Rural Freedom
I like the dirty life 💩
I’m kind of a dirty hick no matter how you look at it. I just kind of like the look and feel of dirt and mud, the smells of nature. Cleaning is difficult and I’m not sure how healthy it really is with harsh chemicals and the destruction of healthy bacteria that builds the immune system. Plus it’s often hard to get things cleaned without a lot of hard scrubbing.
It is pretty common on dairies for parents to bring babies out in a stroller and plop them out between the feed aisles so they can breathe in the barnyard air with the breathe of cattle and the pungent smells of silage and manure. The cows mooing are soothing and the natural bacteria healthy. Barnyards are hardly sterile, they are living natural things.
My apartment is dirty as is my truck and my camping gear. I do some cleaning but I’m not particularly worried about a little bit of mud or dirt. Sometimes things smell bad – I do my best to clean them but I’m not perfect. I probably should do more but what is the harm? Living close to nature means living in the dirt.
Cleanliness has its benefits in the city, although it’s hard to argue most cities are particularly clean – people track in mud and dirt and pollution from buses, trucks, cars and factories can make cities quite gross. Cleanliness can help slow the spread of viruses without vaccines like the common cold virus but even that is somewhat over stated. It looks nice and smells better to be clean but it’s debatable if it’s that much healthier.
WE WERE LIED TO About OFF GRID LIFE.
Brandon Rhyder – Haggard
I need to get out of the city, drive a country mile
Get back to my roots, before two worlds collide
I want sausage biscuit gravy, sweet tea from a jug
So jump into my pickup truck, and I’ll fire it upWe burn our trash out in the backyard in a barrel
We feed our dogs and cats our table scraps
We get our eggs straight from the hen house, and our water from a well
Dig our onions and our taters from the ground
Yippee yi yo, yippee yi yay, I’m feelin' kind of haggard todayI want to get out on the river, catch a mess of fish
Throw a big ol’ party, that you don’t want to miss
We’ll have washer pits and horseshoes, shine and chocolate pie
'Cause when I’m on the swing with her it makes me almost high
Reminds me of traveling in Western Pennsylvnia, smelling the cow shit, the burnt plastic in the burning barrels, the oil wells, the kerosene and coal smoke from the rural homes. Beautiful, wild country, even if it's been blasted away from the explosions of powder and the coal mining.
It’s Great to be Back At The Cabin!
I always like catching up to see what Dale is up to these days.
Why I don’t talk much about owning my own land and living off-grid these days 🚜
Sometimes the best thing to do with an automatic investment is to just let it run its course. Let the bimonthly deposits go in on schedule, let the markets grow, ignore the ups and downs, know that better days are ahead but don’t give it a lot of thought in the near term.
The truth is my hope and vision for the future hasn’t changed much though my expectations have been somewhat tempered watching the rate the markets grow, my quickly aging parents, the progress of my career. I realize probably within the next decade my parents are either likely to pass on or retire to a nursing home when they are no longer able to take on their homestead. My sister has little interest in their five acre property in Westerlo, so it will either get sold or I’ll take it up as my own home.
It’s not everything I would want in land but there is a lot of possibility with the property and it’s within commuting distance of my current job. Another thing two I’m considering is that I’m within 5 years from having twenty years in with the state retirement system at which point I will get a big bump in my retirement benefits. My current apartment isn’t great but it works well enough and is super convenient on the bus line and not a long ride to work.
On that land, if it’s someday mine I could rework it more into my own vision of the land.
Cornfields make good neighbors. 🌽
If you want to live out in the country as I do eventually, I wouldn’t mind having a corn field or another farm field as a neighbor rather then a residential property. Great place to spot deer and wildlife, except for when a farmer is working the land, it is vacant and quiet. Sure, at times of year when manure and anhydrous ammonium is applied, it can be smelly, but cornfields don’t complain and aren’t bothered about what goes on your own land. Sometimes farmers work late into the night in fields, but it’s not an all year thing.
A cornfield ain’t going to complain about the smoke from your woodstove, your burn barrel or bonfire, they won’t care if you listen to music too loud, they don’t care if you leave a light on out back or make some noise when you have friends over. Cornfields don’t care about smelly livestock or your compost pile or your garden or your barking dog. Yes, you must respect private property, fence in your pigs and goats, and be fire safe, but the farmer just wants to grow his crop to feed his livestock, and if you leave him alone, he unlikely to bother you — and he probably does much on his land which you do on your own.