Samhain Thanksgiving Moon
The transition from growing season to fallow season creates a sudden release from one domain of chores. No more spraying, harvesting, weeding, checking the health of the plants. No more colony inspections.
Many baby boomers, the paper says, have migrated to downtown apartments citing outdoor work and home maintenance as primary motivation. While that once might have made sense to me, now I wonder. The outdoor work, as long as I’m able, keeps me active, close to the rhythms of the natural world. It gives more than it takes. Cut off from it in an apartment doesn’t sound appealing. If you don’t like it, if it takes more than it gives, then, yes.
I know that feeling. Home maintenance would take far more than it gives if I felt responsible for doing it myself. So I can understand wanting to move away from that. In an apartment the building takes over the plumbing, the furnace, the windows, the doors. Even there, however, being responsible for seeing that the maintenance gets done, though it does feel burdensome, maintains our agency. And I like that.
More than any of these matters, though, is the single word home. This is home. Though we could, I don’t want to create another one. At least not now.