I took a couple of days off last week to spend the start of school vacation home with the kids, and to get a four-day weekend. “Are you going away?” my friends asked. “What are you going to do?”

I had only one plan: not to get into my car for four days. “I am not leaving home.” I said. “Not once.”

I drive far too much. Work is 38 miles from home, and the girl’s ballet class is 20 miles away, and in addition to classes all week she has rehearsals on weekends. And even the stay-at-home boy needs to be dragged places sometimes. But ballet school was closed for school vacation, and staying home for four days seemed like it might work.

And there’s plenty for me to do at home. There’s that wall in my son’s room that I never finished plastering so I could paint it so I could move his bed back to where it belongs, there are book shelves downstairs that need to be moved upstairs so that what was the living room can finish becoming the kitchen/dining room, there’s that ceiling that needs to be painted — the usual endless list of projects that never get finished when you’re at work all the time. And there are walks to take, and secret sledding hills in the woods the boy needed to show me. And backwoods skiing if we ever get any snow. No reason to leave home.

Well, the no-car idea didn’t work past Saturday, the first day off. “When you take the girl to piano, make sure you stop over at Jungle’s,” my husband told me Friday night. “Aaaugh! I forgot about piano!” I said. “And I suppose she’ll want to go to church Sunday too.” The daughter loves going to church. And youth group on Sunday nights.

So I quickly revised my plan for vacation: not to venture any farther than our little town, which means staying within a seven-mile radius. That would cover church and piano, and keep open the possibility of pie and coffee and Jungle’s, the mom-and-pop store our friends run. It wasn’t exactly staying home, but still a vast improvement from my usual daily routine.

How did all this daily driving become our way of life? My husband and I always envisioned a home-based life: gardening, writing, baking, raising animals and staying home. The name of our long-range plan when we got married was “Bees, Trees and Peas,” a reference to raising honeybees, starting a nursery and running a market garden. We raised bees for years, until all the diseases wiped out all our hives, and the trees and peas are an ongoing project. But somewhere along the line, “Jobs for Support and Health Care” came into the picture. And since we were living in peas and trees land, that meant a long drive.

Sometimes, we think our lives would be simpler if we lived in a city, and the daughter could walk or bike to dance. “But where would we keep the chickens?” the boy asks. And then, everything would be so expensive we’d need even more jobs, which would make for even less home time. And determining where to live based on ballet school seems a little crazy. “I think it’s a plot,” says my husband, who always thinks it’s a plot. “It’s a plot to keep people off the land, to keep people from being independent.”

I don’t know about plots. I know that winter causes us more worry than spring and summer, because as much as we heat with wood, we’re still running that oil furnace at night. And it seems like we drive even more in the winter than the summer. Maybe because we can walk more in the summer, even if it is six miles to town. And when produce is pouring out of our gardens, we feel more independent. In the winter, even with our frozen and canned garden produce, we end up shopping more, which means not only driving to the store, but bringing in food that has been driven in from who knows where — Florida? California? Argentina?

Even while we’re fretting about being too dependent on our fuel machines, other people come to visit to bask in what they consider bucolic bliss. And while I was home, my oldest sister and her friend came one day, and one of my other sisters came another. They think it’s peaceful up here.

We cooked for them on the wood stove, and took walks to the dam. My sister’s friend chatted with the oxen, and admired the little pig, and pronounced that soup and corn bread made on the wood stove was somehow tastier than any other soup and corn bread could be. He admired our son’s complex drawings of a remote control airplane he intends to build, and ascribed his creativity to our lack of TV. “What? You have a telephone!” he asked in mock horror when my sister asked for one, since her cell phone won’t work at my house. “Wimps!”

Another sister came two days later, and called us “pioneers” for cooking on wood and having no cell service. But by then it had occurred to me that my staying home, or near home, had little effect on my overall emissions. I did drive far less — I figure it was around 300 miles less between two days off from work and four days off from ballet. But those days off caused two different visits from two sisters, who both live more than 110 miles from me. So staying home actually caused around 150 extra miles to be driven.

My sisters could have come together — they live within 15 miles of each other — but they didn’t. I could have told them to stay home, but who wants to pass on a visit from the family?

I stopped in at Jungle’s the last day of being home, for a cup of coffee. “What happened to the idea of not leaving home?” they asked me. “It’s not working quite as well as I thought,” I said.

I also didn’t paint the wall in my son’s room, or move the bookshelves. But the soup was sure good, and so were all the walks to the dam.

“When you retire,” my husband said, “let’s get rid of the cars.”

Margaret Hartley is the Gazette’s Sunday and features editor. Greenpoint appears in the Gazette’s print edition Sundays on the Environment page.

Have a question or a topic you’d like addressed on Greenpoint? Email greenpoint@dailygazette.net.