Never Too Old to Start Life on a New Homestead

While most of my friends have retired and moved to Florida or other places of warm temperatures, sunny beaches and golf-courses, I have started building a new life of hard work, broken fingernails, and a never ending to-do list.  But it is a life I had always imagined living, especially as a child living
in a rural town where there was a farm around nearly every bend in the road.

All those farms which my bus passed on our way to school have now disappeared and have been replaced with expensive new homes whose owners probably don't know and wouldn't care to know about the history of the land on which their home sits.  It always had, and still does break my heart to see those hundreds of acres of pastures and gardens dug up to make way for homes, industry or commercial ventures such as shopping malls.

Now that we are able to have our own little homestead, our farm will not be used for anything except growing a new life and the food to sustain it.

Today when very little in life is under our control to the quality of the food and clothes we buy, to the integrity of the leaders of this country,  it is good to know that there is a place where things can be the way we choose them to be.

We do not use chemicals or hormones, but instead choose to grow our food and raise livestock that is much the same as they were during the days of the Founding Fathers.  Heirloom vegetables and heritage livestock are being bred to retain their purity and traits that have made them strong and flavorful.

Instead of relaxing on a beach during my retirement years, I am learning to raise and breed Heritage cattle, hogs, geese, chickens, ducks and goats.  By doing so, I hope to help save these breeds from extinction.

Rather than spending hours browsing through shopping centers I  browse through seed catalogs.

Instead of sitting in the shade of an old tree, reading about the latest Hollywood divorce, I am sitting beneath an old tree reading about the way homesteaders of the past had dealt with matters such as trying to grow an orchard in soil that is mostly heavy clay.

The day begins early, by tending to the animals.  Once they have been fed and watered, then we can have our own breakfast.  Collecting eggs, milking (when the time comes), weeding the garden, baking bread, collecting firewood, and the list goes on.  In the evening we sit and talk or watch a movie.  We do not have television, but we do have movies that we enjoy seeing over again, or we read.  We sleep like we did when we were young and awake each morning refreshed and ready to begin, again.

Before coming to live on our farm I had to cope with the pains of aging.  Arthritis had me dependent upon pharmaceuticals in order to live pain free, but at the cost of constantly worrying about what damage those drugs could be doing to organs while it was making my joints function properly.

Now, here at the farm I have discovered, quite happily, that I can live quite well without those prescriptions, and have replaced them with herbs.  Perhaps not for everyone, and not for every condition, but for me, the exercise from having to be moving nearly all day has done more to aid in the quality of my physical life than all the pills in the pharmacy could have done.  And the only side-effect is that I no longer fear that my vital organs are being irreparably damaged by the treatment.

We raise most of own food including meat, eggs, and vegetables.  We are preserving a way of life that is quickly disappearing from the world stage, and we are as self-sufficient as we can be.

It is indeed a good life and an excellent retirement.