EcoBliss: Urban Living is Smart Living

First buds on dwarf apple tree.

Listening to right now: Paolo Conte

Today's Happiness Formula: The sound of Italian first thing in the morning! Waking with books in my head. Waking and feeling truly awake (thanks to obeying my wheat allergy).

Following My Bliss by: Today I'll ride my bike to my chiropractor and then to get wine to go with homemade corn tortillas tonight. Yum. A friend is coming this morning to pick up the incorporation papers for an adult creativity center we are in the process of opening. Later, I will finish writing a grant and doing edits on my partner's novel.

We live on one-tenth of an acre in the city. We are in a zone 6b (for you gardening nerds) that acts a lot like a zone 7. We are in a clean watershed. Our bio-region is diverse, to say the least.

And right here, in this tiny yard, there is so much going on:

We have been eating asparagus for about three weeks already.

There is edible kale -- it overwintered -- and there are baby kales, chard, dandelion, greens of all sorts coming up.

Our kiwi vines -- yes, kiwi, there is a hardy variety -- are trailing and filling out the front arbor. I can already see buds aplenty.

Our grape vines are robust.

Our dwarf apple that we planted two summers ago has its first flowers. Perhaps we will eat an apple this fall from our own yard.

Our almond tree is healthy -- for now. Almonds in California are being plagued by an unknown disease and I fear for ours.

Our strawberries are covered in flowers and we will eat strawberries into the fall -- and this is only their third summer here.

This is all in a yard that has a ton of flowers. Besides being good for bees and birds and butterflies, they are good for my eyes. And we still have too much grass -- which in my book means we have grass. I would like to not have any and someday we will accomplish that goal. For now, we mow with a reel mower.

For every vegetable or fruit we eat out of our own yard, we are decreasing our footprint on this small planet.

I won't go on and on about the evils of sprawl. Here's a place you can read about that. But from what I have observed about people who live out in the country, they spend a lot of their time driving into cities. Everything they do takes more resources. Think about how much more fuel it takes to get them their groceries alone. Add to this the fact that they most often do not work any where near their homes. They are constantly commuting.

City living can be the more relaxing option -- if you approach it intentionally and mindfully.

We don't have to have a car. Which you know by now. At the very least, could you get rid of one of your cars? (It is pretty safe to assume in this country that if you have two adults in your household, you have two cars.)

There's no public transportation out in the country. There's barely any in the suburbs.

We live within a 3 mile radius of absolutely everything we need. Think about that. It's all walkable! We don't have to drive for anything -- we can walk to our food, our entertainment, our work.

And if more people opted out of cars and into bikes, walking, and public transportation, imagine how much more wonderful and human-friendly city-living could become.

We could remove driveways and add gardens! We could make kid-dense areas car free. There are parts of London where you can't drive a car. Downtown Freiberg, Germany is car free.

Living off the grid might sound ideal, but grids work because they are efficient in that they serve many, many people. What we suck into the grid is where the change can -- and needs to -- happen. The grid itself is not the problem.

We are part of a community. Some of our best friends live within the houses right around us. That is worth something -- especially if you believe times might become increasingly difficult.

We are two people living in 900 square feet (small here, but large in most parts of the world) on one tenth of an acre. We could be two people living on 10, 20, 100 acres, and that is not justifiable unless you are a farmer.

And being a farmer is something most of us could not handle, no matter how much we like to romanticize it. Most of us can't grow a decent tomato. Let's just start where we are, shall we? Like with salad greens -- you don't even need a garden bed; a pot will do for salad greens!

Does gardening and producing your own food on a small piece of land sound like too much work? Because it's small, the gardening is dense, which means less weeding. And because we aren't driving around all the time trying to fulfill needs or get to jobs, we have a lot of free time.

Because this is about quality of life, above all else. We live cheaper and easier and so we don't need to work as much and can concentrate on our writing and our art and our friendships and having fun.

Imagine that.

EcoBliss: Joyful Car-Free Living, Part 2

My newest bike, barely a year old, Holly GoLightly.
(A Giant like Genevieve.)

Listening to right now: Amelie Soundtrack

Today's Happiness Formula: Rediscovering music that is transcendent and makes me feel filled and slightly floaty at the same time.

Relevant-to-this-Post Headline: I've been told that our Erie Mayor will be announcing a bike-to-work week, which will take place May 12th to the 18th. Details about other activities will be forthcoming!

After deciding that giving up our car for a year's experiment was a go, I looked at everything we did on a regular basis and figured out how to do it without a car.

The only thing I could not get to without a car was cat litter. Yes, cat litter! We went through a lot of it, having multiple cats, and the bags were too big and heavy for a bus ride.

So I looked into the idea of an occasional car rental, which turned out to be very cheap on weekends through Enterprise. (And they are not paying me to say this!)

That was that. Fast forward seven years and we rent very little. Perhaps 8 weekends a year. Holidays, family out of town visits -- that sort of thing.

Now, if you have children, your first line of defense for you car will be them, so I direct you to a blog about a family living car free.

But WHY do this, you may still be asking, so here's the list, and it's certainly not exhaustive:

**It slows you down to a more human pace of life. Were we meant to go 70 miles an hour? When I look at the anger on people's faces in their cars, I know the answer is "no."
**It's great for your overall health. No more gym. No more stress. Driving, now that I don't do it all the time I can notice this, driving really shoots adrenaline into your system. It's a trying-to-survive thing.
**You notice things about where you live that you would have never noticed in a car. And you'll feel more invested in where you live because of this.
**You won't spend as much. The average car -- and this is an 8 year old stat from a book by Katie Alvord -- costs 5 to 7 thousand a year. And every time you think of some little thing you "need," it's so easy to jump in the car and get it -- no more.
**You won't be running around all the time. Whenever we do rent, we run some errands, and I think about how people do this kind of running almost daily. Two days of it every couple of months almost drives me batty.
**You'll have more time to do what really matters. Since you won't be running around so much and since you'll have more disposable income and maybe can cut back on work that you don't like (if that's the case), you can spend quiet time with your family, plant a vegetable garden, read poetry, paint a masterpiece -- listen to your heart's yearnings.
**Be European wherever you are! Living without a car makes me feel like I live in a village. And when I have flowers in my front basket and fresh produce in my back basket, I can imagine I live in one of those very Miss Marple towns (but without the murder, thank you!).

Nothing simplifies your life like getting rid of your car.

And now the harder stuff (you knew it was coming):

**We are at war for oil. Period. Wars are always about resources. And this war will turn into more wars, if we don't figure this out.
**This problem is one of demand and not one of supply, as we are treating it. We must take responsibility for this war every time we fill our gas tanks and it doesn't matter how you vote -- if you drive every single day by yourself in a car when there are other options. We can find other "fuels" but in fifty years we will discover the error of our ways yet again. Nothing is perfect. Every fuel comes at a price.
**We subsidize our addiction by taking away from some of the solutions. Our roadways, our gas prices, our car manufacturers -- all of them take government subsidy money away from railways and buses, more efficient forms of transportation, bike paths, and on and on.
**The problem does not stop at fuel: the manufacture and subsequent disposal of that car wears on the environment in a larger way than the extraction of the fuel that goes into it.
**This list will not go into the details of all the death: human, animal, and otherwise.

Al Gore called the truth of all of this "Inconvenient," and yes, for many people, that is how simple it is, and so they continue to choose convenience.

But there is so much more to this issue that has to do with the beauty of our humanity...

the connections to nature that we are missing...

the infinite power of our imaginations that we are denying every time we take the easy way...

the lives that we are missing and exchanging for speed and consumption.

EcoBliss: Joyful Car-Free Living

My Bike, Genevieve, at a park near our home.

Listening to right now: Revista do Samba

Today's Happiness Formula: Another "yes" in my inbox to a request for an interview; I am overwhelmed by people's positive responses to this idea.

The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man.
Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish.
Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.
--Iris Murdoch, 1965

"Where to start?" I always ask myself when I'm thinking about telling someone about our car free lifestyle and what it means to us.

At the beginning.

When we still had a Paris-quality patisserie in this town, whose walls were sunshine yellow and whose owners always smiled and whose pastries, well, they could almost make you believe you had died and this was definitely heaven.

I had a partially eaten chocolate croissant on the table. Partially eaten, that is how used to this heaven I was. A cup of perfectly not-over-roasted coffee at the right hand corner of my journal.

In which I was scribbling, furiously. I was writing a list suggested by Julia Cameron's Right to Write.

And that was when an impossible sentence spilled from my pen: We could get rid of our car.

We could get rid of our car, it whispered, and you could have more time to write and she could have more time to paint and...

I looked up to see if the world had stopped spinning.

And this seems like hyperbole, but in this culture, really, is it?

For my partner, the thought of not having a car was instantly do-able. For me, I was much more attached to being able to get around quickly.

And I was a bit lazy. Admit it, that is part of the issue. Cars are so easy.

And we don't live in Boston or Chicago or any such place. I have lived in Chicago; I have experienced real public transportation.

The public transportation in a small city like ours can be...startling.

In order to get myself to do it, to make the leap, I made a deal with myself: this was a one year experiment. You can do anything for one year. Right?

We handed in our car at the end of July in 2001.

We have (barely) looked back. Yes, every spring, after a winter of partaking of very poor buses that only run every 45 minutes, every spring, I get the urge, I lust after a car.

Just a small one, I say, as my mouth waters like the post-diet, starved-for-chocolate, about-to-fall-off-the-wagon woman we have all been at one time or another.

Every year, this wandering eye lasts shorter and shorter amounts of time. The first few years, I could go a month or two comparing and contrasting all the possibilities. This spring, about a month ago, my lust was down to a few days.

Because our life is good.

Really good.

Without a car. With the occasional rental.

This choice was made for all the right reasons -- quality of life reasons -- and those override lust every time.

How do we do it? What does the day to day look like?

Tomorrow, we'll get into the nitty gritty.

For now, just try to imagine it. And if you can, imagine it with a chocolate croissant at your side, yellow walls promising summer around you, and make some lists -- lists about how you could slow down, spend less, and savor more.