My Suburban Escapes

My mind roams while my body is fenced in on yet another short cold gray day.  Winter just makes me sick, as in I can’t breathe and I’m in bed sick.  I’m don’t mind the cold, but it’s tough on me. I can only conclude I’m allergic to it because I’m southern. I must lack what it takes to survive winter because of evolution, like gills.  But I have an ace up my sleeve this year, a plan for when the dark spiral begins. In this, my twelth winter here, I’ve gotten wise to my wily winter ways. 

I got a yurt.

The yurt is a thing of beauty: easy to erect, easily portable, warm in winter and able to ventilate in summer. It is the ultimate shelter for the impossible conditions of a nomadic life in Mongolia, or in the suburbs.  Ours positively glows in our backyard, a circular domed tent stretched over a collapsible lattice framework. It was built by a wood worker and his seamstress wife in Oregon and shipped to us for Christmas. We, as a family unit, somehow cobbled it together in the cold without killing each other.  It is 12 feet in diameter and is connected to civilization by an umbilical cord running from our back porch so the babies inside can have heat, light and music.

I’m really not an earthy-crunchy gal.  I prefer living ON the grid, but out of the house, especially when I’m stir crazy. The yurt is the perfect inside-out solution, warm enough for me to nap and read by day and for the kids to hang out and blast the karaoke machine and party lights by night.  I can even watch the moon pass by the hole in the rooftop, feeling every bit like a nomad on the Eastern Asian steppes of yore. 

Daydreaming in our yurt has led me to one conclusion: I could live off the land and in the yurt if I had to. I’ve about figured it out. I’d snowshoe into the vast wilderness behind our house to find just about everything I need.  The golf courses of Apawamis, Willow Ridge and Westchester create a large uninhabited landmass of about 500 acres of happy hunting ground.  Deer, duck, geese, squirrel and rabbits are plentiful.  We have a bow and arrows, a shotgun and several bb guns so I could put the kids to work.   I could fetch drinking water in Beaver Swamp Brook, boiling it first on our fire pit in the back yard. I’d wash clothes in the pond on Apawamis’ 12^th hole and hang them to dry on our zipline.   I could mill wheat to make bread using the water rushing over the dam on Willow Ridge’s 6^th hole (note to self: plant wheat).  We already have a garden, so I just need to dig a root cellar to store summer’s bounty of onions, peppers, lettuce, corn, carrots, tomatoes, broccoli, radishes and peas.  I could harvest ice from the golf course ponds to keep the cellar cool. For protein, we could catch the huge turtles that swim in Beaver Swamp Brook in Greenwood Cemetery, using their shells for bowls afterward. 

I could canoe down Blind Brook to the open waters of the Long Island Sound where lies protein a plenty:  oyster beds, clams, lobster and fish, all mine for the harvesting. I’d stop by the Nature Center on the way to pick some herbs from their garden and maybe kidnap a knowledgeable naturalist.

So even though I am stuck inside, hacking and wheezing and delirious with boredom, my mind is free and wild. I am not fenced in.  I can sit in my yurt and daydream.  Yes, it’s so cold that the ponds are frozen and the geese have nowhere to land.  Yes it’s so windy that we’ve staked down the yurt with rebar and rope and fearfully watch her billow and flutter.  Yet I rest securely in the knowledge that I could, if needs must, make do out there. A country gal can survive.