It costs

We live fairly far north. Our growing season is short. It’s early September and the season is basically over. There are a few small organic operations, but very few. Most of our organic food has to be trucked in. It’s about 350 miles to the US border.
Because of these factors organic food in my community is expensive and it is hard to find. When you do find it there isn’t much variety. Organic fruits are the rarest because they don’t travel well without pesticides, which would kind of nullify the organic thing. We get a few types of apples, some bananas, and the odd orange. We get a slightly wider range of vegetables: carrots, lettuce, extremely expensive tomatoes. Packaged foods are easier: broth, canned tomatoes. We do have an organic bakery so bread is accessible.
I’m lucky because we both have good salaries and don’t have children to feed.
Organic foods taste wonderful. The flavour is fuller; the mouth feel is superior. They are worth the cost.

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This one is ambiguous

I guess when I set this goal I was responding to a very specific time of my life when I was coming out of a very unhappy and unsettled period and looking at a chance for happiness and stability. The issue, maybe, isn’t the place: it’s the people. When you are with the one you want to be with, then the place is less important We are together, now, in one place. The question now is, is it the right place for us? If it’s the right place for us now, will it be the right place in the future?
It used to be there was this ideal of stability. The family home stood there, forever, a place for the kids and grandkids to return to for Christmas and anniversaries and birthday parties. That’s the kind of family I grew up in, with my grandparents’ farm as the focal point.
Now it’s all different. My parents’ children have scattered; my children too. My grandparents are dead; one of mine too. Last summer I had to go back “home” to help my mom sell her house to raise money to pay for her stay in the old folks’ home. We had a yard sale, sold a lot of family stuff, had the movers haul a lot of stuff to my place and those of my siblings, threw a lot out. I was the last member of my family to sleep in the house. Given over to aliens after more than half a century of ownership. The house my father and his friends built after WWII. The house where I grew up. Gone.
This summer I did the same for my own family house. We’d owned it for about 15 years. The marriage is over. The kids are all grown up and working in other cities hundreds of miles away. Again there was the packing, the selling, the movers. Again, I was the last member of my family to sleep in the house before it went. It’s been a time of sadness, but softened with joy because I’ve moved in with somebody I love. We are looking at a life together in this house or in another one, as we choose.
It’s not merely the stability of location and property, though they are a lot more important than many people think. It’s the stability of the love.

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