Getting here

No matter who you are or where you live, the last few years have almost certainly marked some kind of turning point for you. For too many people, 2020 was a year marked by grief. Losses that sheared away the lives that might have been lived, the paths no longer to be taken. Fears that became a background drone in the backs of our minds, at times a light hum, at times an angry hornets’ nest of anxieties. Separations that stretched interminably on, from our nearest and dearest, from our habits and haunts, from the plans we’d hatched or thought we’d have time to hatch.

For two long years of pandemic life, I had many, many blessings to count. My loved ones stayed healthy, even when they had to take risks. As a newly minted quadragenarian, I welcomed staying home, even knowing how claustrophobic it would have been to a younger me. As a partnered person (and one quite content with solitude in general) I avoided isolation and the loneliness it brought to many others. The barest thought experiment (undertaken in sympathy with the friends who were then enduring it) of imagining trying to date in plague time was enough to inspire a shudder of disgust. Dating in regular times was hard enough. I really felt for those attempting it, and was deeply grateful not to be in their shoes. I was so glad not to be in my 20s for this period of history - and those of you who are, hats off to your resilience.

But this is not to say that 2020 brought no changes to my life. On the contrary. For over twenty years, my job in international development has meant a life of constant motion. Any given year saw me boomeranging around the world, for weeks and months at a time. This period of my life has given me untold fortunes of experience. I met heroes of all kinds; climbed mountains; saw wonders; found a thousand thousand new things to see, to hear, to taste.

A person in a winter coat and hat makes a terrified face under a sign that says “CONGRATULATIONS YOU ARE NOW AT THIRD HIGHEST PEAK MOUNT KENYA”

But it did come at a cost. I missed not just anniversaries and birthdays, but whole seasons of the year. I tended a fig tree from a two-foot stick to a ten-foot giant with a wingspan as big as the yard of my house, but tasted only one of those figs in a span of ten years. I missed the cherry blossoms. I missed the roses blooming. I missed the good apple season. I decorated Christmas trees to spend only a day or two with them. I was simply always away.

At the beginning of 2020, that all came to a screaming halt. As were so many people who’d had other plans, I was grounded.

I had the good fortune of being home when the first cases were seen. I didn’t get stuck for weeks and months in quarantine, or held up overseas by the lattice work of global travel restrictions and swiftly changing visa laws. Lucky. I kept my job; it turned out to be one I could actually do from my living room, so long as my dogs stayed quiet. Lucky. But it was a complete inversion of what my life had been for the past several years; namely an accelerating merry-go-round of airports and hotel rooms. And I realized something very important.

I was exhausted.

It wasn’t until I stayed in one place for longer than three months that I realized what coming off of two decades of chronic jet lag felt like. And things began to change.

I got regular sleep every night. Those first months when we could go almost nowhere, we could at least go outside. I awoke in the morning to the sun coming up, and I went out for long bike rides along the Anacostia River. I soared through wafts of honeysuckle and virgin’s bower. I stood and looked at the river. For minutes at a time. What a luxury. I watched the gradual turning of the season to summer with the emergence of yellow flags and rosemallows along the river bank. As summer advanced, the cascades of virgin’s bower fell down over the trail, breaking out into meadows of tickseed and gumweed and chicory. Before that summer, I hadn’t known what any of those flowers were called; I may have seen them in passing and thought them to be pretty, but I’d never considered them before. I’d never watched how they shifted day by day.

I began to think of becoming grounded in a very different light.

To my surprise, I enjoyed being in one place. I didn’t find it difficult to be in the house all day, day after day. Our two dogs, which turned into three dogs at some point (I’ll eventually tell the story of our pandemic oops puppy; the one we accidentally drove several states over to adopt…). I had new knitting projects, and zoom knitting / coffee dates with my mom and her pals back in my hometown. I learned to hand quilt, finally making a dent in the collection of charm squares I’d gotten several years ago to top the jars of signature dry rub I’d wanted to give as favors at our wedding but hadn’t managed to make in time.

A black and white puppy in a plaid bandana looks into the camera.

It’s not that I hadn’t always had an interest in the natural world and what it offered. I’ve been known to pluck random plants on hikes and eat them. I’ve always had an interest in being closer to the land. In down time between trips, I made rain barrels at a county extension class. I built raised garden beds in my backyard. I took classes in blacksmithing. I was a “shareholder” in some urban chickens (really I just chickensat when my friend, in the same field as me, was away and in return I got to eat fresh eggs). Yes, I had the leanings of an urban homesteader, but neither the means nor the lifestyle to support it.

When I met my husband in Nairobi, Kenya, we talked about a shared dream of (someday, down the road, when we were ready to retire) getting a few acres and a farmhouse. Raising some chickens, some ducks, perhaps a goat or two. Growing our own foods and putting them up like my grandma did. With a few tweaks to the recipe inspired by my travels, perhaps. We dreamed of this; but we were resigned to waiting a good number of years until we could make it a reality. We had to put in our time in DC. The acres and the house and the garden and rows of mason jars glinting on their shelves were a faraway dream.

Until 2020.

It didn’t happen right away. The first year was nothing but uncertainty, and that included what might happen with my work. I had no idea where I would need to be located, how we’d all wind up working when the world shook us out the other side of whatever it was we were living through. But as the time wore on, I realized that unlike some of my colleagues, I had no yearning to get back out “on the road”. I yearned instead to grow peppers on my patio, and to see if I could figure out what made some of them so much hotter than others and if I could marshall those conditions intentionally. I yearned to pick pea pods and peel them on the porch.

For my husband, being stuck inside all day was far less tolerable than it was for me. But even less so because we were confined to a house in DC we have (lovingly, and at times loathingly) called “The Cheesebox”. The noise and churn of city life began to grate. Perhaps they’d been okay once, when broken up by the daily commute and the variety offered by moving from Cheesebox to Cubicle and back again. But they weren’t anymore.

Together, we realized that perhaps we didn’t have to wait twenty more years to live the life we wanted. No, we are not ready (or able) to quit our jobs and become full-time homesteaders. But neither do we have to wait.

The world turned course in 2020; and with it, the opportunities for how we work. So we made the decision to pack ourselves up and leave the city. We can start the next phase before we’re done with this one. And by then, we hope to have grown into and with our new home. To have planted the trees that will by then give us their fruits. To have studied and learned the secrets of each corner of the meadows and woods, springs and gullies, that will make up our new home. We hope this change will give us the tools to live more sustainably, and in a way that builds up and gives back to the community we are joining. As we have all learned in the last two years, there is no time like now.

What’s in a name?