It was only about four years ago that I remember telling my friend that the world was spinning too fast. To me, it seemed that real estate was in a feeding frenzy, rents were insanely high, and both businesses and government had perfected separating average people from their cash very handily.
Yearning for the simplicity of my childhood, when I thought everyone was as poor as we were, I just wanted off the merry-go-round. I remembered having one telephone with a long, curly cord that would reach halfway down the basement steps. At least it gave me the illusion of privacy. We had one television, too, with three channels to choose from. One channel was clear, one was bearable, and the third looked like a perpetual snowstorm. We never felt deprived.
Living two miles out a dirt road, we did live the simple life. We never really considered it the simple life; to us it was just life. Our little acre was in the middle of a whole lot of coal mine land, so we didn’t have close neighbors, and the coal mine didn’t really care if we put a garden a few hundred feet above their maze of tunnels. So we had a garden, and my Mom and neighbor built a little pole barn, and we put up an electric fence to keep a few calves in. We put up food and stored it in the basement, and we sent our calves out to be butchered. They went into the freezer. In addition to the garden and barn, there were various fruit trees and even a grape arbor. Thinking back, it was absolutely perfect.
And I couldn’t wait to get away.
All those years later, when I felt the world was spinning out of control, I’d think back to those years in that little house, and I just knew that it was the right kind of life. Oh, how I wished I could have another chance to live it.
I have gone back to West Virginia and driven up that hill. I looked at the place where I’d lived while I went to high school, and I felt a sad nostalgia, a sense of loss. Although the trees and bushes were much more mature and the place somehow looked more “done,” it wasn’t really as I’d remembered it. The house had burned down sometime in the last 20 years, and another had been built in its place. And, standing there looking at someone else’s home, I knew it was true that you really can’t go back.
But that doesn’t mean that you can’t use that knowledge and those memories as you go forward. Thinking about my humble beginnings, I wondered why I’d ever come to the conclusion that EVERONE needs at least a four-bedroom house and a three-car garage. In my mind, I’d decided that a family (even just a couple) needed a master bedroom, a guest room, a home office, and a workout room, and they all needed to be furnished NICELY. In the garage, a car for me, a truck for my husband, and enough space for all his tools, our camp gear, Christmas decorations, and miscellaneous “stuff” was also essential.
Somewhere along the line, I started to feel like I was trapped. I’d look around at all the beautiful furniture my husband and I had chosen so carefully, all the shelves of books, the hundreds of DVDs and CDs, closets full of everything, and I just wanted to walk away. It took every dime we made just to live, and we didn’t even really live a lavish lifestyle. On one hand, I felt guilty about my feelings, because it felt like I wasn’t appreciating what I had. Remember when you were little and didn’t want to eat your food, and your Mom said, “Think about all those starving kids in China”? On the other hand, it was becoming more and more clear to me that people just don’t need SO MUCH STUFF!
And then the merry-go-round came to a screeching halt. It really is true that what goes up must come down. Without going into all the gory details, suffice to say that we knew the time had come to return to a simple life, to find the peace of mind that comes from having only what we need, and of knowing that we don’t really need nearly as much as we believed we did for so very long.
And so it began…
Craig’s List is an amazing place to get rid of “stuff” as long as you’re not interested in making a lot of money. We liquidated a four-bedroom house in a matter of a few weeks. Getting rid of stuff, I have learned, happens in stages. Things that you would never dream of getting rid of in round one will find their way out of the house by round three or four. The hardest part of all was getting rid of books, and to be completely honest, I wasn’t all that sucessful in that area. We still have several boxes and maybe I’ll let go of them by round five or six, but I’m not betting on it.
The furniture went quickly, and it was easy to believe we were moving along nicely, because each empty spot seemed so huge. As it turns out, the furniture wasn’t the hard part; it was all of those little tiny things that actually make up our lives: souvenirs from anniversary trips, boxes of old picture albums and high school yearbooks, junk jewelry that belonged to my mother many years ago, tons of office supplies that were just too good to throw away, but that I knew I didn’t have room for. The hardest part was the hundreds of decisions that had to be made every day, what to keep, what to let go of, about every little piece of our life. We ended up getting rid of at least 80% of everything we owned, but believe me, I now understand first-hand that little poster that said, “Everything I ever let go of had claw marks all over it.”
My husband and I now live with our 90-pound yellow lab in a log cabin in a little coastal town in Washington. Including the loft, it’s 729 square feet. Although my husband is 6’5″ tall, we manage in a queen bed rather than a California King. Did you know that you don’t actually NEED a dishwasher? It’s amazing! When you do your dishes after each meal, you always have everything clean and ready for the next meal. Our town has a nice little laundromat, and I visit once a week with my friend who runs it while our two loads of clothes wash and tumble dry. Whenever the sun comes out, we take Juneau (the yellow lab) and head over to the beach. Our cost of living has decreased by about two thirds, I’d say.
We shop for real food now, and we cook real food. Both of us have noticed that our joints don’t hurt anymore. I can’t say for sure that it’s the change in diet, or a more relaxed lifestyle, but we’re definitely feeling better. It’s taken awhile to realize that we don’t have to go at a dead run for 12 hours a day just to pay the bills, but we’re getting there. Our idea of a Valentine’s celebration this year was to splurge on 2 nice filet mignons. We grilled them on our George Foreman, opened our favorite wine, put on a nice CD, and ended the evening in our little two-person hot tub on the porch waching the geese fly over on their migration north.
We’re thinking about putting in a solar/wind off-the-grid power system and maybe an underground rainwater collection tank. Then we’d REALLY have it made!
Given what’s going on in the country right now, I have to believe that we made the right choice by getting off the merry-go-round. Some might think of what we did as “austerity measures,” but we’re adjusting. It isn’t the life we had. To me, it’s a whole lot better. Simplicity of life is the ultimate freedom. Where else but in America can we have that freedom?
Do you think maybe our government could learn something about going back to a simpler life?
The new Weight Watchers Points Plus program, in my opinion, is FANTASTIC! I’ve fought my weight for nearly all of my adult life, and when I hit menopause, WHAM, it got even worse. But, I’m counting points, working out, and finally dropping the pounds. I also have a food storage business….hmmm. Although food storage is technically for emergencies, I’ve been known to dip into my reserves occasionally (quite often, actually) and I wondered how these delicious storage foods would stack up as far as Weight Watchers goes.
