This morning, I woke up, read a beautiful word and photo essay in National Geographic, and I told Maria I would love to move to Detroit, there is something there I would love to be a part of, the very difficult and arduous and painful rehabilitation and renewal of a great and abandoned American city.

Is this just a pipe dream, or is this something that is possible and worthwhile? We own two donkeys and are getting a horse. How wonderful to bring them to a great urban center and make the point that animals belong in our every day lives and can thrive in cities, as the New York Carriage Horses do.

We love our farm, we love living in nature, we love our town and our friends and our lives. Yet I keep thinking of my daughter’s wedding when a friend of hers – she knew about my open heart surgery – wondered if it wasn’t dangerous for me to be living in a small rural community so far from a hospital and a lot of doctors.

I told her it was far more dangerous to live a life of fear and caution.

I told Emma’s friend that the location of a hospital  would never be my criterion for living. What a good statement to make as I approach my 68th birthday that life does not need to end when one gets older, it is simply another new beginning.  To take what I know and apply to something needed and necessary?  I love the voices I heard from Detroit in the National Geographic piece, the images, the spirit of rebirth and renewal. Would the city be interested in an aging writer and his fiercely artistic wife and their donkeys and pony joining the renaissance underway in the Detroit?

I can’t even think about the logistics, we have little or no money, really, and it would be quite an upheaval to go out to the Midwest and try and find a home in the middle of this broken but resurgent city. Maria wouldn’t want to leave her donkeys, for sure, but she was intrigued at the idea of doing something like it. She sure didn’t say no.

A part of me thinks this is just another of my fantasies and impulses, I used to live by them. But some great things can come out of impulses of the heart – look at Bedlam Farm. Not a simple or easy thing, but it brought me riches far beyond money. I love Maria’s response – it’s great to think about it, it’s great to want to be a part of something. We both are cautious about our passions and our dreams, they can lead to ruin as well as glory. I have learned that the hard way.

Will I be laughing at myself tomorrow, or maybe trawling online to see what houses with some land cost in Detroit, or if the city allows domesticated animals, or if I need to go back to my therapist and get a slap upside the head. I love my life very much, I am not dissatisfied with it, but I have always wanted to be part of something meaningful like this, it would be wonderful to blog from there, to take photos there, to also make the point, if possible, that carefully chosen animals can and should be part of a great urban renaissance.

I woke up wanting to rush to the keyboard and share this impulse, some will roll their eyes – I can imagine my daughter for sure doing that, she has lived with my passions a long time. I think it would be a wonderful thing for Maria’s art, for me and my writing, maybe even a good thing for Detroit.

In the meantime, we’ll go to Vermont today with our newly shorn wool and pick up some yarn for Maria to sell and give thanks for the rituals of our life now. You don’t need to live in Detroit to make a difference, my blog teaches me that every day.

So I’ll mull it and chew on it, my gut tells me it can not realistically happen. But how sweet it would be to sit at some dinner party down the road and tell people that I am not moving closer to any big trauma hospital, I’m moving to Detroit.