JONTILLMAN.COM | Part of the problem since 1976

Since December of last year, we have been living in the Southwest corner of Georgia, a place where most of my family is either from or currently lives. I was born an hour East of here, in Tifton a place most notable for the Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College.

Originally, our plan was to breeze into town, do some minor construction and remodeling for my mother and breeze back out of town, and perhaps off of the continent again (we came here from London). Life, as they say, is what happens while you’re busy making plans, and things have not quite worked out that way.

Four months later we are still here, living in what could be described as a caretakers apartment on the grounds of a plantation house owned by one of my relatives. With acres and acres to play with and a massive house in need of renovation and no real bills to speak of, we have begun settling in.

We have found ourselves quite busy with a myriad of projects, all of which have served to pull me further and further away from the previous “life online” that has so dominated since I began this blog two years ago. I spend most of my days outside, doing manual labor of one sort or another. The list is long, but a few highlights are:

• felling dead trees previously leaning at dangerous angles.
• restoring a pecan grove to productive capacity.
• beginning an edible landscape on the grounds.
• Filling construction dumpsters with the detritus of 50 years of random accumulation on the grounds.
• Restoring power to a house built in 1878 and last occupied in the early 1990s.

I’m sure I’ll write more about the project in the future, but for now that should give you a taste of what life has been like for me recently.

These projects, coupled with some extreme good luck in book buying (somehow we landed in the center of the library book sale universe) and a nice little apartment have conspired to raise a simple question in my mind: why on Earth would I leave now? I mean really, I eat well, do meaningful physical work, read books at a prodigious clip, watch films with abandon and have not a care in the world, really.

So, life is changing (as it always does I suppose) and as my life goes, my blog goes. Posting has slowed here to match the pace of life, and after a few days of self-imposed guilt over not maintaining my previous volume of posts, I got over it in a hurry. That sort of assumed obligation is exactly what I am no longer interested in carrying around inside me.

So, there will be more Doing and Eating posts around here for the foreseeable future and less Pondering posts I suppose, as my life moves away from full-time navel-gazing and towards something a bit more ‘balanced’.