Why are Hippies Dirty and Other Unanswerable Questions
With apologies for not writing more about my ambulance life adventures, it turns out they are actually much more mundane than TikTok would have you believe, and mostly they involve just living in an extremely small space while you do normal life. I like to believe I have a knack for words and sometimes even storytelling, but even I could not make hanging out in a trailer park while furiously finishing my dissertation every day into an interesting yarn.
On the other hand, I can already tell that my new living adventure — in which I join a quasi-commune of weird hippie woo-woo types — is going to be much more story worthy. I move in this Saturday and already spent an entire day cleaning out the refrigerators in the old grist Mill that will be my new home. I will not give you all the details because I want to respect your digestion, but let’s just say that the cooling unit in one of them had a hiccup and did not do right by the numerous uncapped bottles of homemade kombucha and sunchoke pickles labelled “2018.” Y’all. It was bad.
While recuperating and trying to undo the trauma of the whole thing, I sat out in what was once a very cute little yard off the back of the Mill. Hidden behind some trees is a tiny, abandoned stone spring house that will make an excellent little writing cottage once I sweep it out and put in a desk and some string lights. It would be a delightful place to turn my dissertation into a book. The yard, meanwhile, is currently a holding pen for half a dozen uncompleted projects, rotting picnic tables, stacks of unsorted firewood, and overgrown garden beds. And yet. The stream that used to power the Mill burbles off to the side, its banks overflowing with a wild bounty of foraging opportunities. Wild grapes, day lilies, raspberry bushes, nettles, hostas, poke weed, and clovers spilling all over each other. Walnut trees and ferns off to the other side. A day or two of dedicated cleaning would turn the porch and yard into a tiny piece of heaven. The fireflies should be out any day now.
Having to deal with the questionable hygiene practices of hippies aside, I’m really excited about this next leg of my journey. I’m already thinking about the pickled grape leaves I’m going to be making, turning the dissertation into a book, learning some farming and historical building restoration, and just generally reorienting my priorities from the go-go-go mentality of academia and the rest of the “respectable” world. Paying $500 a month in rent and being able to pick fresh food steps from my back door sounds an awful lot more attractive to me at the moment than spending $1400 a month for a studio apartment in an overcrowded concrete suburb with failing infrastructure. I’m looking forward to sharing more of these questionable choices and unbecoming adventures with y’all going forward.
[ Editor’s Note March 06, 2025: tl;dr this adventure was a terrible, terrible mistake. It was in fact extremely story-worthy, but not in a good way. Let us never speak of it again. ]
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