Ok, when we last left off in the yurt journey story, we had just bought a small storage barn to add to our camper for living space. It was 14' by 20', had one window, big doors (which we often kept open), and a window-unit air conditioner. I'm sure that, to many of you, living the way we did that year sounds crazy. It kinda was. But we were done with renting and throwing money away. We couldn't afford a big mortgage and still live the simple, follow-your-bliss and make-a-difference kind of lives we wanted to live. This was our answer. In the spirit of full disclosure, I present the best and the worst of Year One, AKA as the Year Before We Got the Yurt Up:
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| Here's a picture of the camper during this time period. That sweet kitty, Columbine, is no more. |
First, the crap times: 1) The rains that spring were intense. Flooding like crazy. Our land had just been bulldozed, so there was not much grass yet to stop the erosion problems. The land has still not completely recovered from those rains. 2) Late May and early June, before we bought the air-conditioner. So hot. 2) Caring for two 17-year-old cats and six baby chickens in such an unusual space. Not easy. Kinda stinky. 3) The camper shower just got crappier and crappier. 3) Carrying Beatrice to go to the bathroom in the middle of a rainy night. The camper was a 30-second walk away at a quick pace. 4) Getting ready for school in the mornings, walking back and forth between the barn and camper—more on that later. 5) July and August during the day, even with the air-conditioner. It was stifling. The air in the camper went out. We simply left every morning by 11:00 and returned around 6. Thank goodness for Barnes and Noble and Greg’s office.
The hardest of all were the morning routines. A Montessori school in Little Rock was our choice to return to the world of the schooled masses. The girls both started in late August 2011. The school began at 8am and it took 45 minutes to get there in heavy traffic—only 20 in the off hours. To make matters worse, the uniform for that school was as confusing to me as trigonometry or Glenn Beck. We just couldn’t figure it out. And, of course, we had no washer or dryer in the camper. Forest green shirts were okay but emerald green ones were not. Dark blue was right and light blue was, too, but only in the short-sleeve variety. (I’m sure I got those details wrong, but you get the gist.) I won’t bore you with more details of the uniform. Suffice it to say that the uniform store told us that this particular school’s policy was the most confusing in town.
We woke at 5:30 to make it on time by 8. It was a rush of still-sleepy bodies tromping back and forth between the camper and the barn, looking for socks and aluminum foil and all the other daily details, all the while trying not to step on a cat or knock over one’s sister or spouse. If we woke at 5:35, we were late. We were often late. The school asked us to please make being on time more of a priority. We did our best. We left that school after Spring Break, for other reasons not important here.
If we had been more organized, more type A people, we could have made that routine better. We could have done it smarter. Of course, if we were those people, we probably never would have done this at all. We did our best. We learned. We’re still married and the girls got over it through therapy and hypnosis (kidding!), so it’s all good. Truly, the girls were great during this time. They had fun. They were never lacking anything. They became more resilient. They fought and played and scraped their knees and learned what it’s like to truly make friends with one particular forest. The bad times weren’t, after all, so very bad.
Now, for the great times. The good stuff is harder to convey in words, and some of it is a little embarrassing. For example, in the embarrassing category, there’s no way you can know how enjoyable it is to pee outside on a warm June evening with the owls hooting and the full moon dancing on the leaves until you’ve actually done it yourself. Don’t judge. Our ancestors have been doing it for thousands of years.
We watched “My Neighbor Totoro” dozens of times in that little barn, all piled on the big bed, eating chips and salsa and singing loudly “Hey, let’s go! Come on, let’s go!” We chased fireflies and played in the sand of our driveway, which resembles a Florida beach more than it does Arkansas soil. We took nature into us and gave ourselves over to it. We saw the moon and the stars in a different way, becoming familiar with them, making friends with them. We had campfires and sang at the top of our lungs at midnight.
We learned about living that spring and summer in a way that we never had before. Living on the edge of living, I call it. There are only a few things we humans really need, it turns out. Someplace dry and not too hot or cold. Protection from the weather. A softish place to sleep. Enough food to eat and clean, readily available water. Community or family and loving connections to other people or animals. Access to medical care. That’s about all I can think of that we actually NEED. If you have all those, you’re better off than a whole lotta people on this planet.
That first year on the land, this was our gift. We appreciated, for the first time, things that our grandparents and great-grandparents knew. We learned about how amazing running water is and how air conditioners are a marvel and a gift. We learned how fun and sometimes hard it is to live so close with the people you love the most. We ate simple food because it was a lot of work to cook complicated things in the camper. The seasons became characters in our lives. The weather was sometimes the antagonist, sometimes the deus ex machina, and sometimes just the scenery. I wish every American could experience some of what we did that year, both the good and the bad.
And, of course, all year we worked to raise money to make the trip to pick up the yurt in Indianapolis in May and build the platform it would eventually stand on. We held a cabaret performance of all the Robinsons and some talented friends to get the money for the gas and hotel for the trip. We borrowed some funds from my parents for the platform materials. We used tax return money and the money that used to be paid in rent. Little by little, we were gonna raise a yurt!
The trip to get the yurt was grueling, to say the least. We had to take the yurt down, board by board, screw by screw, and pack it all into a giant truck. We had colds. We had brought our aging kitty with kidney failure with us, because she had to be given subcutaneous water several times a day. We were wishing we had paid attention in stagecraft class every time we failed at appropriate screw-gun use. We had amazing help—shout out to Eddie Ryan, who is the most bad-ass septuagenarian we’ve ever met, her daughter, kindred spirit Dawn Ryan, Dawn’s awesome kids, and her crazy husband Bo, may he rest in peace—and we hired a wonderful Marine/ultra triathalon man named Dwayne, AKA Epic Ninja Dwayne, after the first day. The previous owners also provided assistance. Five days later, we were home, sore, and had a yurt in pieces in storage. Still no platform and not enough money to build one. Most of the platform materials the previous owners had used were deemed unsafe to rebuild with by our building expert advisors, including awesome Uncle Larry and the wonderful handyman who was born with the delightful name Dick Hopper. Not even kidding. Great handyman. We were unsure of our next move. Still living in our little 14’ by 20’ barn.
There were some times that summer and fall when we got really down. I remember standing on the hill that overlooks the property, crying, and thinking that we had made a colossal mistake. We had no real skills. We had no savings that could be easily retrieved. In my haste to be independent and rent-free, I had thought that the fact that we homeschooled and I did things like canning and making my own cloth diapers and yogurt somehow meant we could build a yurt and sculpt land into something livable. We were going to have to admit that we were wrong and just find some cute affordable little bungalow to rent in Hillcrest. The student loans would default, but defaulted student loans seem to be a mark of shabbily genteel education nowadays, right? It would be fine. It was a big mistake, but we had made bigger ones, hadn’t we?
We all had those times of doubt, even little Beatrice. For her, it was always after going to visit some friend with an awesome big girly bedroom. Those times were pretty rare for each of us, but we always rallied around the person struggling at the time. It would be OK. We were gonna figure this out. One thing was certain: there was no way we could do this alone. We were going to need help. And that, my friends, is the best lesson/gift this process has given us.
YEAR TWO to be continued soon. . .
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