Breaking out of the box

Bonafide Farmer — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 02:30:12 +0000

So last winter, I was sitting in my urban apartment ready for a change. I had just returned from a few months of living in a log cabin in Alaska, riding in bush planes and firing machine guns, and I’d finally realized that the life I wanted to live couldn’t be contained in the seven hundred square feet of a third-floor walkup apartment.

I was vermicomposting under the dining room table. My rakes and hoes and dirty garden boots permanently lived in the storage unit of my station wagon. I had trays of leaf cuttings rooting on radiators—in my bedroom.

It’s not like this was a great revelation, this figuring out that my interests in messy, often organic projects were overstepping their boundaries. I mean, I was the kid in freshman dorm with the chia pet. From there, my need for space to do things just increased, even as I downsized my living quarters and I tried to fit myself into the box of urban life in a major East-coast city.

That box held me for five years. Five exciting, exhausting years I wouldn’t give back for anything. But after leaving Alaska—where people I met indulged their passions and pastimes without restriction of space or mindset—I knew I was ready to challenge myself with something bigger. Something I’d always dreamed of doing.

And so, in May 2009, I bought Bonafide Farm. And isn’t this just the picture-perfect vintage Blue Ridge foothills farmhouse I’d always dreamed of?

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Breaking out of the box