I am so amazingly in love with this place that we found to call home. Instead of talking wistfully of "someday" when we have "a few acres", now we actually have them and we're just busy enjoying and taking care of them.
I've been reading Making Home by Sharon Astyk (one of those rare books that I enjoyed so much from the library that I bought a new copy) and it has inspired me to appreciate and love my home even more. It's also inspired me to want to do even better, to settle, to be a better steward, to plan for the future in responsible ways.
One immediate change I'm making is to break my dependence on the dryer. If I have a "laundry day" once a week, the only way to get all the laundry done is to use the dryer. But dryers use a lot of unnecessary electricity, when the same job could be done by passive energy and a sunny corner of my living room. So I'm not doing the laundry once a week anymore, and am drying everything on my wooden drying rack. That means I need to do laundry three or four times a week, and have a better system of storing dirty laundry as it waits its turn. But I've made the changes, and everyone still has clean laundry as they need it, and our dryer now just sits empty.
I am very grateful to have a home, to have the resources that give me the freedom to make choices in how I want to live, and to have found this corner of the world to settle down on.
I love our home, too :) "Making Home" sounds like a book I'd enjoy...I need to look for it in our library catalog...thanks for the suggestion!
ReplyDeleteI am impressed with your breaking dependence on the dryer. You are absolutely right, it is a waste of electricity. I grew up with us always hanging our laundry outdoors to dry, but I have totally gotten out of the habit. I do hang up much of our laundry on drying racks in our basement laundry area, but I do use the dryer too.