Today over at Jetson Green Preston posted on the $30,000 recycled cabin manifesto.  It was an interesting post, one that really made me think and one that prompted a bit of a rambling comment that then prompted this post.  I missed my bi-monthly Mondays in the garden post, so this will be it.  On Tuesday.

So what caused my rambling comment and drove me to write this post?  It was the combination of these paragraphs over at Jetson Green:

That said, if someone mentions they’re building a second home, the typical environmentalist will most certainly pounce.  It’s a common, knee-jerk reaction, but tell me you don’t find some truth in Lou’s statement:

Building a cabin, I’m finding, can be a lever into a middle-aged man’s rural fantasies. Second homes are an American obsession, partly — maybe mainly — because of the chance they give us to live a second life, one that may be truer to our real selves than the first that we live out of necessity.

A place to get away and enjoy nature.  Maybe even respect nature and realize how important the environment actually is.  Maybe even get back to nature because our first homes don’t really do the job.  Lou tells us why he’s building a cabin, and we can’t blame him either.  He seems to be going at it the right way, that’s for sure.

Image source CC from Flickr user johnylive

Currently I live an abbreviated version of my ideal life.  A 15×40 organic garden in my back yard serves as my farm and my home is my version of the cabin I would really want to live in, but really is nothing like the home of my dreams.  Sure, I like it well enough and I live in it now, but if I could do what I really wanted to do, it would be different for sure.  Read on to see how.

If I had life my way I would live on a paid off 40 acre swath of land in a home that I built myself out of trees that needed to be thinned from my land. I would raise a cow for milk and meat along with a couple of sheep and goats. It would have a creek for trout and power generation and would feed into and out of a pond. Duck, geese and chickens would populate the grounds with the guinea fowl and peacocks.  A little corral of goats and sheep would finish off the mini farm.  All of these animals would serve an organic purpose, an educational purpose for my children and would provide, the milk, cheese, eggs and meat that we would need for us and to sell.

Image source CC from Flickr user Ilovebutter.

Moving along I would reserve enough of the acreage for organic gardens that would create enough food for the family and enough to sell to keep us in the necessities that the land did not provide. It would be off grid of-course and fully self sustaining.  The land not needed to sustain us would sit as a respite from everything in the world and would remain in it’s natural state as a playground and laboratory for my children.

Sure it would be a lot of work, but the land is paid for and sustains itself, so it would be my work.  I wouldn’t have to leave everyday to commute to a job I hate to pay for and a life that I really don’t want.  It isn’t even that far fetched for me.  As a child my parents owned a 25 room motor court.  In the back we had the acreage, the animals and the garden along with the untouched land for my playground and laboratory.  I had chores and I actually enjoyed them.  Well, most of them.  I hated spreading goat manure on the lawn for fertilizer.  I cried over that job.

This life isn’t that far away for any of us and isn’t even that far back in our families.  My grandparents mostly lived life this way and my great grandparents absolutely lived life this way.  To get there it would just take the guts to make a major change and the money to buy 40 acres outright.

So there you have it.  My dream life.  What is yours?