Saturday, November 3, 2012

Little House by the Mountains

I've got 75 Freedom Ranger chickens coming in from PA in two weeks.

Yes, November is a strange time to try to raise free range chickens.... However, since we know how to butcher chickens, it seems a shame to buy them in the grocery store. Plus, even if they end up being more "feed fed" birds, they've still been raised right here on my land and I know they'll be healthy.

I found my aged copy of Little House in the Big Woods and flipped it open. Couldn't put it down. Then I checked out all the Little House books I could find at the library. I'm reading Little Town on the Prairie now. That Nellie Olsen is just as mean in the book as she is in the television show.

When I was little, maybe seven or eight, I used to make believe I was Laura at recess. The other girls were playing kissing tag. I was the solitary fat-girl in the corner nearest the tan brick church who looked like she had lost her mind. Pantomiming everything from pushing the plow, sewing the seed, detasseling (hey, I'm from the Midwest, I know how it works!), to harvesting the corn. Sometimes another strange little girl who wore her hair in a long brown braid would join me. But most of the time, I played farm alone. Most of the time, my eccentricities were ignored by my good-natured, modern classmates. But when I pulled up an invisible stool and squatted down to milk the cow, I noticed more puzzled looks than usual.

 My point is that while some kids played school or house or superheroes (which I also did from time to time) my preference was, from a very young age, to play farm. Now that I'm all grown up and have a "farmette" of my own, I feel like I'm living a dream.

 Rediscovering the Little House books has piqued my interest in how they did it back then, homesteading and living off the land. For the first time in my life, I can sort of homestead too. Now, I can't do EVERYTHING - 10 acres isn't enough land to grow feed and a garden and raise livestock. But I know I could do more with it... the question is, how to I convince my husband that he wants to be more like Almanzo?