Dear World: I Quit My Life 🔪 & Moved to the Woods 🏡

I’m Ash, and I’m a writer, traveler, nonconformist & nomad, and every week I’m sharing funny field notes from around the world. Currently, I’m in America writing about what it’s been like to return home to my small town, twenty years after living abroad.

When you’re young, you think life is about daring adventures and New York style pizza crust and sucking in your stomach and nights spent roaming around Barcelona until dawn.

Then, you turn 40, and you discover the truth: life is actually about friggin’ flower pots.

Yup, those heavy-ass terra cotta clay pots. And hedge trimmers! You should see my hedge trimmer. It’s huge. (8-foot extension pole, thank you very much.) And lawn mowers. (Wet.) And sarcastic salt and pepper shakers that say inappropriate things. (These ones.) And rocking chairs. And light fixtures. And finding that perfect shade of blue for the bedroom. (Which is not baby blue, because baby blue is for perverts, but periwinkle blue, because periwinkle is for creative people.)

Something I never, ever counted on as I got older: finding fulfillment in the ordinary.

In my 20s and 30s, I was VERY against ordinary. Sitting around your house looking at birds felt like a cruel form of punishment. You weren’t relaxing, you were stagnating: the most vile word in the English language.

How many of us feared that word?

I can’t even type it without having a panic attack. Stag…staaaaag….STAAAGGGGG…….christ.

So, when I decided to trade my full-time globe-trotting writerly, nomadic life of European travelin’, fancing wine drinkin’, cosmopolitan city walkin’, ocean-side villa-ing to buy property in the small, rural American town I grew up in, I never (actually) thought I’d like it.

But, something I do like is real estate.

And there just happened to be the prettiest white historic farmhouse, with a stately apple red door, perched high up on a hill, across from a pond, on 5 acres of land—with a matching two-bedroom guest cottage to boot.

This is how you do brave things: you bribe the hell out of yourself. Bait yourself with things you like more than the things you fear. I might sound like I’m being sarcastic, but honestly it’s an effective tactic. Sometimes, you just need something wonderful to love.

This property would have cost beaucoup throw-up bucks in Connecticut. But here, a glass of wine in the nicest restaurant in town costs four whole dollars (yeah)—so you can imagine the cost of other things. Before, making this kind of TERRIFYING, PERMANENT DECISION THAT WILL BIND ME HERE PHYSICALLY would have felt like a prison sentence. I have to do what? And I have to make sure the pipes don’t freeze? And I have to spend the equivalent of a first-class transatlantic plane ticket on property taxes, and school taxes, and sewer bills, and homeowner’s insurance?

No, thanks. Too permanent. Too…commit-ey.

Back then, I didn’t do anything that was permanent. (Except for the time I tattooed eyeliner on my eyelids. Didn’t have a single tattoo, just decided to go right for the eyes! Highly recommend, especially if you look like a balding, beady-eyed, sleep-deprived wash woman from the 1600s without eye makeup on. *raises hand*)

Permanent meant stagnant.

And we all know what stagnant meant: death by minivan and carrot sticks.

It also meant: no physical home addresses, no paperback books, no brick and mortar businesses, no pets, no artsy fartsy Etsy creations, no sofas, no home offices, nothing that would physically tie me to a place. That was the rule: no tether.

I didn’t know then that tethers can also be life preservers.

Turns out, restraints don’t always restrain you.

Sometimes, the right ones hold you.

What a fucking revelation.

What I have discovered in the year I’ve been living here learning how to use chainsaws in the Pennsylvania countryside (besides the fact that mice are malevolent shitheads):

There is fulfillment in the work.

Watering the flower pots.
Cleaning out the gutters.
Trimming the hedges.
Mowing the lawn.

It is the ritual of it all; the satisfaction that comes from having this thing to care for.

These are all things I dreaded before. And yet, here at age 40, having to do these things doesn’t feel like a chore I’ve got to do: it feels like something I get to do.

Something that is mine.

Something that is under my care.

Something that is adding a new layer of meaning to my life, showing me how to care for something other than my passport.

In fact, I like mowing the lawn so much, I now volunteer to mow the public square in the center of town. 🤣 Every week, I take my Jeep truck, and I load up my ultra-slick battery-powered lawn mower and matching weed wacker (#ryobi), and I go down to the town square, and I mow this humble little patch of lawn around a stone monument—in ugly athleisure, even! And the fire chief stops by to chat. And my 92-year-old neighbor stops by to say hello. And the neighbor across the street—someone who I have nicknamed “Nicotine Ned” in my head—finally started waving to me, too. (This was a FEAT.)

There is community here. And, I am part of it.

I didn’t realize how much I had missed that. I have been sourcing my community online since 2009. I didn’t think I needed real people: you know, the kind that are TERRIFYINGLY PERMANENT AND WILL BIND ME HERE PHYSICALLY.

This has been another unexpected joy of moving to the countryside: how much I actually…like people? I thought I hated people! (Mostly—ha.) But, as I am discovering, people bring meaning to an otherwise arbitrary world. And, in-person relationships are a whole different vibe.

Just yesterday, my neighbor asked me if I wanted some chicken eggs.

The kid at the coffee shop noticed I bought a new car.

The man down the road gives me baked goods every time I stop by.

The guy mowing the fields waves in his tractor.

The mail delivery chick stops to chat when I pass her on a dirt road.

The little league coach asks me if I can help write a grant proposal.

The township supervisor invites me to a barbecue.

The electrician calls and asks how my trip to Iceland was.

These small acts create a surreal sense of belonging. And, what’s more: I didn’t have to be some amazing, accomplished superhero in order to “deserve” it. The neighbor isn’t asking me if I want chicken eggs because I am an author; she is asking me if I want chicken eggs because I am a neighbor. The kid at the coffee shop isn’t commenting on my new car because I have an email list; he is commenting on my new car because I’m a customer. The township supervisor isn’t inviting me to a barbeque because he wants to know how to start a blog; he’s inviting me to a barbecue because he wants to know me.

I hadn’t realized how being a personal brand can sometimes make you feel like you are only deserving of attention if you have “earned” it.

Maybe that’s why I’m enjoying these in-person relationships so much: they are not transactional. No one here even knows what I do. And, there is a gentle freedom in that.

Interviewers used to ask me on podcasts: “How did you get the guts to find your voice? Weren’t you afraid of what your friends and family would think?” The answer was no: when you are unknown is when you are most free. This is the best time to build anything—your anonymity is a gift. You can experiment! Screw up! Test things! Be silly! And no one is going to write you emails telling you that they hate it.

Once you begin building a brand, however, that’s when the pressure’s on. That’s when you have thousands of people watching, deciding, judging.

Not that this is bad. That pressure is one of the best creative forces there is.

But—sometimes you just want to exist, without having to impress.

Sometimes, you just want to water the flowers.
Clean the gutters.
Trim the hedges.
Mow the lawn.
Look at birds.
Buy a paperback.
Get a dog.
And enjoy the ordinary.

Because, maybe this is where life is: in between the big, flashy moments.

And maybe, sometimes doing nothing, and staying still, and not constantly going, going, going is exactly what we need.

Sometimes, remaining idle doesn’t mean you’re stagnating.

Sometimes, it’s just a pause.