if daydreams were cattle.
Like all of my great ideas and fantasies, which seem so obvious in retrospect, this one fell out of nowhere and refuses to vacate even when threatened with practical realism like, say, financial feasibility. Although, to be fair, this particular kernel of a fantasy might have been nurtured beyond mere infancy by dint of a weekend spent traveling to Alabama, knitting in the woods, reading books on preserving the harvest, and talking about some eventual homesteading lifestyle.
As I was skimming back through my 'family' and 'roots'-related journal entries, I was struck by how each of them seemed some variation on an underlying theme I haven't quite articulated yet. They seemed unfinished, in a way, as though I've been rooting down through the family traditions and stories to some common core, but have been letting the whatever-it-is drop just before tying it back into something larger.
It occured to me last week for the first time that my fantasies of apprenticing with my uncle on my family farm next summer, living in my grandparents' now-vacant farmhouse, could be combined with the long-standing fantasy of going on a writing and reflecting retreat somewhere for a few months.
The pieces fell into place like so: farming during the day, learning plantings and harvests and machinery and livestock and all the myriad frustrations that arise when one attempts to plan a life around something as violently unstable as nature. Spend my evenings coming face to face with my heritage as a living thing, in that farmhouse, on that property that speaks more to my identity than the house I grew up in, and writing.
What I would actually be writing is so far completely unclear. It would probably be just for me, a document of my retreat into my rural heritage lifestyle, a document of "maker-culture," as Francis calls it, the time spent digging my way into the land and seeing what it teaches me, as Thoreau might have it. As for making a book, or making it public - well, no one needs another memoir in the world, and no one needs an "Under the Pennsylvania Dutch Sun." I don't want to pin down form when I have so little content.
Literary hand-waving aside, I fed this idea little scraps of excitement all weekend, giving it free rein to grow as it would. It took on a little vegetable gardening here, a little furniture building there, and a dash of handmade clothing for fun; some bow-and-arrow deer hunting and raising chickens by mid-afternoon; canning jams from berries on bushes on the hill, mixed with the occasional major car repair. If it was crafty, backbreaking, and wholesome, I was mentally all over it.
By evening, working my way through only my first-ever knit scarf, I had already wished into existence a wee one-bedroom cottage up on the hill of my family farmland, built by me, with a porch and a sleeping loft and a woodstove - a place for retreats and vacations and maybe, eventually, to build a full-on life. I am not sure how I wound up here from thinking that what little writing I've done could use some time to polish and expand; but I am here now, and it's a lovely little place to be.
Clearly at this point, I am just rambling away with my unrealistic dreaming. But, grounding all this fantasy in the real-life place of southern Schuylkill County, PA, tempts me into believing that maybe my idle daydreaming could actually blossom, someday, into some semblance of reality.
***
As I was skimming back through my 'family' and 'roots'-related journal entries, I was struck by how each of them seemed some variation on an underlying theme I haven't quite articulated yet. They seemed unfinished, in a way, as though I've been rooting down through the family traditions and stories to some common core, but have been letting the whatever-it-is drop just before tying it back into something larger.
It occured to me last week for the first time that my fantasies of apprenticing with my uncle on my family farm next summer, living in my grandparents' now-vacant farmhouse, could be combined with the long-standing fantasy of going on a writing and reflecting retreat somewhere for a few months.
The pieces fell into place like so: farming during the day, learning plantings and harvests and machinery and livestock and all the myriad frustrations that arise when one attempts to plan a life around something as violently unstable as nature. Spend my evenings coming face to face with my heritage as a living thing, in that farmhouse, on that property that speaks more to my identity than the house I grew up in, and writing.
What I would actually be writing is so far completely unclear. It would probably be just for me, a document of my retreat into my rural heritage lifestyle, a document of "maker-culture," as Francis calls it, the time spent digging my way into the land and seeing what it teaches me, as Thoreau might have it. As for making a book, or making it public - well, no one needs another memoir in the world, and no one needs an "Under the Pennsylvania Dutch Sun." I don't want to pin down form when I have so little content.
Literary hand-waving aside, I fed this idea little scraps of excitement all weekend, giving it free rein to grow as it would. It took on a little vegetable gardening here, a little furniture building there, and a dash of handmade clothing for fun; some bow-and-arrow deer hunting and raising chickens by mid-afternoon; canning jams from berries on bushes on the hill, mixed with the occasional major car repair. If it was crafty, backbreaking, and wholesome, I was mentally all over it.
By evening, working my way through only my first-ever knit scarf, I had already wished into existence a wee one-bedroom cottage up on the hill of my family farmland, built by me, with a porch and a sleeping loft and a woodstove - a place for retreats and vacations and maybe, eventually, to build a full-on life. I am not sure how I wound up here from thinking that what little writing I've done could use some time to polish and expand; but I am here now, and it's a lovely little place to be.
Clearly at this point, I am just rambling away with my unrealistic dreaming. But, grounding all this fantasy in the real-life place of southern Schuylkill County, PA, tempts me into believing that maybe my idle daydreaming could actually blossom, someday, into some semblance of reality.
***