Yes, I'll admit to romanticizing the past....I aspire to be a modern day homesteader.
It was inevitable. My girl cousins and I grew up reading the Little House books (pre-Michael Landon versions, thank you very much!) over and over just as my children have read Harry Potter series until they can quote Hermione, Harry and Snape verbatim. We begged our mothers to help us make calico dresses and sunbonnets, arguing about who would be Mary and Laura Ingalls--or assigned the role of Nellie Olsen! Then, we loaded up the baby dolls and snacks into the red Radio Flyer "covered wagon" and headed down to the creek on the farm.
No doubt popular children's literature has shaped generations of bibliophiles like me since the mid-nineteenth century when the genre first took hold with the works of Louisa May Alcott and other early writers of children's literature. I know my mom talks of reading the Bobbsey Twins and The Five Little Peppers sitting with her feet warmed by the wood-burning parlor stove. Books continue to shape the way I see and learn about the world, more than television. I still reread the Little House books each decade. I even named my daughter Laura.
However, my world view was also shaped by my heritage and my environment. Growing up in rural Wisconsin in the 70's, I experienced a lifestyle of parents, grandparents that hadn't really changed from the rural agrarian habits and society from earlier decades of the century. My sister, Jann, who was born only nine years later, had an entirely different childhood than I did because of the rapid shifts in technology and cultural expectations around habits of affluence.
Both sets of grand parents lived their lives and raised their family on farms in the river bottoms along the Pine River just north of it's confluence with the Wisconsin River. My maternal grandparents, the Wastlicks, worked most of their adult lives to acquire and pay off the mortgage on an 80-acre diversified family farm near Twin Bluffs. When I stayed overnight, I helped them pour the cream-rich milk of the Gersey and Jersey cows through the strainers perched atop the milk cans. Yes, they are the same milk cans that are still seen in some antique and collectibles shops in the Midwest. My Grandpa Wastlick would then let me ride alongside the stainless steel milk cans on the two-wheeled cart he used to pull from the barn to the milk house. I bumped along with the milk cans over the driveway where the ox eye daisies were always trying to grow through the gravel and dust. The smell of a crushed daisy takes me back to that memory yet today. Once at the milk house, the milk cans would be lowered into a cement tank of earth-cold well water on the floor of the milk house. There they would cool, waiting for the milk truck to pick them up and transport them to the nearest cheese factory to be made into Cheddar or Swiss cheese.
Although milking the cows provided the main "cash crop", they raised chickens for butchering and eggs, hogs, and raised vegetables and myriads of fruit to fill the freezer and root cellar shelves. Grandpa loved to walk up through the pastures and woods harvesting wild ginseng, wild grapes, hickory nuts, black walnuts in the fall and morel mushrooms around each Mother's Day. The woodlot provided the fuel to keep the farmhouse toasty upstairs and down. Each fall, the meat provided by domesticated stock was supplemented by venison, pheasant, duck, squirrel, rabbit and even the wild turkey as they grew in numbers during the late 70's. I have wondered since if we had Rachel Carson's efforts through the book "Silent Spring" to thank for the return of the wild turkey as well as other predator species like the eagle.
I'm not sure I want to be a homesteader in the way that my ancestresses were 100-150 years ago. The disregard for native people's rights and sovereignty is the dark side of the romanticized pioneer mythology. Accustomed to modern woman's lifestyle, I certainly would have a hard time facing the prejudices, limited human rights and educational expectations for women back in the day. We HAVE come a long way!
But, if I might be humored...I would like to be a bit more self-sufficient in providing my daily bread from the land and abundance that surrounds me. Like a homestead woman, I want to provide for my families food, clothing, and shelter in a manner that honors "traditional knowledge and home craft" and connects with the animals and the people of the landscape. Like Thoreau, I would like "to live deliberately", not taking all this for granted.
So here's what's happening on my urban Montana homestead...one city lot in Great Falls, MT.
