Raven's Roads
Living an interesting life: the travels and musings
of motorcycling author Linda R. Moore

Nov 18, 2006

Gardens are good

Filed in Blog

On Hallowe’en morning we received a very nasty surprise, the kind of surprise that makes one want to scream or throw up immediately…or both.

Our mobile home park is to be sold to make room for townhomes. We are to become victims of greed: let me give you a brief clue as to how much greed. It is highly unlikely that they will spend more than a total of $750,000 buying out all our mobile homes. $750,000 is most likely the start price for the townhomes they will be building. Assuming they build ten town homes…well, you do the math.

I and my neighbors have all gone through the bitterness, anger, shock and all the rest of it. We sat stonily through the meeting in which the nice builder man spoke of his nice family-owned business in front of a bunch of people who were wondering what they were going to do with their families. But that’s enough of that.

This thing is going to happen. Unless somebody else takes up the fight, I’m not going to waste time and effort and emotion on fighting it. Assuming approval, notice will be given in February. We’ll then have six months to Make Other Plans. The longer I live, the more I think that Making Plans is not a good way for me to do things. It seems, and I say this without bitterness, that Plans are for other people. For me, there’s just this river and I sail down it in a little canoe. Every so often we come across a great big waterfall, like this one, and then we circumnavigate it and move on. I’m starting to take the attitude that it’s better to just point one’s nose in a direction that feels right, and see what happens.

For example, I had just got done reading “The Complete Tightwad Gazette” in preparation for my husband’s extended sabattical (after 3 years with no vacation it was about time); I had rather been relying on being able to live cheaply in our mobile home. This threw us for a loop because a) rentals would be a minimum of three times the cost of our rent here and b) I seriously doubt that anybody is going to let us buy a mobile home, even outright, during the middle of a sabattical period.

So, what to do, what to do?

We think we’re going to buy an RV. That’s a motor home, for my friends over the Pond. That’s right, kiddies, we’re talking about buying some kind of shack-on-wheels and going to see America. This is the least responsible, strangest solution that popped into our minds, and right now it seems to be the only one that makes the remotest bit of sense. Of course, if we don’t go that route, I’ll be wiping egg off my face, but for now it seems that is the way we are being poked to go. I can take my writing and books and cats along, do some talks and visits, and it will be a chance to finally live instead of being bottled into the constraints of a crazy Silicon Valley work schedule. We can even look for a patch of land on which, maybe, to build a home.

Even so, I have no intention of planning this trip beyond the basics of making sure all our ducks are in a row and stating, “Yes, I want to do this.” We will just go, and see what happens.

So, what’s this got to do with gardens, I hear you say? Well, part of the sale is that we need to get an appraisal done. For over a week now I have been hauling out trash and decluttering and changing the shape of my home so that it can get a good appraisal. The last day or so I’ve been out in the garden, calming that down as much as I can. While hacking away at my garden I have gained clarity on various things, including that actually, I’m no longer unhappy about this situation with the house. I’m excited that I might be going on a fantastic road trip. I’m excited that I might be able to launch a newsletter about our travels. And I’m excited that I might be able to sell a few more copies of “A Little Twist of Texas” and meet some Book Crossers and Markeroons.

But more than that, because of all my physical labor in the garden and the smell of its rich damp earth, I feel peaceful about what is to come. And for that, gardens are the best thing on Earth.