Put a girl in it… 👩🏻‍🌾

That’s the song that Brooks and Dunn made famous about 20 years ago. And that’s the advice of my counselor to help me find more order and contentment on my life. It’s actually not a bad plan. I have to say I agree with a lot of his idea.

I can go alone for the rest of my life with the freedom to do whatever I want whenever I want. I do like my freedom. But there is a lot of benefit to living together with someone and having a relationship and shared responsibilities. Stools are more steady with more than one legs.

The truth is my off-grid dream or owning a homestead really isn’t super practical to do it all alone. It is nice to have money and invest it, with a dream but it’s hard to make it a reality alone. Plus it seems like all my friends are settling down, buying houses and starting families. While I doubt I’d ever want to have kids except maybe young meat or dairy goats, certainly more hands can bring a homestead closer to reality.

Having an extra leg in the stool means both partners have somebody to fall back on and provide mutual aid. I can shovel horse manure, break ice in frozen water troughs or haul garbage to the burning barrel or slop to the pig pen in exchange for help when my truck breaks down or just needing companionship when I’m lonely or need some one to bounce ideas off of.

I am not sure that I am ready to settle down although truth be told I’m kind of bored with doing the same old trips to the Adirondacks alone. I kind of want to have land and livestock. I’d like to meet some new people and new horizons. I feel like I’ve run low on interesting unique places close to home so maybe the next best thing is new people and groups. Not looking to spend more time with Albany insiders though.

Albany is fine, it pays well and I like my work. But the suburbanite, everything is plastic isn’t the life I want to live. I want to be closer to the earth and be able to take care of myself and my family when things go wrong which are certain to happen in an era of accelerating climate change.

While I want to set down roots, I’m just as committed as ever to get out of New York State eventually, just because of the gun and open burning laws. To say nothing of what is happening to so much farm land and forest with the industrial solar farms or how humane laws and climate change restrictions might make it very hard to have a homestead in New York. I worry a lot about New York versus the kind of lifestyle I want to live eventually. It’s not homestead or rural life friendly.