My man and I have been together for 15 years this summer. We'll be marrying in August of '13, if all goes well. While I didn't grow up 'on the land' (rather, 'in the mountains'), Mike did. He spent much of his childhood on a small family farm in the midwest. We moved out of the city (Olympia, WA) a little over 6 years ago, and are trying to sustainably build a soul enriching flower and woodland garden to house our massive iris collection in a nutrient-poor twice-harvested clear-cut grown over with mutant hybrid douglas firs. Our work is cut out for us.
While we're now in a rather red portion of the state, we don't generally encounter any problems from neighbors. Our families are supportive and loving. Our neighbors are the best, we're very fortunate. We are blessed to live in a very beautiful setting. Neither of us are what you might expect of a gay couple from watching TV - I'm generally filthy from the garden or hiking deep in the mountains, Mike is generally dressed for the garden. I drive a 30 year old Toyota pickup, and know my way around logging roads better than city sidewalks.
I wish we would've come to our land with some measure of permaculture in mind, rather than coming to it once we got here, but we're moving forward and doing good things for the land. It is one center around which our relationship revolves. We enjoy shaping the land with our hands, guiding the plant and animal communities toward bounty and resilience, bringing beauty out of a fractured and injured landscape. We both look forward to preparing our land, and our selves, for the coming decades of change, and to growing old with our land. Just this morning, we were remarking on how the maples in front of the house, while still small, were just this year starting to show good form. In just a couple of years, they'll provide such a wonderful shade from the summer sun.
Life just keeps getting better.
