Bright lights, big city

Image courtesy of www.torontostockphotos.com

I'm off to the big city tomorrow. It's my first weekend away since we moved here. That's not entirely true -- I've left the farm to visit family and friends but I've always had the kids with me.

But this time I'm going solo. And I'm really looking forward to it.

Don't get me wrong -- I truly love this place. But I'm spending the weekend with some girlfriends who I've known since God was a boy. I went to grade school with three of them, and junior kindergarten with one of them.

What amazes me most is that regardless of the different paths life has take us and all the moves, jobs, marriages, births, illnesses and stresses we've collectively gone through, we've stayed friends. I guess you just can't replace that kind of history.

There's only one downside: I've got to head into the Big Smoke to see them. And I'm pretty grumpy about it.

I know, I know -- Toronto is one of the most multicultural places in the world, it's a place of opportunity, a leading economic centre and home to an amazing array museums, schools, diverse neighbourhoods -- I know the spiel firsthand. I spent my first 17 years living there (and another two years in my twenties when I went back to school.)

But now I find there's too many cars/people/shops/houses/noises/smells/messes/stresses.

Just Too Much.

So how did this city girl go all country? To be honest, I'm still trying to figure that out. (I think my dad is too.) But for one thing, I know I've always been passionate about wide open spaces and the outdoors.

And I've got the artwork to prove it.

Just before our move, I found this undated poem. Given the meticulous writing, I'm assuming it was in primary school, perhaps grade five or six, before my handwriting went completely to hell and morphed into the scrawling mess it is now.

If you can't read, it goes like this:

I said in my heart, "I can't stand the indoors. I need some freedom to run and play. I'm going outside where the leaves are deep and feel the cold breeze on my face all day." Summer is gone and fall is here. The leaves are falling to the ground. Children are out to romp in the sun. It's the best time of year around. The End. By Fiona C."

I'm the first to admit it's a good thing I left my poetry to my grade school self but the essential sentiments, about the outdoors and freedom, remain true to this day.

As adults, I think we've got to remember the things that made us really happy as kids. I mean that blissful, fully-present-in-the-moment, absolutely-exuberant kind of happy. And yet it's too easy to forget what was once important. I know I almost did.

After university (the first time), armed with a degree in international development and history (a major and minor, both of which I loved), I wasn't sure what to do next. But the boy I was completely enamoured with at the time (and still am) knew he wanted to go back to college. So I said since I wasn't sure I was ready to join CUSO or go gallivanting overseas just now, if he went to school, I'd work.

A friend of ours heard that I was looking for a good paying job and his firm was hiring. So I applied and got my first real job. I even had a fancy title: Tax Group Coordinator.

Yep, I worked in an accounting firm where the stereotypes were all true. It lasted three months. Looking back, I'm surprised I made it that long.

One day I was kvetching to a friend, the one that I've known since kindergarten, about my miserable dilemma and she said that if I was serious about quitting, her firm was hiring. It'd be a two hour commute, each way (one hour drive, one hour train) but it was good pay and great opportunity. Plus, we'd get to work together.

I applied and got my second real job, this time as an assistant at a investment firm. Can't you just picture it? Nylon stockings, heels, suits -- the works. I looked all grown-up. I figured I was well on my way to becoming a capital "P" professional. And I was good at my job. So much so that within six months the biggest producer (= most successful advisor) in the branch wanted me on his team.

Here I go, I thought -- I'm moving up. This is the way it's supposed to be, right?

I lasted an entire year with him-- and again, I can't believe I made it that long. Even then, fresh out of university, I knew something was wrong when the person I worked for had a picture of his house on his desk instead of his family. He'd brag about his $4,000 suits and tailor-made dress shirts and yet he'd asked me to lie to his kids when they called and asked when daddy was coming home.

Then one night, after working late again, I had to take a bus part way home as the trains were no longer running. I started talking with the man sitting next to me. He was young (probably early 30s), immaculately dressed and a corporate lawyer with one of the big Bay Street firms.

He was a capital "P" professional with the wife and two kids, a designer house with a matching designer dog -- and he was absolutely miserable. He told me he hated his job -- the long hours, how different the practice of law was from the theory, how cut-throat and competitive it all was -- but he was trapped by "golden handcuffs," he said. That was the first time I'd heard that phrase and I remember thinking, I never want to be like that.

Then along came an opportunity to move to another branch, closer to home, with an advisor who I really liked and respected. He had a great sense of humour, he was fun and he believed in a good work-life balance. It meant I'd no longer get to work with my kindergarten bud -- the one part of my job that I loved -- but it was a chance at happiness I couldn't pass up. I thought maybe working for a better boss would be the difference and that I could make this "good" life work for me.

So I moved to the new branch, worked closer to home (by then, we'd gotten married, that boy and I, and we decided to split the commute) and I met some new fabulous girlfriends. I'd take walks by the lake at lunchtime or on rainy days, I'd visit the library. My boss, an Ironman finisher several times over, even inspired me to take up running.

And yet, I was still miserable. I couldn't shake the feeling that this was it, this is what I'd be doing the rest of my life? I had a great boss, a "good" job with a bright future (I'd just been offered a big raise and a promotion) and yet it wasn't enough. Not for me.

Now, I'm not trying to trash the world I worked in. I have many dear friends in the investment business who are lovely people, good citizens and all that, and they're still very, very good at their jobs. It's just I couldn't find my happiness there. And when you spend 50 hours a week (or more) in a place, it was too high a price for me to pay.

"You can do anything," my boss would always tell me.

So, I quit. And this time, it was my turn to go back to school. Journalism school, of all things. I'd always love to learn, to read and to write. I joked I had the attention span of a gnat and that I could never commit to a single profession because I was interested in too many things. Writing gave me a chance to explore my world and perhaps bring a deeper understanding to my place in it.

I replaced a secure job, good pay, great benefits and a bright future to with a freelance writing life characterized by insecurity, poor pay, no benefits and an uncertain future. (Hmm, seeing the cold hard truth of my decision, I can't believe Lucas didn't try and shake some sense into me. But he didn't, and I thank him for it.)

If you met me for the first time today, you'd never dream that I'd once been climbing the corporate ladder. The only clue is that I still do some writing for business publications (but more often than not, there's some kind of 'green' slant to them.)

I've traded my heels for wellie boots and my suits for smelly coveralls. I still go for walks at lunchtime but the destination has become the barn, not the lake or library. And my benefits and bonuses are no longer monetary -- but I've been able to stay home with our kids. I'd trade dental coverage for that privilege any day.

The neat thing is, once you leave "security" for "insecurity", any subsequent exits -- like when Lucas quit his job and went freelance too -- seem a little less scary. I think that's partly why we're here today.

So while this is by no means the first time that I've gone back to the big city since I left at 17, it's the first time I've been back since we moved to the farm.

It's a chance to come full circle, to go back to the place where I came from that was once home, spend 24 hours with a group of ladies that I love and say goodbye to it at the end of the weekend.

For I know by the time Sunday afternoon comes, I'll be sorely missing not just my kids, but the clear skies, the fresh air, the wide open spaces and the freedom of the countryside.

And when you ache to return to a place, you know that place has become home.

So to quote John Denver, who's much better at poetry than I ever was:

Well I wouldn’t trade my life for diamonds and jewels
I never was one of them money hungry fools
I'd rather have my fiddle and my farmin’ tools
Thank God I’m a country boy

Yeah, city folk drivin’ in a black limousine
A lotta sad people thinkin’ that’s mighty keen
Son, let me tell ya now exactly what I mean
Thank God I’m a country boy

Thank god, I'm a country girl!

Power's out and there's a flood in the barn. What do you mean, there's no coffee?

When I think back on the holiday season, I'm faced with blurred visions of of hosting, visiting, cooking, baking, eating, driving, playing, couching, relaxing and celebrating. Apparently, we still have to work on our idea of simple celebrations.

That's not to say we didn't enjoy our first Christmas at Rowangarth farm. We did. My dad and step-mother even came to spend the 25th and 26th with us and we toasted the first of many years of traditions here on the farm.

On the 27th, we woke up first thing in the morning, fed, mucked and bedded all the animals and then drove four hours west to spend the day with Lucas' family -- his mum and dad, brother and his wife and their two daughters, who are close in age to our kids.

A great friend of ours, a self-affirmed city mouse, agreed to stay at the farm so that he could keep an eye on things while we were gone for the day. It's not easy to get away when there's a wood furnace and animals to feed but we knew the farm was in good hands while we were off visiting.

Unfortunately, the weather turned pretty ugly during our return trip home. We left around 8:00 pm and by about 11:00 that night, we were driving in and out of a thick, thick fog. While Lucas found it somewhat mesmerizing, like driving through clouds, I found it eerie and at times, downright scary.

By the time we were about 30 minutes from home, I was a stressed-out bundle of over-anxious nerves. The rational side of me said that we should pull over and wait out the fog but the emotional (and louder) side of me screamed that I just wanted to get home to the farm. Now.

Lucas was driving, thank goodness, though more than once I tried peddling the brake from my side of the truck. He took it safely, slowly and by about 12:30 am, we were safely ensconced in our driveway.

Everyone behaved while we were gone, our friend assured us. Relieved, we transferred the sleeping kids from the truck to their beds and by around 1:30 am, I too tumbled into bed, exhausted but happy.

Given the fact that I rarely stay up later than 10:00 pm anymore, I felt it necessary (and in everyone else's best interests) to have a bit of a lie-in the next morning. Lucas had given the animals a hay top-up when we got home so I didn't feel too badly about staggering out to the barn at 9:30 in the morning. I reasoned that although I was late, I did make an appearance before I had a chance to savour my first morning coffee.

By the time I made my way through the soggy, sloppy, poopy mess that had become our barnyard (apparently, with the thick fog came rain and lots of it) and rounded the corner of the first run-in, I noticed that stall light that was just on had suddenly gone out.

That's weird, I thought -- we'd just put in new CFLs. I figured that we'd gotten a bum bulb (it's happened before) so I didn't think much of it.

Then when I slid the main barn door open, I noticed there was no music coming from the radio that I usually leave on for the animals. Again strange, but perhaps our friend had turned it off.

I flicked on the light over the goat pens. Nothing. Then the hall light. Nothing again. I even tried the light in the chicken pen (remember, I hadn't had my coffee yet) before I finally realized that perhaps something wasn't quite right.

But even in the grey light of morning, I noticed what looked like a dark, irregular-shaped shadow cast on the shavings on the far side of the chicken pen. The girls were squawking louder than usual, crowding up to the pen door like a bunch of crazed paparazzi. I stepped inside, knelt down and felt the shavings: they were wet. Soaked, actually. We'd had a leak in the barn.

I simply did not feel up to dealing with this without at least a cup of my fair trade, organic coffee and a piece of homemade toast. I decided to quickly feed and water everybody and then head back to the house for some sustenance.

By then, the weather had taken a turn for the worse. The grey but balmy (relatively speaking) morning had been replaced by menacing clouds and the wind had picked up something fierce.

I trudged back through the soggy, sloppy, poopy mess in the barnyard, cursing and grumbling, all the while trying to stay upright against the wind. But as I walked past the outdoor wood furnace, I noticed that it too wasn't working. Oh oh. This wasn't good.

"Power's out," Lucas said as I walked in the door.

"We have a flood in the barn," I grumbled back. "Have you made coffee yet?"

"Nope. And I'll take a look at the barn later," he said, then turned to his friend. "Time to go see if this generator works."

While we'd purchased a generator a few weeks earlier, we had to special order the right power cable and it had only arrived a few days before Christmas. With all the craziness and busyness of the season, we hadn't had a chance to test it out.

(What we didn't yet realize was that we weren't alone in our dilemma. According to the local paper, severe winds storms had left an estimated 230,000 people in Ontario without power, with over 20,000 people affected in our region alone.)

By now, the kids had stumbled out of bed and make their way sleepily downstairs. I carefully explained that the power was out and until we knew the generator was working, we couldn't run any water, open the fridge or consume any coffee, though I was alone in my misery over this last point.

Meanwhile, Lucas and his friend were outside trying to dig out a spot with the collapsible emergency shovel from the truck and then manoeuvre the generator closer to the external house outlet that connects to the generator panel in the kitchen. While the generator is technically portable, that doesn't make it any easier to move it through several feet of uneven snow, crusted over with ice in some places and slushy in others with gale force winds howling all around.

That was my observation at least, from the comforts of the kitchen (we're all about delegating responsibility here.)

Not long afterwards, I heard a loud whirring sound. At least the thing runs, I thought. Then Lucas told me to fire up the generator panel. Thankfully, there was step-by-step instructions posted on the inside of the cupboard for non-electrically inclined people such as myself.

I turned off the main utility breaker before turning on the generator breaker and sub breakers. The loud whirring sound changed in tone, like the power draw on it had been kicked up a notch. Then I heard the fridge start up. I turned on the lights and tried the tap.

"We have power," I shouted, "and water!"

Pleased with the success of our flirtation with off-grid living, I set upon making that much needed coffee. I plugged the grinder in the wall - nothing. I tried another outlet, one that shared a circuit with a light switch that worked - nothing. I then remembered that the generator panel has circuits only for the kitchen lights, fridge, well pump and garage.

No coffee grinder. No percolator.

I had one possible option left. I crammed myself between the fridge and the wall and reached way back to the outlet that powers the fridge. ZZZzZZZzZZZzZZZ went the grinder.

"We have coffee!" I shouted.

Finally, fortified with my morning dose of black gold and equipped with my LED headlight, I headed back out to the barn to survey the damage in the chicken pen. It's not exactly clear what happened -- I'm assuming it's some kind of crack in the barn's foundation that we'll have to repair in the spring.

In the meantime, we made a crude levee by shovelling some shavings and straw into a pile in the corner, in an attempt to mop up the trickle of water that must have started during the previous day's rainstorm and/or thaw.

The chickens, however, had other plans. A few hours later, the shavings and straw were dispersed throughout the pen. It appears our girls had some kind of scratching party. What they were looking for remains a mystery but at least the bottom three inches of shavings, now frozen, have since been covered with several more inches of clean shavings.

It wasn't the homecoming that we'd expected but nonetheless, it was satisfying to discover that we successfully got through our first mini power outage unscathed (the power came back on a few hours later.) Our girls are still laying eggs, despite the watery assault upon their living quarters and the barnyard is looking, well... slightly less sloppy thanks to a lot of shovelling and several wheelbarrow trips to the manure pile.

As for me, I've decided I'll have only two items on my wish list for next Christmas: one manual coffee mill and one woodstove-top percolator. Now if I can just figure out a way to power my new coffee roaster...

Looking back

It's hard to believe that I'm writing about the holiday season in past tense already. I mean really, people -- where did 2008 go?

But now that both kids are back in school, the holiday dust has settled and life on the farm has returned to our version of normal (complete with a barn flood and power outage -- more on that later), I've had a chance to do some reminiscing about the past year.

Just this morning, Lucas and I looked at each other, with incredulity and wonder and asked, "How did we get here?" You'd think after six months we'd be done asking that question but when a dream comes true, it takes a while to sink in.

Truth be told, moving to the farm isn't the first time I've had a dream come true. The day I married my husband and the births of both my children are the most important occasions of my life.

But moving to the country, living just as we're living right now, was for a long time something that seemed beyond our reach.

It was just over a year ago, New Year's Eve 2007, that Lucas and I had a mutual feeling that 2008 would be a "big" year for us. I half-expected this "big" would have something to do with our careers. Lucas had just quit his job and was looking for a new opportunity and now that the kids were getting older, I'd hoped to spend more time building my freelance writing career.

We had a good life -- fabulous friends (who I still miss dearly), a great school for our kids, a comfortable home -- but we were faced with a growing feeling that our beliefs were becoming incompatible with our lifestyle.

We wanted to move away from heating our home with fossil fuels, but we lived in a 150-year-old semi-detached home, surrounded by mature trees and close to a major road, that was not a good candidate for retrofitting or even supplementing with alternative energies.

I wanted to grow more of our own food but our backyard was a shady haven for hostas and impatiens -- not vegetables (though had we not moved when we did, I was to have a plot in our town's first allotment garden.)

We wanted to raise our own animals, surround ourselves with open spaces and get away from the buzz of city life. Moving to another part of town, even on the outskirts, just wasn't an option as housing prices were going through the roof and developers were circling the city limits.

Besides, our once small town was becoming too busy, too big-box, too suburban.

We knew it was time to move on, before we'd grown even stronger roots to our community. But truth be told, we were scared.

We worried that if we moved to a small town, we'd have difficulty making a decent living. What's more, we'd lived in our old town for nine years and we'd grown to love the familiarity of it all. We'd be starting from scratch, again, but this time with two young children -- which made a move that much scarier but also that much more imperative.

My dad and his wife had moved east of the GTA only a couple of years earlier and we were taken by our impressions of a more relaxed pace of living. We decided to look "east" and we gave ourselves a window of about two years.

Then in late March, I attended a sustainability symposium in Belleville, Ontario. The night before, I stayed at a lovely bed & breakfast, the Motley Manor on Lilac Grove Hill, in Madoc, Ontario -- about 35 minutes north of the symposium. I spent a solid two hours chatting with the owner and her mother, who was visiting, about the area and our dreams for a simpler life.

Visiting the symposium the next day, with its presentations on sustainable food systems, alternative home construction and green energy options, cemented my belief that we were on the right track.

Then just two weeks later, I attended the 2008 Farmland Preservation Forum in Guelph, Ontario, which was essentially a discussion on strategies to help ensure access to land for the next generation of farmers. At my table was a gentleman from FarmStart, a non-profit organization that helps young and new farmers get started, as well as the Executive Director of the Quebec Farmer Association (QFA).

As we went around the table, introducing ourselves and explaining why we were at the conference, I could feel my stomach churning and the palms of my hands started feeling clammy.

When it was my turn to speak, I said that I was a representative of P.O.W.E.R. (a Halton-Ontario based environmental organization of which I was a board member) but I was also an aspiring farmer. It was the first time I'd voiced our dream to anyone beyond a close circle of family or friends.

No one laughed. In fact, a few people smiled and nodded their head in approval.

Then, at the lunch break, the ED of the QFA sat down with me and started asking about our plans. The more I talked, the less crazy I started to feel. What's more, I started believing it was possible.

Then he asked me, "If you didn't try it, would you regret it?" and without hesitation, I answered "Yes." He asked me, "Then what's stopping you?"

What's stopping us, indeed.

I can scarcely remember the rest of the conference. My mind was a whirlwind of possibility and I couldn't wait to get home. Lucas and I had been having conversations about a modern-day homestead for years (I was more nervous than he, by far) and just recently, we'd started voicing our ideas with my dad. But now, our dream was truly "out there."

Now, I'd been browsing for online property listings for ages and I hadn't yet found anything that even resembled our pretty specific dream list. I was starting to think that we'd never find it: a three-bedroom century home on 50 to 100 acres with outbuildings, a pond or a stream, with a sizable woodlot and pasture, all within our price range.

But within a week of the conference, I'd found a property that was all that. Twelve days after the conference, on a Tuesday in late April, we visited and placed a successful offer on the farm we now call home.

Of course, when a dream comes true, it's easy to left with the feeling of "what's next?" Thankfully for us, whether it's the union of two people, the birth of a child or a move to the country, we're guaranteed years of memories in the making.

We still have lots of work to do and we're struggling to make a decent living. To say our learning curve is steep is a gross understatement. But we've never once said, "We made a mistake" or wished we were anywhere else.

So while 2008 was the year of something "big", we hope 2009 will be the year of lots of new "little" beginnings.