Then The Question

My friend Sarah, her husband, and then two girls made a very conscious decision to leave their suburb and opt instead for a life outside the outside. The goal was to live a simpler life, a meaningful life for them. They found a house in a small town in which they knew no one, grew some vegetables, clipped their budget, and in time had a son in that home with a midwife present. (She, a nurse, chose to forgo the conventional birth, the medical birth, and wrote about the experience so beautifully to me that I convinced her to publish it -- and she did!).

Sarah asks a lot of questions of herself, and I wish I could be as thoughtful as her. Her Post Picket Fence -- it's as complicated as mine, not as idyllic as she hoped or wished but maybe nothing ever is really, not even the things one chooses deliberately. But she went there; she goes there every day, totally committed literally and figuratively. I am honored to know her.

For Sarah, a recent question in a writing class was this: What will your life look like in 20 years?

"In 20 years I will be 57. I am so unclear as to what my life will be like then. I’m scared scared scared to think about it. I know and hope that the constant will be my husband. For now, we spend all of our time building our home – our homestead – planting sapling heirloom apple trees and peach trees and blueberries; clearing poison ivy and choosing some significant, meaningful name for our place.

I so fear that all of this will be for naught – that we’re doing it for the wrong reasons – huh? What reasons? Resale value? To impress the neighbors? To give our children a vision of simplicity and a taste of our little vision of utopia? To have a place we’d survive in if we truly needed to be self-sufficient? A place that represents purity and hard work and love and acceptance?

I cry when I think of what the “playroom” might evolve into. What will sit on its shelves? Will we break down and put in a TV to lure the kids back home?

In 20 years I want to be an expert – a gracious one so that I won’t feel nervous and self-critical all the time. I want to be active, interested, in LOVE with my life and my Loves and the World. I want the world to change and meet me halfway so I won’t feel so frustrated and like throwing my hands up in the air and wondering if anything is worth it. I want to be living, eating those apples, watching my children become adults, and holding the hand of my Love, traveling down the path we can hopefully choose together."

Where will I be in 20 years, or you? I'll get back to you about that, but for now, what I do know is that I am the luckiest girl alive to have the friends that I do.