On Friendship

At the start of this year, trying to revive a latent writing habit, I set an intention of publishing one piece of substantial writing every month. I’d been good on this promise through the winter months but, as predicted, my springtime energy blew in this April as it does every year like a chaos agent and here we are on the cusp of June already. The relentless, prolonged Nordic winter gave way in a blink to a flurry of movement – the extensive task of opening up my beloved island farmhouse for summer, capitalizing on the ambitions of the kitchen garden I’ve always dreamed of architecting, nursing the latent seasonal restlessness by planning summer visitors and drinking up every blissful sunny afternoon with wine on sidewalks before they’re replaced with July storms. 

I’ve been bouncing – oscillating, really – between the delicious thrum of city life when the seasons first shift, moods lift, and skin reemerges and the utter calm and contentment I find when out at the farmhouse, puttering around in a constant flow state for hours on end through different projects that leave me feeling body tired, mentally accomplished, and emotionally satisfied at the end of most days in a way urban environments simply don’t. 

It’s also resulted in a minor bout of what has felt uncomfortably like writer’s block, or at a minimum, writer’s procrastination, distraction, diversion. On the end of my mental to do list these past two months has been to write a piece on homeowning or, more specifically I guess, homesteading – the nurturous act of building, fostering, maturing, experimenting with and learning from a big old house and sprawling piece of land that has replaced all notion of home that I’d ever previously known. It’s been an unexpected and nonlinear four year journey full of surprises and lessons, equal parts emotional, practical, and economical, so I thought I’d write something about it. 

But frankly I’ve struggled to pinpoint what precisely is so novel or meaningful about this process that I wish to share, despite it having fundamentally changed my life in every possible way. What I started to reflect on, rather indirectly, was how perhaps more than anything the past four years has deeply changed my philosophies on relationships, and in particular the friendships in my life since I embarked on The Farmhouse Years. The rhythms and cadence of, substance of, shape of, value of, depth of. All of my relationships have changed dramatically since the course of my life has led me to this house. 

This is due in large part to the fact that – unless you came of age in the city in which you find yourself as an adult, saddled with a lingering group of unconditional friends from childhood or adolescence – city friends in your 30s and 40s are, by design, a pretty odd mix. 

A composite of legacy friendships, last ones standing who haven’t ditched town for a suburban life, couples you met in former relationships, a random amalgam of lighter weight friendships of circumstance – colleagues, the run club, the cycling group, the pilates teacher – new friends formed through common connections who drop into your life like unexpected flies. Over and over, you start again, forming friendships for the company, for people to do things with, for people to momentarily take you outside of your apartment life or significant other. You become friends because of the joint circumstance of experiencing city life in this precise moment in time together before departing for wherever life takes one of you next. You get older, waiting for the day when this process and organizational setup becomes less transient, but it never will. City social structures are the revolving airport door until one day you decide to finally exit. 

City friendships hinge primarily around the meet up to catch up. For dinner, for drinks, for a swim, for a coffee. Tell me about your week, your day, how are things. How’s your flat, how’s work, how’s your relationship, your children, have you been on dates and what are your summer plans? We should do this again, let’s look, things are so busy right now, how about 6 weeks from now if I don’t cancel last minute because my kid is sick?

In the years since becoming A House Person, more and more I’ve watched the relationships in my life change. 

I now find myself with a collection of lamps, people I almost certainly wouldn’t be friends with if it weren’t for this house. They are relationships built off the back of the niche and unexpected things we care about now and the freedom we’ve architected to be completely ourselves in an environment totally of our own making. None of these lamps have ever even been to my house, in its remoteness. They are all far flung across continents and I typically see them in person as little as once a year, some even less. 

But somewhere along the way, we’ve forged a deep understanding for how we enjoy spending our time, our space, and the space that occupies our minds and so we talk constantly, in one form or another, about our house lives. We call to talk about nothing and everything, every few days, without pretense or scheduling, devoid of the insufferable “penciling in.” Ah yes, you’re home again, how does it feel? How’s your sleep and what are you cooking? Tell me about the garden, what projects are you working on, are you feeling inspired these days and how is the weather? What are you building, what are you reading, did I tell you about the door and do send me some pictures, I’d love to see. 

Then there are the lamps who’ve carved out time to make the trek. One of my most precious lamps has an old house of her own we often refer to as the House of Self-Repose, a house that for one reason or another people always seem to arrive at in an emotional heap to ground themselves in friendship and return to their non-house lives absolved. For it is those who understand that the clearing of one’s schedule of obligations, distractions, noise and chatter to make a visit to a friend’s old house is perhaps the deepest form of friendship in this modern life. The true precious gold that is several uninterrupted days with an old friend devoid of work calls, children, partners, doom scrolling – to spend like lamps, alone together in total privacy. To chat less, talk more, co-exist and swim amidst the true comfort of aimless time spent with a person who understands you in a quiet house and the deep ocean that creates. 

Perhaps more than anything – more than electrical wiring, tree knowledge, what’s happening with that moss over there, how to build a kitchen from scratch or change a water filtration system, why you should split your mortgage and never leave the freezer full of meat in the summer – this is what I’ve learned from the nurturous act of homesteading. 

Things that helped shape these thoughts:

• Rereading Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour for the hundredth time

• A rework of my favorite Sharon Van Etten song

• Charles Dowding’s brilliant book, No Dig, and the power of leaving things as they are

• Remembering that writing about writing is still writing, after all

Light Moves is a newsletter from PALTA Studio. It is personal reflections and conversations with others on the continuous process of refining the shape of life.