The Joy of Imaginary Homesteading in Los Angeles

Sure, my prairie is a driveway, but the mind must travel.

May 18, 2020

Yesterday, my husband found a large baby bird in our yard. It was the size of a cantaloupe and had gray wings with tendrils of yellow fuzz sticking out of them. Someone online said we should keep it hydrated, so I went outside with a dropper and a jar of water, expecting it to be afraid of me.

Instead, it drank from the dropper several times, and then groomed itself patiently while I sat a few inches away.

By the time my husband returned from the neighbor’s house to ask if they were missing a baby chicken, I was already daydreaming about building a hutch and collecting eggs every morning. The neighbor said the bird was a baby pigeon. They had a pigeon already, and they’d be happy to adopt another one.

I guess they saved me from the humiliation of a summer spent hoping my baby pigeon would lay eggs soon.

But that humbling feels like an appropriate corrective for someone who spends so many hours daydreaming about living off cherry tomatoes during a pandemic. I’m also growing basil and sage in containers on the driveway in front of our garage. Yesterday, I baked cinnamon rolls and made pierogi from scratch. Today I’ll plant flower seeds and green beans and make cheese bread. I also have a book to write, but I’m not doing much of that.

My baking and cultivating amounts to a bourgeois distraction at a time when 135 million are facing food shortages. I should be saving every cent to feed the homeless instead. I should be teaching my kids to sew their own clothes, not so we can share a group hallucination of some “Little House on the Prairie” lifestyle, but so we’ll stop buying unnecessary junk and save our extra money for the people who will die without it.

Sometimes it feels like all joy leads back to guilt and darkness right now. I have to remind myself that calming activities and even distractions are necessary for balance, to steel myself for the long road ahead. I can still be pragmatic and prepare to be of service. It’s not self-indulgent to hoard joy itself. If that means I end up trying to coax a driveway into the shape of a tiny farm, so be it. I’m going to try to relish every spot of sunshine I can find.

Heather Havrilesky writes the “Ask Polly” advice column for New York magazine and is the author of an essay collection, “What If This Were Enough?”

Doodles by Larry Buchanan. Larry is a graphics editor at The Times and also writes, reports, makes charts, and flies drones.