I collect artwork depicting houses. I take walks just to peer into houses, take photographs of them, and imagine myself living there. I put myself to sleep imagining the rooms in a tiny house that I’ve had in my head since I was very very small; at the end of a long path deep in the woods, ivy-overgrown and a tiny gate, herbs from the rafters, flagstone floors and a kettle at the hearth. My cat, dead some 4 years now, lives there too, curled on a red velvet ottoman in front of the fire, a deep low slung chair beside it. In this house there is no rent, no mortgages, no plastic or places to go. It is dark, and warm. Some people count sheep. I fall asleep by walking through each tiny room in a tiny cottage that never was.
by Eden Veaudry
From the Just Seeds / San Francisco Print Collective table at the Anarchist Bookfair this weekend.
I am not sure of the artist – it is a silkscreen.
Thrifted 1970 drawing.
So I’ve been obsessed with the idea of my own house, but I live somewhere that one would have to commit to 30 years of coming up with thousands of dollars a month (& cost prohibitive down payment, etc etc. In general not a reality for the common human.) This seems, in general, like a poor and unsustainable idea – clearly, from the fiasco we see before us.
So what do we do? Where do we find our utopias? Where is that sustainable but secure future, cozy rooms and fireplaces, walls I can paint at whim, silent serene own-ness without the company of stacks of neighbors and shared walls? Do I run to the woods and hide forever once the stacks and stacks of bills are paid by the 9 to 5? Is this really what it means to grow old? Where is my magical (affordable, sustainable) witch cottage? Why has it become such a driving obsession, this abode autonomy?
Larisa
11 months ago
I dream of the same, a small housie (as my German friend calls it) to call my own. It hurts even more that I spent months of the past year apprenticing in building, and though it was beautiful, I want to transfer that same tenderness to the walls of my own warm cottage some day, shelves for my own brews, my books and the art it cheers me to see above my stove. We will get there!
verhext
11 months ago
Where were you building? Bread & Puppet? Building cottages? Are you sure you aren’t a secret Vermonter?
roxi
11 months ago
i am obsessed with houses as well… not only having one one day, but writing about them & looking at how the house has a manifested body in some fiction (shirley jackson, ann quin’s berg, any gothic novel). in most of these cases the house functions as repressive space, embodying all these ideas about limiting rather than subverting domesticity. but the house is just a container, a vessel for whatever you can dream up to fill it with. how to even have one to start is a complete mystery. it seems like a lot of people i know have been buying houses & reading about their struggles gives me an ache… it looks like such a miserable process. i hate paperwork.
verhext
11 months ago
the paperwork i can deal with, it’s the magically summoning tens of thousands of dollars i feel may throw a wrench into my home dreams ;D
i do wonder though, does a 30 year mortgage turn a dream into a prison?? i worry that i would consistently be able to come up with a huge amount every month, especially here.
sigh. someday, at least. and if not, then teeny no-electricity cabins in the woods.