Ridiculous

I hear homesteading rumors about docile flocks of chickens, bountiful milk goats, and loyal working dogs. I have none of those things. I have chickens that sleep in my crepe myrtle and lay eggs on my front porch. My collard greens are 48 inches high, brazenly growing taller despite my talent for neglect. There is a cat living inside my sofa. I tend to attract life's most curious offerings, like a magnet beckons sparkly lost earrings and bent cafeteria forks. It's been this way all my life. It's as if the Universe said to itself, "You know what we need here? Someone with an aptitude for the ridiculous." And lo, I was born.

I'm from Royal Oak Michigan, which is just outside Detroit. If you started on the north end of Detroit, somewhere near the somewhat famous 8 Mile Road, you'd need to walk two miles to get to the appropriate suburb. I grew up at the intersection between an eight-lane intrastate freeway and a six-lane interstate beast that runs from Sault Sainte Marie (MI) to Hialeah (FL). There was no FFA or 4-H, although we did attend the Sate Fair every year to eat fried food and play carnival games. There were livestock at the fair, and I have memories of petting goats and sticking my fingers into rabbit cages, but I lived in the city. It never occurred to me to ask for a pony for my birthday. I asked for a bike or roller skates. We all asked for bikes and roller skates. We were city kids.

My father's parents lived in a wooded suburb further from Detroit, in a neighborhood with a pond and an excellent sledding hill. There was a thicket out front and tall climbing trees in the backyard, making it possible to forget that there were neighbors on three sides. I rescued toads from the backyard fountain and caught snakes in the woods near the pond. We spent a lot of time having picnics in the thicket and playing Clue on the sun porch. Theirs was one of those neighborhoods, the kind that didn't have sidewalks or straight lines. That made it less like the city, where everything is on a grid and the only wildlife were the homeless people.

My mother grew up on a small family farm, although you wouldn't know it if she didn't tell you. She's not a huge fan of "roughing it" unless you count the slow food movement. You can't blame her, really. Her first pet was a chicken. Her house didn't have indoor plumbing until she was 13 years old. I doubt she ever had her own bed. My grandfather raised all manner of livestock, and when I was a child he farmed a small bit of land beyond the pig pen where we were offered twenty-five cents for every jar we could fill with pest caterpillars plucked from the plants. I say offered instead of paid because I'm not sure we ever finished the job. I kept the caterpillars as pets, of course. They always died. Surely it's the thought that counts. While pursuing my PhD in ecology I often thought he would be tickled to death to find his eldest granddaughter driving tractors through cotton fields rather than riding buses through city traffic.

So here I am, a 35 year old woman in a community so small that the postal system incorporates it into the neighboring town, which has a whopping 6000 people in it. I live in a creaky 100 year old farmhouse on property formerly farmed but now converted to slash pine. People often ask if I feel scared out here all by myself, but truthfully I don't. The stars are amazing on a clear night. The woods are full of wildlife and it's not unusual to have to stop the car to let a river cooter cross the road, or urge a king snake to end it's nap early. If there's ever any trouble, I've got a twelve-hen early warning system and a sheriff's deputy right across the street. Let's face it, nobody ever thought I was going to grow up and be normal.