The Evolving Homemaker

I am having reoccurring dreams of homesteading.

And not in my sleep. Strangely, it is when I am wide awake and driving around, trying to get to my to-do list, cleaning the house, watching the kids ride their bikes, gardening, getting coffee, while doing dishes, whenever. I am starting to think that ‘homestead’ comes into my mind actually more often in a day than sex pops into the mind of a teenage boy.

I am serious.

I can’t get this image out of my mind…rolling green hills, with the morning mist rising from the dew dripping blades of grass…a couple horses off in the horizon, their bodies ghostlike in the morning haze…chickens busy laying the eggs we will be eating for breakfast…rows and rows of raspberries and strawberries and every kind of tomato known to woman…an old farmhouse waiting to be updated but also left to tell of memories past…our dogs roaming around significant acreage…our kids caked with the mud of their mother…the sunrise welcoming us into another blessed day…

My son wants a cow.  We will see.

Am I crazy?  Sometimes I think so.

But then sometimes I think how peaceful a life led simply could be.  I am not dumb.  I understand the work involved, I have worked on two farms before, and I actually enjoy shoveling shit and filling up a wheelbarrow of sawdust to lay down fresh for a pony or two.   I have always been one that doesn’t mind getting dirty and staying that way.  I can tell you from a camping trip last summer, that my daughter feels exactly the same way. She may like her princesses, but she is Pig-Pen too and I love her for it.

I often wonder where this fast paced, driven life we are leading know is actually going to get us in the end.  A life well lived is a life full of amazingly simple moments that we actually take time to notice.  Not rushing around, trying desperately to get ‘ahead’, getting to every birthday party, answering every email…where is the space?  The room to breathe?  The room to grow?  The room to stretch our imaginations? The room to stretch at all?

Maybe I just miss connecting with my earth mother.  I wish I could say that time was easy to come by for hiking, and resting, and smelling the flowers, but it just seems like it isn’t.  There is always something to take precedence over a moment to just take it all in.  I want my life to include many moments smelling the fresh morning air, to engage in the circle of life season after season, to be on the back of a horse cantering through the woods on a fall afternoon, to teach my kids that happiness and contentment will come from nothing outside of them ever, but the quiet moments they spend inside themselves instead.

I never thought I would become this woman.  A woman in search of simplicity and enjoying the truths of life rather than the distractions of life.  I can promise you that ten years ago, that isn’t at all what I was looking for.  But having children changes your perspective on things.  Approaching 40 changes what you value, I no longer feel like I have something to prove to anyone except myself.  Slowly dropping distractions to find that you actually feel fresher when your hands are covered in mud, or busy with knitting, or the air smells better with a tinge of leather and manure just might change the course of your entire life.

For now at least, I am left to fantasize about misty mornings, riding my mare, as the sun slowly rises to warm our faces.  A girl can have a dream can’t she?

Spill it: What are some dreams that you had as a child that you dropped as you grew up, only to realize you just might have been on to something back when?  Dirt and poop and manual labor doesn’t work for everyone, but what works for you that might be out of the box too?

Posted May 10th, 2010 under Miscellaneous. Tags: dreams of mothers, farms, homesteading
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