Retired from Homesteading

After several months of reading Steemit posts about "homesteading", I have reached the conclusion that I have been "homesteading" most of my life. We didn't call it homesteading back then; we were living a necessary way of life in order to feed and clothe a family. Rich people could afford to buy everything at the grocery store; poor people had to raise it themselves. We were poor people.

My father worked in a struggling plywood mill, and he had what he called a hobby farm, where he raised goats and sheep. He sold the wool from the sheep, and he sold some of the lambs, and we ate a lot of old, tough mutton. He also sold some of the goat kids, and in later years he sold goat milk. He wasn't as careful as he could have been about the location and cleanliness of the milking stanchions, so the milk tended to taste very goat-y. None of us drank it but him, as I recall, until he improved his system after retirement.

My parents always had a huge garden, and we children helped to weed, harvest, and preserve the crops. Eventually we developed an orchard that produced pears, apples, cherries, and plums. And we always had chickens to provide us with fresh eggs. I remember we had ducks for a little while, and rabbits, briefly. We had a donkey for a short time. She was inappropriately named Sugar: my sister still has a scar on her hip from the day Sugar bit her. After retiring, Daddy raised two pigs, just once. And he raised two steers, just once. But always he had the sheep and the goats.

My husband grew up in a gardening family, too, so we automatically planted a garden after we got married. Because my mother had done so, I canned peaches, pears, cherries, applesauce, jelly, and jam. I also canned green beans, beets, carrots, tomatoes, tomato sauce, stewed tomatoes, tomato juice, and salsa. Some years our tomato crop has been amazing, and on those years I even tried my hand at making my own ketchup.

I bake my own bread, prepare most meals from scratch, try to avoid GMOs and HFC, and adjust recipes to accommodate family members with blood sugar issues and allergies. We've picked elderberries and made juice, or frozen the berries. We grow strawberries and raspberries, most of which I freeze. We attempt to store squash and potatoes in an above-ground root cellar, with varying degrees of success.

However, now that I have passed Milepost 60, the Do-It-Yourself mindset is losing its allure. The children are grown and gone and/or busy with jobs and family. Tasks that went quickly with four people working now take hours with only one person (me) doing all the work. I am discovering, as all people eventually discover, that things take longer when one is getting older. So I am re-evaluating how I want to spend my time. Do I really want to devote an entire day to picking, snipping, and canning 24 pints of green beans? And then spend two days coaxing my arthritic thumbs and fingers back into function? And then repeat the process every three days during bean season? Or would I rather spend those days playing with my granddaughter, or reading a book in the shade, or maybe riding my bike on the bike path along the lake?

Life is short, and the older one becomes, the more aware of that fact one becomes. I have no desire to be a DIY homesteader any longer. I don't want to make my own hand lotion, toothpaste, and herbal cough medicine; I'll buy it from ambitious young people. I exhausted myself for years: raising children, home schooling them, gardening, canning, freezing, making everything from scratch, trying to be independent and "get back to nature." Now it is time to relax, read books, listen to good music, enjoy friends and family, and have time to volunteer.

As I see my age-mates dropping dead from various diseases and accidents, I realize spending time with people I care about is more important to me than spending day after day in the hot sun, pulling weeds. I'll keep baking my own bread, because it tastes so much better than the loaves at the store. And I'd like to have a SMALL garden, with just a few of my favorite vegetables to enjoy in season. My priorities have shifted. See you at the lake, or the tea shop, or the Farmers' Market!