Earth Sweet
ome
by J uliet C uming
In 1995 I moved to Vermont with my husband, pregnant with our first child. We were seeking to build a home, a home that neither of us had ever had. We were both raised in New York City, by single parents in apartments, with infrequent access to plants, trees, wild animals, blue skies and all the things that childhood should be filled with. We had survived our upbringings and were hell bent on doing things better. Present-day difficulties and intergenerational traumas continued to haunt us, but, being young, we filed the difficult stuff away for future reckoning. After a few years of searching, we made our way to Vermont, where we hoped to craft a new, better, healthier life for ourselves. I knew that whatever was ailing me was not getting better in the toxic stew and screaming noise of the city. Just being
out in the air, near trees and plants, allowed my nervous system, which was permanently turned up to 11, to relax. In Vermont, living the life we craved felt easy. The week after we moved into the rental house we’d be living in while we built our green dream house, we attended a country fair where the electricity was provided by the solar folks who would be installing our photovoltaic panels. That same week, some building friends of ours from out West were holding a straw bale workshop at a local farm. The publication Environmental Building News, which we’d been avidly consulting, was located seven houses up the street from our rental. At my first midwife appointment, I discovered that my midwife lived, literally, in the house next door. The stars had aligned. We, who had never owned anything, “bought” the land on which we planned to build our home a few weeks before we officially moved to
