Confessions of a midlife wannabe homesteader

And how I realized you have to actually BE HOME to do it...

As I’m writing this, my kitchen is full of dairy experiments. There’s clabber fermenting in the cupboard, fresh chevre in the fridge; viili (Finnish mesophilic, or room-temperature, yogurt) cultures doing their best to populate a jar of milk on the counter.

I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m having so much fun.

It all started with a visit to a local farm in Southwest Michigan, whose owner Sam I stalked befriended after I met her family and their utterly charming goats at a “goat yoga” event I attended in 2022. I’ve been out to her farm a couple of times, soaking it all in; the animals, the buildings, the way of life.

During my visit last week, Sam let me milk one of the goats, Black Raspberry (who incidentally was the one who spent the most time on my mat during goat yoga). I’ve dreamed about milking a goat since I was a little girl and fell in love with these funny, friendly creatures, and the experience was everything I’d hoped for.

I. was. in. heaven.

Since I was a little girl I’ve been drawn to what we collectively call the “domestic arts”. Growing and preserving food, animal husbandry and even cleaning have always fascinated me (my all-time favorite scene in any Laura Ingalls Wilder book is when Laura and Carrie clean the house “top to bottom” while Ma and Pa are away taking Mary to college in Little Town on the Prairie. A blacking brush! What was this magic?)

As a young mother I dreamed of starting a homestead long before it had become a trend on social media (I started feverishly researching homesteading via a handful of blogs in the late 90s - years, in fact before the existence of social media.)

And while that dream didn’t play out the way I hoped it might back then, along the way I picked up a handful of homestead-y skills: I learned to make my own household cleaners, to grow herbs in containers, to can strawberry jam and tomato sauce, to roast a whole chicken and make broth from its bones.

I plugged along for a decade or so, cataloging new skills as I added more kids to my household. Then, for quite a long time, I simply stopped doing most of it.

In the past few years I’ve gotten back to those original skills and even expanded my skillset a bit; I now raise chickens, I’ve learned the basics of fermentation and how to forage for wild greens, berries, and mushrooms. And now I know how to milk a goat and make cheese from its milk. What next? The possibilities seem endless.

I’m finding myself more and more captivated, fueled by curiosity in a way I haven’t experienced in a very long time. And sometimes, I admit, I am also frustrated by all the time I’ve spent not pursuing this path; the years I didn’t learn a single new skill or even stopped implementing things I already knew.

But I stop myself from going too far down the self-flagellation path. Because - and this was a key realization for me, if obvious to others - developing a toolbox of home-based skills typically requires a person to, well, be at home. Some things, of course, require less time and can be done on the fly or just once in a while, but when you piece together multiple ongoing projects at once—say, chickens AND a garden AND milk fermenting in the cupboard—it gets really hard to manage if you aren’t actually physically on-site, especially when you’re in the still-learning-how-this-all-fits-together stage.

And for years, I simply wasn’t at home that much. Between work and travel and a social life that frequently pulled me away, I barely had available the time or attention required to keep a houseplant alive, much less bring a garden to fruition.

Looking back now, I can give myself a hearty pass. It was the season of life I was in, not a failure - and there’s no point now beating myself up over time “lost.”

But I’ve been slowly entering a new season, one in which my home is again taking center stage as my primary source of entertainment, comfort, nourishment and other sorts of sustenance. My latest podcast episode delves more into my recent move toward a more home-centered life.

And this new season seems to be picking up steam. Eric and I have so many plans for our property - don’t be surprised if goats make an appearance sometime soon - and I’m finding myself ready to dive headlong into a decades-deferred dream.

Sometimes dreams don’t come to life in the timeline we hope they might, but that doesn’t mean they won’t happen, friends.

To use a dairy metaphor, since milk is on my mind right now: the active cultures of my homestead-ish dream weren’t dead during that decade of zero progress; they were just dormant. Now, they’re out in the warmth again: waking up, coming back to life — and more active than ever.