6 months, and John put up the trim around the bathroom window that needed finishing).

Then we spent another day taking all our personal belongings and shoving them (yes, almost literally shoving) into the basement. All the things that would scream out "THIS HOUSE BELONGS TO SOMEONE ELSE! Someone with KIDS! Someone with PAPERWORK! Someone with TOO MUCH STUFF!" to someone trying to spend a nice, relaxing vacation in the Adirondack park.

When we left, I looked around and thought (or did I say it aloud?), "This is exactly what I'd like our house to look like."

Sigh.

Because I thought that only someone else would get to experience that freedom.

But this brings me to the second happening: a few days later, I'm reading Everything That Remains by Joshua Millburn one night when everyone decided to hit the hay earlier than me. I'm reading about Ryan Nicodemus and his extreme introduction to minimalism. He called it a Packing Party (on page 85, to be exact).

It involved packing every. Single. One of his belongings into moving boxes and stuffing them into one room of his home. Covering his furniture, his tv. As if he was moving. But instead of moving, he had 21 days during which he could take out of the boxes only those things which he truly needed. At the end of 21 days, he had to either sell, donate or trash whatever remained.

Wow! That's a heck of a way to move into minimalism.

So it's late, and my brain is processing this stuff I'm reading, and suddenly I realize: that's US! WE are going to have an (Un)Packing Party.

We already did the hard work - moving all our stuff sitting around, collecting dust, driving me nuts. It's already in the basement (our version of Ryan's moving boxes). And why just bring all of it back upstairs and clutter up our beautiful small house the moment we get back from a relaxing vacation? No, no, I am not going back there!

So I am going to celebrate every time we unpack only the things that we need. Then, I'm going to celebrate even more when we get rid of all the stuff we have that we don't need. The stuff we didn't even know we didn't need because it just kept sitting there.

Our 21 days starts today.

Join me on our journey and find out what we really need - and what we don't!

Don't Forget the Why

So I was just about to write a nice little post last week about our car downsizing experiment, and how we decided to keep two cars, and all the reasons why – where we live (rural, mountainous, with no solid public transportation, far away from THE grocery store) and how we live (running a business, with two small children), etc. We were sorting out what kind of car to buy to replace my little putt-putt. Then we drove back to the Hudson Valley to visit family. And, lo and behold, our other car died, on the day we were supposed to drive home.

It’s been six weeks now. Two (old) cars down, one (new-ish) car up. The one-car experiment continues.

What’s been on my mind lately, though, is more about why we downsize, rather than how or how much.

Because I see (especially in the tiny house movement and the minimalist movement) a push towards decluttering as some strange anti-American Dream competition, where numbering one’s possessions and obsessive downsizing have overpowered the whole purpose behind the origins of the movement. The place that Things once held is now just replaced by the-getting-rid-of-Things.

I work with data, numbers, and statistics on a Monday through Friday basis in my job in data governance. I see how taking a count – a real, numeric, quantitative count – of one’s belongings could be helpful, to set before you everything you have as one lump sum total. It could force you to see each thing individually as you give it a cardinal number. I haven’t done it yet, so I’m only surmising.

What I don’t understand or see value in is the competition (with oneself or with others) to get that number down. Is there a perfect number of Things that we’re all trying to obtain? (If there is, can someone please share?!) If I have 83 possessions, am I happier than my friend who was 87? Or if I have 207 possessions now, am I any better off than I was when I had 208?

And I can attest to the fact that decluttering feels GOOD. Really good. It literally lightens your burdens in life to get rid of things you don’t need. But I see folks for whom decluttering is their new hoarding. It fills their void. It becomes just another addiction to distract from what really is important.

But what IS important? What does freedom from Things mean?

I’m in the middle of reading Everything That Remains by The Minimalists  Joshua Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus. (P.S. I think this is a great read, no matter where on the minimalist continuum you are.) Millburn writes, “Ultimately, the purpose of embracing minimalism has to do with the benefits we each experience once we’re on the other side of decluttering. Hence, removing the clutter is not the end result; it is merely the first step…. It is possible to get rid of everything you own and still be utterly miserable.”

And: “When I got rid of the majority of my possessions, I was forced to confront my darker side, compelled to ask questions I wasn’t prepared for: When did I give so much meaning to material possessions? What is truly important in life? … Who is the person I want to become? How will I define my own success?”

These are the tougher questions that everyone on a downsizing journey runs into eventually and has to answer. For themselves.

I’ll tell you one of my answers.

This week, I’m writing from a beautiful big house in coastal Maine. We rented it on airbnb.com on a last-minute whim, sharing a vacation week with my in-laws. Because I work remotely, I can work from anywhere, so I figured why not work from coastal Maine?*

We also thought, why leave an empty house behind? So we took the leap, ran around and made some last-minute fixes, and rented out our home on airbnb. (My fingers are crossed for a good first review!)

This is one of our goals, something that has value in our lives: to be mobile, unattached to mortgage/responsibility/Things, ready and able to travel and see the world around us. It’s not like we don’t want roots. It’s more like we want to be like seaweed, with strong roots in the ocean floor below us but the ability to wander around with the waves. Because we chose a small mortgage and we live in an area where people vacation frequently, we can rent our house for a few days, cover our mortgage, and travel somewhere new without going into debt for the experience. 

This is what having fewer things, and small house living, is giving me.

For now.

Life is fluid, right? It’s good to check back in now and again because what I’m doing right now might not work for me, for my family, in five years. Or two years. Or whenever. I try to stay sensitive to the shifts in our lives and revisit what we want and how to get there as necessary.  

If you’re on a path of downsizing or sorting out what things you want to own that add value to your life, keep the end goal in mind: to add value, as you define it. 

Even if you define it from a porch swing on a summer night in Maine. 

*Though, through a series of poor circumstances, I ended up taking the week off. My husband had a (thankfully) brief hospital visit at the beginning of the week and we weren’t even sure we’d be able to make the trip. But it was his birthday, and he wanted to be by the coast (isn’t the ocean relaxing?) and I wanted him to be happy, and he said he felt up to it, so we cautiously set off from our home 6 (or was it 10?) hours away. Basically, I looked for every hospital in between there and here just in case something went wrong. Seriously, I don’t make this stuff up. Anyone with or married to someone with Crohn’s Disease probably understands. There’s some type of balance we have to strike between being safe (like, at home in a comfortable place, or near a hospital) and living life (like, going on this trip!). 

I Dream of Italy

Almost three years ago, on the way home from the hospital with my daughter, we got a phone call that would impact our choice to live minimally as a family.

It was an invitation for my husband to work with Mike + Doug Starn for two months on their Big Bambu project in Rome, Italy. With a three day old in the backseat, my husband and I knew if there was any time that we could make this work, it was then! When the baby was two months old, we packed a suitcase of tiny clothes, diapers and a toy and headed off to live in my mother country.

The good thing about Rome and Romans is that they loooove babies. And when I say "love", I mean random strangers will cross the street just to oogle over a little one. To hold their hands, touch their faces, ask for names and ages, and, if you're up for it, even hold your little one and take them back across the street to show their friends! I know some parents might be appalled, and honestly it did surprise me the first time it happened, but after I got used to this different way of living I decided it was simply AMAZING. Not only could I get a much needed break from holding my daughter (you know the concept of the fourth trimester?), but she was socialized, introduced to the Italian language AND we met many wonderful people we never would have otherwise:

Copyright 2010 Beth A. Mackey

(Okay, okay, I know he's not Italian! But apparently he knows that "when in Rome...")

Anyway, here we were 4,000 miles (for the rest of the world, that's 7,000 km) away from home with a two month old baby and a suitcase of "stuff" in a hotel room for two months. (Sounds like the start of a new Vacation spin-off!) It probably could have been a disaster - and we did have language barriers, diaper blow-outs, and some breastfeeding challenges on our tour of the Vatican Museum - but I have to tell you it was basically The Best Time I'd Ever Had.

Partly because the way we lived in the Eternal City was minimalism at its best - and pretty much perfect. Since Rome is full of real neighborhoods with local markets within walking distance, we didn't need a car, a big refrigerator or a lot of packaged, preserved food. We ate fresh and healthy food, got exercise, and met the local people in our amazing neighborhood of Testaccio. With a bed, a desk, two closets, and a kitchenette, our hotel room became our first experiment as a family in small house living. 

Except for needing to buy a sweater while we were there, the suitcase of clothing we brought was completely adequate. In fact, I brought some articles of clothing I never ended up wearing - so I learned to pack lighter on subsequent trips. Even though she grew through a size by the time we left, I had more than enough for my daughter, too. Maybe a washing machine would have been helpful, but we managed just fine without it and didn't miss the space or the stuff we had left at home. 

This was our first of several times travelling as a family, but so far it's been our longest stay away from home. Every time we travel, we absorb our experience and it changes us in some way. I brought home from Rome the understanding that everything I need to raise a child could fit in a suitcase. 

As I settle into life with our four week old son, I seem to be reliving the time when my daughter was the same age and feel like I should be preparing for some epic trip. I find myself reminiscing about the streets we would wander down, the historic sights we would pass by, the friends we made, the feeling of living in such a family-centered city. I miss trying to sputter out some broken and improperly conjugated Italian. 

I think I'll get my son a passport. Tomorrow.