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Our writer discovers that she's not the only one who dreams of a return to simple living.A few weeks ago, I tore an article from a farming magazine about making a braided rug.
I was imagining weaving together colorful strips of fabric and declaring, "I made it!" when I stopped to wonder when I had become a woman who read farming magazines and wanted to make braided rugs. I decided it must have happened around the same time I decided to grow pots of veggies on the patio and darn torn wool socks instead of shopping for new ones.
Courtesy Everett Collection
While some women covet the lives of Oprah or Madeline Albright or Snooki, I am curled up in front of Little House on the Prairie reruns and dreaming of living like Laura Ingalls. As it turns out, I'm not alone.
The idea of pioneer living has taken hold. While covered wagons and floral bonnets don't appear to be making a comeback, modern pioneers are embracing aspects of Little House on the Prairie living, growing their own food, raising livestock, making clothing and shopping local.
Emily Achenbaum Harris who writes a blog called Little House, Southern Prairie, claims that a combination of the economic crisis, environmental awareness and the desire to be a stay-at-home mom led her to embrace traditional values like veggie gardening and secondhand shopping. Her mantra is the WWII motto, "Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without."
"It feels like a trend to our generation because it's different from how we grew up," she explains. "Our parents and grandparents were living like this and it wasn't special back then."
It's the "back then" that Achenbaum Harris refers to that draws me in.
The writer with her jarred fruits. Photo: Jodi Helmer
I was raised in cities with public transportation, corner stores and crowds. It's not an uptown condominium I crave but a secluded acreage in the mountains. I dream of living in a farmhouse just like the one where my great-grandmother was raised. I want to trade the corporate ladder for a grain elevator and tackle chores like feeding chickens, mucking out stalls and catching trout in the creek just like Laura Ingalls. I spend hours reading The Pioneer Woman, Cold Antler Farm and other blogs written by women who have embraced back-to-the-land living, dreaming of my own personal Walnut Grove.
For now, I live in an urban townhouse with a postage-sized patio so the chickens, horses and trout-laden creeks outside the back door will have to wait. I still manage to live a little like Laura Ingalls, even as rush hour traffic roars past the front door.
I have started growing vegetables and shopping at farmers markets, making meals from scratch, collecting rainwater, bartering for goods and services, wearing hand-me-downs and spending evening in heated games of Battleship or Scrabble instead of sitting in front of the TV. While it's not a true pioneer existence -- I'm not about to give up indoor plumbing, central heat or WiFi just to be like Half Pint -- it does represent a shift in how I'm living.
The decision to adopt some old-fashioned habits came from a desire to spend less (spending 99 cents for a tomato plant that will produce fruit for months is much more cost-effective than paying $3 per pound -- or more -- for supermarket tomatoes) and, in the case of food, to know the origins of the products I was eating.
"We grow our own veggies partly because, of course, it's economical," explains Megan Crotty, who grows everything from beans and tomatillos to pumpkins and zucchini on a 2.5-acre homestead in North Carolina. "Personally, I love to watch things grow [and] it's definitely a learning experience. We try to grow something new every year. It's amazing to look out there and see things growing and think, 'Hey, I did that.'"
Just like the Ingalls, Crotty and her fiancé, Todd Dulaney, share their crops with neighbors and coworkers, often trading fresh produce for venison, eggs and manure.
There is more to pioneer living than fresh air and a little dirt under the fingernails. In an effort to be more Laura Ingalls-like, I've discovered that a return to simpler times is a lot of hard work.
Last summer, a neighbor invited me to pick all of the peaches I could handle from her trees. I filled two baskets with plans to bake and preserve peaches just as I imagined Laura and her ma did in Walnut Grove. I peeled and sliced peaches all weekend, placed each jar in a pot of boiling water and set the jars aside until their seals popped. It felt like a sweet-smelling sweatshop: peel, slice, boil, repeat. After hours of work and hundreds of peaches, I had preserved just seven jars.
Exhausted and covered in peach juice, I knew it would have been easier to cut coupons for canned Del Monte produce but there was a strong sense of satisfaction that came from seeing the literal fruits of my labor stacked on the pantry shelves -- and that is the crux of the desire to live like Laura Ingalls. It might require more work but it offers more payoff, too.
While it sounds cliché, I have to admit that the peaches tasted sweeter when I recalled how much effort went into preserving them. The same can be said for the homemade bread that took six tries to master and the single small tomato I plucked from a withering vine. I've learned that the more effort something takes, the more I appreciate the result.
I'm well aware that growing vegetables, raising chickens and darning socks might be a fad. Like legwarmers, fruit roll-ups and friendship bracelets, the trend might fade into the background.
"I think that we're a stuff-loving society," Achenbaum Harris says. "As soon as the economy bounces back, people might keep their vegetable gardens but they'll probably go back to buying 10 pairs of shoes."
Even if I eventually trade the dream of a 100-acre farmstead for the desire to live in an urban high rise, there will still be preserved peaches in the pantry and a braided rug in the living room where I can kick off a new pair of shoes.
Jodi Helmer is the author of The Green Year: 365 Small Things You Can Do to Make a Big Difference.
Do you have a personal story to tell? Tell us about it in the comments, and don't miss these great stories:
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