I am what I am.
Why am I the way that I am? Do you ask yourself this question? I seem to be asking it of myself more and more of late. I grew up in sunny southern CA, with a house lot I figure to be somewhere in the neighborhood of .19 acres (this is just a guess, Mom, if your reading you can correct me.). We never had a garden that I am aware of. My mom did always plant flowers and things in the yard to make it attractive, but I never got the impression that it was a passion to her. My dad, having been made to weed the garden when he was a kid was not so ambiguous about his determination to not garden, yet I look forward to gardening every day and sometimes yearn for a place in the country where I can have a small "pocket farm" (Liz I stole your phrase.) of my own and do my best to provide for my own needs. I look back and remember the things that I always was fascinated by, and realize that I can’t understand what it was that got me interested in them in the first place.
I have always liked to grow things for instance. I remember getting a houseplant from my mom when I was a kid, and training it to grow up my walls and across my ceiling. I loved to see it there. Still today, I can get endless satisfaction from just experimenting with plants and watching them grow and evolve. My office has begun to resemble a small greenhouse.
I was also incredibly interested in the old time ways. That is to say that if I could have gone to a Daniel Boone camp or something as a kid I would have been in heaven. I remember I used to get books on American Indian crafts and try to make them out of things I could gather in the canyons behind my house. I made string out of yucca fibers, throwing weapons from scrub oak and rocks, and tried my hand at game traps; I never caught anything. (I’m sure my mom’s thankful for that. I can just imagine her face if I had brought home some jackrabbit for dinner at 10 yrs old.) Today that translates to my interest in finding simpler ways of doing things. I remember being 9 yrs old in Sweden visiting my family; I went to a place called Skansen and found that the living history museum was one of my favorite things ever. Today I like to go to places like This is The Place state park to learn and see how things used to be. Last year, the family and I were in Ohio visiting my wifes side of the family and spent a day checking out the Amish. Oh man, did I love it there, I think the wife was afraid I was gonna move her back and give her a bonnet and a butter churn.
All this being said; how do we get to where we are? I work in the IT industry, and every day wonder how I ended up here? I don't have any peers of mine that have this same fascination. I am curious from you, those of you homesteading or even just those of you with interests that are maybe just a little outside of average, Nature of Nurture?
P~
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5 comments:
Nature. Although I know a lot of people leaning to this lifestyle have grandparents who lived similar and we got to see/learn a bit from them. So I guess it may be both. But in my family, I'm the "freak" :)
It's a bit of both. I was raised with crafts and historical reenacting in the home, but not so much gardening or preserving food. I am now working in the engineering industry (civil) but dreaming of homesteading while growing what I can around my small-town place. I am also the black sheep in my family for my "backward" ways. I prefer to make what I can, not buy cheap imports. Someday...
You know, we recently had dinner with some new friends, and Wes said, "Why are the two of you different from other people?". It kind of surprised me, and I've been thinking about it ever since then.
The answer I came up with is that I think a lot. Too much. I have asked myself a lot of questions that most people either don't have the time for or don't care what the answer is. I am not satisfied with status quo.
The interesting thing about where I live in Maine is that there are a lot of people (well, maybe not *a lot* but some) who have asked themselves the same questions, who have done the thinking, who have challenged the status quo. I'm forever grateful that we found this area (quite by accident... it just "seemed" nice) because having a peer group has turned out to be more important to me than I previously thought.
I was also influenced by my grandparents, as I mentioned in yesterday's post, but unfortunately, didn't get to learn much directly from them before they passed away (5 & 10 years ago). But that's ok, because I wasn't ready for what they had to teach me back then. My parents are "normal" by today's standards, as are my in-laws, and all three of our sisters. We're the weirdos, the black sheep, the oddballs who live on that farm in Maine. But that's ok. We've got things pretty well figured out, so I'll take those labels. ;)
Let us say that it started with my addiction to The Little House on the Prairie books. But that really didn't take hold until later in life. I grew up in an odd mixture of parents, a prison record holding hippy for a mother and a beatnik motorcycle cop as a father, they kept me reading, and we had a small garden in suburbia. I never liked living in the city. We moved to the country because of our children, I worked 3rd shift at a hospital and couldn't sleep because of the teens and their bass, and we worried about the traffic and our small child playing outside. So we moved. I was laid off my job, and started a garden to supplement our food rations. My mother gave me a homesteading book to help me learn to can, and it went from there. I taught myself just about everything.
And that is way I am like this.
I guess it's nurture then, we were all just born "freaks":)
I think it all started with the grizzly adams show, come to think of it. I wanted to run off, steal away into the mountains, build a cabin and live my days there. Thanks for your input all, I know why I love all of your blogs now, we're kindred oddballs.
P~
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