Wildfire

This site contains the fiction, poetry, essays and rants of Mary Wildfire. A homesteader living on a ridge-top in West Virginia, I have been trying all my life to figure out how to save the Earth. Why? Well, it’s my homeworld, and we’re all partial to the homeplace…but also because it’s such an exquisite jewel of a place, so rich with biodiversity, so full of variations in climate and culture and biome. What a privilege to live here! Perhaps it’s not such a privilege to live in such interesting times…but there is yet hope that humanity will achieve a breakthrough. Perhaps we will stop allowing the least wise among us to rule, and learn to behave responsibly. As we float down the river of time, we’re clearly approaching a waterfall; it’s around the bend but we can hear the awful roar. We can’t get off the river, we can only cling to each other and other creatures, trying to save as much as possible, hoping that beyond the waterfall we will find calm waters.

Trying to do my part, I decided that words are my strength, thus this website. My other effort is to create a model of sustainable living. So my husband Don and I joined a land trust, built an energy-efficient octagonal house and put up solar panels, and I’m trying to grow more and more of our own food, to shrink our environmental footprint smaller and smaller. We share our one-acre clearing with a dog, two cats and about a dozen chickens.