Dear Homesteading Lady

Someone who is enthusiastic about homesteading is always fun to talk to. You can talk chickens, gardening, goats, housing (conventional and UN-conventional), herbal remedies, guns, etc. Usually you can name a subject and swap ideas, stories, and problems for a long time.

Then occasionally, you run into a real veteran homesteader. Someone who really knows a wealth of knowledge based on personal experience.

And then, you might just … want to have a two-sided conversation.

Dear Homesteading Lady: You are not the only homesteader on the planet.

Recently I was talking to a person who had lived an idealistic, romantic, simple life on the homestead for years before it was popular. She has homeschooled all her children and baked her own bread and cooked on a woodstove. She was incredibly sweet.

In our conversation, I listened and listened. I had to break away for moments at a time to tend to my children, but I jumped back in and responded to the stories with comments like, “oh, believe me, we know about outhouses!” or “We have those in our garden this year too.” or “That’s what we did for our youngest.” 

With a smile, she continued to tell stories and freely hand out advice.

And as the conversations went on, I began to be very frustrated with this woman. I couldn’t pin down why. Later that evening I realized I knew all about her “homestead life” now and she didn’t even know I had just spent the last 6 years as a homesteader too!

Dear Homesteading Lady: It’s not you, it’s me.

I had ALSO baked my own bread and used herbal remedies and foraged for wild food! I had lived without grid power and city water and I had used the wood stove to heat and cook and I had been kicked in the gut by an 800lb milker and I wanted desperately to tell her we were one in the same! And I still couldn’t believe it- had I really left her with the impression she had talked to a city girl? A greenhorn only interested in hearing about labeling mason jars with chalkboard paint?

I felt like I had earned at least a couple of sentences about what we had done. My responses were actually even polite ways of sneakily interjecting knowledge about our family. Hints that we are alike! But it fell on deaf ears, and left me worn out from the conversation.

Dear Homesteading Lady: I hope we meet again. I have a lot left to say.