Reflection
Sitting on a dream
I grew up in a gardening family. I loved summers, helping with weeding the garden and gathering the bounty of tomatoes, beans, peppers, sunflower seeds and more. My husband and I dreamed for years of having our own garden, but our busy corporate careers and my business travel schedule made a garden mostly impossible.
Dream comes into vision
Finally, I was recruited into a position that required only sporadic (vs. weekly) business travel. This coincided with my husband stepping back a bit at work, with more time at home and less stress. We charged headlong into building our new garden. We started turning kitchen scraps into compost, tilled the soil, sowed seeds carefully curated for our short growing season, and then watched that garden grow and produce. It was thrilling to return to letting the afternoon harvest determine what we enjoyed on that evening’s dinner table. But something was missing.
Enter a flock of mini dinosaurs
“What do you think about getting chickens?” I asked my husband. He had grown up with a small flock of bantams and liked the idea. I dove in, in my typical fashion, and did a ton of research into raising backyard chickens. I was fortunate to have a good friend and “chicken lady” to serve as a mentor. Soon, we were the proud owners of a brood box, a chicken coop and all the accoutrements (feed, feeders, waterers, etc.). We came home one day with a “takeout container” of fuzzy chicks and we were on our way!
An unsettling reaction from Dad
A few months later, the pullets started laying! I proudly sent my parents photos of the first stunning, blue-green egg. The reaction from my father, who was proud of our backyard garden and fruit trees when I was a kid, surprised me.
Dad laughed: “I don’t understand why you’re doing this. This is why your mom and I went to college and sent you kids to college, so we could have clean jobs in air conditioning and pay other people to do this sort of hard, dirty work for us.” He went on to insinuate that Mike and I were taking some sort of step back to our grandparents’ generation, a place from which he and my mother worked so hard to escape.
My Solution
Ouch, that stings
I’m not going to lie, dad’s reaction hurt me. Yeah, I was a middle aged, grown woman when I heard these words, but I love my father and his opinion still counts. I reflected quite a bit on all the hard work and sacrifice of time and treasure that went into transitioning my family tree from “poor, dirty farmers”, homemakers, laborers and soldiers to “college educated yuppies” and I didn’t want to seem ungrateful.
At what price?
Then it dawned on me that the real sacrifices my family, and many families like us, made to transition into air conditioned laptop jockeys were downright heartbreaking. In just two to three generations, my family went from hardened, self-sufficient folks who could raise most of the food for their table right out their backdoor to wimpy and vulnerable suburbanites completely dependent on the industrial food supply chain. We severed our ties to the land in exchange for being wage workers. We had been tamed. How sad.
Hard to handle
I’ve become increasingly determined, week by week, to sever my ties to the corporate world, shed the golden handcuffs and go back to the wild a bit. I want to live a life that would make my rugged ancestors proud. Yes, I’m thankful for the college education and my husband’s technical trade training that set us up for a healthy income which has in turn enabled us to invest and prepare for an early retirement. But that role I played in the professional world has already run its course, it’s served its purpose. It’s time to un-tame myself and settle into a role that is more authentically “me”; for Mike and me to become unapologetically “us”.
Key Takeaway
Battery hen no more
The closer I look at this whole “go to school, work in air conditioning and give up your ties to the land” thing, the more I think it’s a pretty crappy bargain. I’m sorry that it took me four decades to figure this out and build a plan for something better, but this is another fine reason to share this lesson with you, my reader. Many of us have traded being a wild, free-range chicken for being a battery hen trapped in a cage. Far too many of us aren’t even aware that we’re in a cage! We just eat the feed and lay the egg, day after day.
Small steps are better than standing still
I pray that my generation (“Gen X” they call us) will be the last air conditioned, over-civilized, over-tamed generation of Americans. I hope that my readers can take even one step this year to un-tame themselves, to step back to the land and away from their desks. This is all the more so if you’re 50 or better, like I am. Find small ways to produce a bit more of your own food and become less reliant on grocery story chains and industrial farming. It’s my sincere desire that in sharing the Briarhopper Ranch journey with you that I inspire you to shed the suitcoat of civilization, even if just a bit, and free yourself to a more authentic way of living.