So. How did we go from a house on this . . .
to this?
Long story, but let me condense. My happiest childhood memories are of visits to my grandparents’ farm. They owned just over 500 acres of mostly woodland in the scenic hills of Indiana. When we visited, we roamed through some of nature’s most beautiful shapes and color palettes. We ate ‘fresh-from-the-garden’ food that my grandmother cooked on an old woodstove by the light of kerosene lamps. We pumped water from a hand pump in the front yard while chickens pecked around our feet and we visited an outhouse whenever nature called. I loved it so much that, in the early years of our marriage, my husband and I moved to a homestead in the mountains of southeastern Kentucky where, for several years, I baked bread on our old woodstove and grew most of our own food and where, like my grandparents, we visited an outhouse when nature called.
But you know how it so often goes . . . you have kids and suddenly, the homestead becomes more chore than pleasure and you want to provide more for your kids. So we joined the rat race and started climbing “the ladder.” Then, some years later, we bought a beautiful home on the wide waters of the North Carolina coast. We had arrived. We did parties. We did lunch. We did lots of social stuff. But all the material goods didn’t make me especially happy or content. And once the kids were grown and gone, that old itch to get my hands in the dirt surfaced again; this time with a vengeance. But that wasn’t all – this time I wanted to live in better harmony with Gaia (Mother Earth). I didn’t want to till the soil, add fertilizer out of a bag or use pesticides and work against Mother Nature. I wanted to do it Gaia’s way, the way the earth itself, when left alone, has done for millennia.
So. It may have taken me a while to get on the right path, but here we are, on half an acre of mostly rock in the mountains of western North Carolina. I hope to live here in a very small, ecologically friendly manner while raising 80% of our food, treating the land (rocks and all!) with the utmost respect while attempting to nourish and replenish both the planet and my soul. Come follow me on this amazing journey. Let me share my stories with you. Please share your stories with me. Let’s see where it all takes us –
