There are a few, a lucky few, folks who were born on
the family farm, grew up on the family farm, learned how to run the family
farm, and have no doubt about where they will live and what they will do -
they will continue the family farm.
For the rest of us, the road to our Homestead is not
usually so direct. Fraught with detours, dead ends, and missing road
signs, sometimes it takes years to get there, and once there, sometimes,
like the dream where you think you are at the bottom, but you just keep
falling, our final destination remains elusive.
Perhaps your earliest memories include fantasies of
ponies, hen houses, and amber waves of grain, or maybe, in an otherwise
normal adulthood, one day pushing pencils in your cubicle you were seized
with the overwhelming urge to leap out the window and go plant something.
Outside. In the dirt. And the sunshine. And never be "cubed" again.
No matter - the result is the same: the need and
desire to claim a bit of earth, raise a barn, fill it with
food-on-the-hoof nourished by grass-in-the-pasture, and earn your keep by
the sweat of your brow, darn it.
'Tis a worthy goal, and like all worthy goals, there
must be a worthy plan - a neat and well thought out plan that takes you
from point A, to point B and all the way to point Q, which is right about
where your farm sits, a perfect jewel set into the warm bosom of a
blissful countryside.
Point A is deceptively easy. It consists of “I wanna
be a homesteader.”
Point B is substantially more involved, and quite a
bit more lengthy, but generally fun and relatively inexpensive and
painless. This is where all the preliminary learning is done. Your
collection of magazines, books, bookmarked websites, and business cards
will amaze even yourself in an alarmingly short time. New words and
phrases will roll off your tongue leaving your ears wondering, “Who said
that?” Sustainability, Grass-fed Beef, and Nitrogen Fixing Cover Crops -
these and other, until now, odd combinations of words will dance through
your head at night like visions of sugarplums.
The whole concept seems so right. Caring for the
earth while caring for your family, dying a noble peaceful death, and
being cared for, in turn, by the earth, like our ancestors did for
generation upon generation. Shunning the mainstream belief of the
nine to five followed by the 401k, we voraciously devour every tale
telling how others have accomplished this modern day return to a basic and
good life.
And one shining truth shimmers through each family
story according to the published word: simply follow your plan (or THEIR
plan, if they are selling a book), and the end result will be your
homestead. Happy smiling family waving from a tractor on the last page.
The End.
For most of us, this couldn’t be a crueler fallacy.
Because somewhere after Point B, life gets in the
way. People lose jobs, they lose spouses, they gain a child or
responsibility of a parent or grandparent, there’s a chronic illness or
debilitating injury tossed into the mix and the lovely plan is in
shatters, tatters, and shreds.
This is where we separate the wheat from the chaff,
the rice from the hulls, the peanuts from the butter. At this
juncture, some people will decide that the homesteading dream is just that
- a pretty dream, like the one where Antonio Banderas rides up on a black
stallion, swoops you off your feet, hands you a perfectly frozen Dove bar
(not too hard, but not dripping and mooshy either), and gallops off to
sunny Mexico with you to the perfect beach with sand that will never get
into your ice cream…
Ahem. Sorry…
The “homesteading as a pretty dream” group will buck
up, re-group and move on.
The others... Ah, the others. Every fragment of
a thought inferring that they will never have their piece of earth will
result in the sound of a tiny piece of their heart breaking.
This story is for you, my friends.
