Circling Home

How We Came to Live Here

Only in the past few generations and only in a handful of cultures have people claimed to need houses. Now almost all of us have houses, but most of us are still homeless. richard manning, A Good House: Building a Life on the Land How We Came to Live Here When we decided to get married three years ago, Betsy and I also decided to build. Separate households would be disbanded and real estate liquidated, creating enough equity to finance our dream house. We were both in our forties and lucky to have found each other. We had been married to others before, but neither union lasted as long as the vows promised. My first marriage was very short in duration, less than a year. Betsy’s endured much longer and was of much more consequence. After seventeen years, when the marriage finally ended, Betsy had two fine boys, Rob and Russell, to show for it. Twenty years after mine dissolved, I had less to show—just a set of divorce papers filed safely away and two decades of unsettled freedom. Working through this freedom kept me single for twenty years and often on the road. I like to dream, and during those two decades my dreams were much more interesting to me than my grounding realities. Being a dreamer was a good excuse to avoid a steady job, to keep from marrying, from committing to anything. “You need to own your fear of commitment,” a 14 girlfriend once said to me. It was not a good moment in the relationship, which ended soon afterward. “Can’t I rent the feeling for a few more years?” I asked as a parting compromise. But things change, even people who are so paralyzed that they need the iron lung of infinite possibility to breathe. Frank Lloyd Wright, quite a dreamer himself, says in The Natural House that when selecting a habitation site there is always the question of how close to the city you should be. Get as far out as you can, Wright advised in 1954. “Avoid the suburbs— dormitory towns—by all means.” Go, he said, way out in the country, and “when others follow, as they will . . . move on.” The answer as to how far out you can move, Wright claims, depends on what kind of slave you are. What kind of slaves, I of course asked, are we? I’d never thought of myself as enslaved, but I admire Frank Lloyd Wright, and I had to consider just what he might mean. After all, I am a southerner, so the word “slave” has some serious baggage. Wright did not have my personal history or the entire history of the South in mind when he talked about slaves. By slavery he meant whatever it is that “employs” you can also most likely enslave you. After thinking through Wright’s terms of “employment ” it began to occur to me that I am now fully enslaved—to my car, this house, the college where I work, even to my sense of who I am: writer, poet, teacher, environmentalist. All of these masters contributed to determining where we would build. Our jobs, as enslavements, are not the worst the area has to offer, and at least they promise flexible hours and adequate income . Betsy and I are both writers as well, and I struggle, in particular , to write imaginatively about the natural world around me, and that effort often seems to enslave my every moment. “At home in the world,” Sam Hamill, a poet friend of mine, once called a book of his essays. I’ve worked twenty-five years to understand what he meant by that. Until the last few years, I didn’t need much in the way of home, and I was skeptical of those who did. I lived by the code How We Came to Live Here ° 15 of the wandering poet for twenty years, but love has a way of rewriting personal codes, so when Betsy and I decided to get married, there was never any question I would take the challenges of settlement straight on. Throughout history, from hut to condominium, the path of settlement has always passed through some form of structure-building and occupation. Slave to a mortgage? When we said, “I do,” we both accepted this mutual obligation that stretched thirty years into the future. Wright would say that our...