Time Travelling

Morning temp: 46F
Afternoon high: 72F
Tonight's projected low: 45F
Humidity: 93%
Moon: Waxing, 10%
Wind: from the North at 1mph or less

I'm posting early today because I'm driving up to Lookout Mountain, Alabama to visit some family I'm very close to for a day or so. In 2002 and 2003, M and I made our first sustained attempts at Homesteading here. M's mom, who lived on the Mountain, invited us to try out our grand experiment on her 30 acres of land. We did, with neither jobs, money, nor any of the skills and knowledge we should have had under our belts, only a vague, romantic notion of "getting back to the land." Almost daily our Homesteading vision changed as we read and researched and discovered what did and did not work through trial and error (mostly error). Trying to live in a twenty-eight foot tall tepee, for instance, is a very bad idea. Great praise must go to my close friend KP, who helped me set-up and take-down that fantastically heavy monstrosity at least 20 times. We invested nearly 60% of our savings into it, but could never get it right, or keep the rainwater from soaking the ground, or prevent hornets, wasps and yellow jackets from taking up residence.

Our greatest success during this time was in gardening. M had small and productive gardens when we lived in the city, and so we had some knowledge here. We also had several thousand square feet of rich valley floor to cultivate, if we so chose. We decided on a "modest" 1,000 square foot Garden. Tilling, raking out and planting the long, straight, raised rows gave us the best days we have had together as a couple, and ultimately lead us to marry. By early May, we easily produced enough food to eat two superb meals a day out of our Garden. During this time I shed some 40 pounds of excess weight, lost all symptoms of asthma (which I had since childhood) and felt better than I have before or since.

Eventually, we moved back to the city, where I returned to University teaching and M earned a degree in nursing. We needed a reliable economic base to fund the many aspects of a Homesteading life. M felt that nursing, particularly working in women's health, would allow her to serve whatever community we choose to live in, even while we pursued a Homesteading lifestyle significantly removed from the dominant cultural patterns. Despite our failure to make it our permanent home, our time on Lookout Mountain was very well spent.