Tfgray’s Weblog

Well, yes, I am. Did George Bush or government fiscal policy have anything to do with it?

Probably not.

Eight years ago, I was supporting 3 kids. Now they’re grown and supporting themselves.

Eight years ago, my mortgage was around $70K. Now it’s about $13K. Turns out my employer shut down my workplace in 2005. I had to choose: move with my job or stay where I was and find a new one. As it turned out, my job moved to Oregon, a place I’d visited 25 years before and loved. I sold my house, the timing controlled by my workplace closing and my daughter’s graduation. As it turned out, June 2005 was the top of the real estate bubble.

The criteria for the new place were (1) no more than a $25K mortgage and (2) no more than 5 miles from work. We downsized into a smaller house on a smaller lot in a cheaper neighborhood 3.3 miles from my job and 3.5 from my husband’s. (Our previous commute was 40 miles a day each, in opposite directions. )

We always gardened, but now we are more interested in maximizing yields and putting up produce. The new place has an apple and a plum tree, and we’ve planted two dwarf pears. Our next major investment will be $200 for a small chest freezer, and in the spring, about twice that for a lean-to greenhouse for the south side of the house. Our first major investment, which we paid off this month, was upgrading the windows to state of the art. We use about half the firewood of other households in our neighborhood.

Yes, firewood. We couldn’t heat with wood in the old house, but this one has a fireplace with a fairly efficient insert, definitely a selling point from our perspective. Since my husband works in landscaping, wood follows him home (in the back of his pickup truck) on a fairly regular basis. As in the previous house, we have a timer on the thermostat. The furnace kicks on just before I get up, and kicks off an hour later, when my husband waltzes out the door to walk the dog. Whoever gets home first starts the fire.

The rest of the time, the thermostat is set at 60 degrees. During cold weather we bank the fire at night. Daytime, we open the shades on the south side in the winter; we close them in the summer. When it’s hot, we use fans rather than air conditioning. The windows keep the temp consistently 19 degrees cooler than the outside temp. In cold weather, the furnace, outside of that one hour in the morning, comes on infrequently. Our worst natural gas bill so far? $62, in February ‘06, the month that natural gas prices mysteriously doubled. (Just for comparison, the monthly bill in the summer, when only the pilot light runs, is $16. There’s a minimum fee and some taxes and whatnot that account for much of it.)

Eight years ago, in a house heated with oil–the price of which has nearly quadrupled since–we ran about $300 a year. Our oil company would sell contracts. We would estimate how many gallons we needed, pay our heating bill in July and then settle up for the difference the following spring. The company stopped offering contracts in 2004. Oil prices had gotten too volatile and they could no longer guarantee the price.

Am I doing better? Yes, I think I am, but I’ve been lucky. Without that fortuitous job-related move, I’d be looking at making mortgage payments until I was 82. My husband and I would be burning about 3 gallons of gas a day between us, instead of 3-4 a week total. My home heating bill would be at the mercy of Big Oil, speculators and Arabs.

I’m lucky. My kids are a blessing. Every day at work I hear co-workers talking about their kids’ problems with school, drugs, the law, and whether they’re on the right meds. Mine, knock wood, are doing ok. Luck has a lot to do with my being better off, as does making every effort possible to conserve energy and become self-sufficient in food and energy.

Some people wouldn’t see me as being better off. I’m in a smaller house in a more modest neighborhood, driving a used compact car. I get my hands dirty in the garden and slice and dice and pickle and stew. I sweat and watch my hair frizz as I put quarts of dills and bread and butter pickles in the hot water bath. I stack firewood while my husband swings an axe. To some people, this is a giant step backward, a fearsome reversal of the eternally upward trend of the American economy.

To me, it’s just that the lifestyle I’d aspired to, so demonized as “Hippy” in the Sixties and Seventies, happens to be working out just fine.