What makes a homesteader?

What gives me the right to call myself a homesteader?

I was born and raised in Bellevue, Washington, arguably the capital of Pacific Northwest suburban lifestyle. Lawns were large, empty, and green, and if you wanted to reconnect with nature you enrolled your children in horseback riding lessons. If you tended a flower garden you were considered downright agrarian.

My husband was born in Seattle, Washington, and moved to Bellingham, Washington at the age of 12 as his parents sought much of the same. Friendly neighborhood kids roamed his cul-de-sac in small packs till nightfall when they didn’t have after-school sports practice, weren’t skiing the slopes of Mt. Baker, or couldn’t sneak away to a best friend’s house to marathon video games together.

His mother grew flowers in every spare corner of their front and back yards, and he learned to tend to and sell their wares within the scope of their home-based flower business. His sister saved up her share, and bought her first car with the profits, and he bought his first and only mountain bike that we still have tucked away in the garage. My mother had the legendary ability to kill anything green, including bamboo planted in the ground and air plants.

I first met Jess when we were both attending the same college in Seattle, and I was growing a tomato plant in the corner of my rented attic room like the rebel I was. He took me camping for the first time in my life and we both fell in love with the woods in ways we hadn’t anticipated. We dated, fell in love, and moved into the worst house anyone has ever rented north of Bellingham right after I graduated.

This house was not only falling apart at the seams, but the parts that weren’t actively dissolving around us were only being held together by the thick interconnecting layers of black and green mold growing out of every damp corner. Our heating bill was astronomical (because of all the holes in the walls and roof), and our landlord was absolutely scamming us. What made us stay for over a year?

It had land.

Not just a yard, but real open space with gravel and dirt and grass and trees. Every morning I saw green out my window and heard birds instead of being able to check out what my neighbor was making for breakfast. We had an actual wood stove where we made real wood fires.

When we finally got our poop in a scoop and moved out, we were devastated to leave it. We settled into the smallest, cheapest 2 bedroom apartment in town we could find and decided to save up to buy a starter home for a year or two. Even on the brightest day no light reached our bottom floor, inward-facing apartment. Our “green space” was the strip of mud and grass between our side and the opposite side of the complex, and our “balcony” was the two foot wide strip of gravel on either side of our front door that served to drain the river of runoff every winter. But, the heating was cheap, the rent was manageable, and they allowed cats- it was what we needed.

Four and a half long years later, we had paid down enough debt to be considered for an FHA loan. Realizing we might actually have space for a garden soon instead of spray painted plastic bins stacked on the front walkway and trees to look at again instead of neighbors and pavement lit a fire in both of us, and gave us an unreasonable amount of hope given how tight our budget was.

We toured our first prospective house. It was in a town we’d never visited, up a remote mountain road I was surprised we could even navigate, and sat on five gorgeous acres. The inside was rustic and partially remodeled, and the backyard had what looked like a chicken coop. The basement was...completely flooded.

The second house we were scheduled to tour a few days later was in a tiny town we drove through before I’d noticed we had reached it. It was the compromised waste of time before we looked at the house I actually wanted to see nearby, and had power lines in the front yard according to the overhead picture. The front looked like a mobile home with a garage slapped on one end- a look I was raised to believe was unsafe and a sign of failure.

Remember that overly expensive moldy house we’d rented for over a year? Yea, privileged suburban ignorance runs deep.

I was riding shotgun with our realtor while Jess drove his truck, and I felt a dread creep over me as we headed down the picturesque state road after we’d passed “town”. The mountains rose up to the north and the south, and the trees showed off their stark winter beauty. I did not want to like this house, but I REALLY didn’t want my husband to like it before we even had a chance to see my pick off the realtor’s list.

Jess beat us there, and as we parked and got out we could see him running from the large shop to the front door of the house with a fools grin on his face. I broke out into a cold sweat. We toured the house and saw two standard bathrooms and three fairly sized bedrooms, including a master suite. The living room was generous, and the kitchen and dining room had a layout that suggested an open floor plan with a little renovation elbow grease. From there we wandered into the shop, a 24 by 48 foot pole barn construction with a spacious lean-to, fully stocked with wood-working equipment. Utterly defeated, head hung low, I headed back out to the front yard (an ACRE of dry grassy play field, I hadn’t even noticed the power lines because they were hung so highly and discretely) to find my husband happily chatting with the neighbor at the fence line. A neighbor who just happened to be his coworker.

We put in an offer the next day, and within three weeks we had made the smoothest home purchase I suspect has ever been made, from an owner who not only went above and beyond to make sure we were had the option to purchase all his woodworking tools, but who spent a pretty penny fixing up the plumbing on his own dime after we had already signed the offer assuming we would be responsible for those repairs.

We moved in while I was working full time, in school full time working towards my second bachelor's degree, and just after the community theater show I was in performed it’s final weekend shows. The next year of my life was a blur of final projects, volunteer work and internships, establishing a career at an engineering firm, and navigating homeowner learning curves while attempting to maintain a connection with my husband who seemed to be taking it all in stride by comparison. It was the worst year of my life.

The cost of finding and getting us safely into our dream home was high. Higher than I was prepared for, and I crashed and burned in real life even while on paper I was thriving. To give myself the chance to not only recover, but rediscover why we even bothered with all these crazy purchases I started making the changes I had spent the last five years preparing for - and the absolute bone shaking terror of those changes brought me even lower.

We had up and moved an hour away from our friends and family, in a tiny town we’d never heard of. We bought a house at the top of our budget, and I was transitioning to work from home at an enormous pay cut. We had started dozens of house projects we did not have the experience or resources to finish.

We also had kind, wonderful neighbors who always offered to help us and feed us. Our drives into town were Bob Ross worthy, in all four seasons. Food was local, organic, and cheaper than we were used to. My time at home gave me the opportunity to learn the home renovation skills I lacked, and to cook my meals for the first time in years.

I’d like to say these revelations lifted me up and inspired me to start our homestead and finally plant that garden...but that's just not what happened. Seeing everything I had ever wanted right outside (sometimes inside) my front door but that I had refused to accept and love as my own finally brought me down to absolute and total rock bottom.

I spent a good six months, maybe a year mourning the loss of that time. All those memories I had refused to make and all the distractions I had sunk my time and energy into, instead of accepting the risky dangerous UNFAMILIAR idea that we were now clutching our dreams. Instead of continuing to take the risky dangerous and frightening steps to see those dreams unfold and take root and bloom.

All this to say, how did I get from there to calling myself a homesteader?

Well, being a homesteader isn’t about where you come from or what you know. It’s about what you love. And sometimes you can love something you’ve never even seen before so deeply that when it doesn’t light your soul on fire with inspiration it’s terrorizing your nightmares and intimidating the poop right out of you when you’re awake.

I started calling myself a homesteader years after friends and family did. My imposter syndrome raised its ugly head and told me that I was a glorified gardener and that all these people didn’t understand what homesteading meant, otherwise they would realize I didn’t fall into that category. I wasn’t canning, I wasn’t growing my own food, I wasn’t raising animals and my household wasn’t fully self-sustaining. I barely owned more than an acre of land, and we were massively in debt. Despite all of this, they called us both homesteaders- not gardeners, not hobby farmers, not hillbillies or dreamers or irresponsible or immature or delusional. This tangible momentum that everyone around us saw clear as day FINALLY broke through my wall of self-preservation, and things started falling neatly into place.

It was like the stars aligned just for us, over and over and over. My husband’s lemon of a truck broke down for good, and within six hours we found a better truck. For half the price of his lemon, and willing to finance with our terrible credit. In town. In his favorite color.

They even towed away his old truck we couldn’t get out of our driveway.

We hired an engineer to tell us how much it would cost to move the load-bearing walls in our house so we could continue with our home renovation. It turns out our roof is engineered so that all interior walls are removable- meaning, we didn’t even have load-bearing walls, and we could finish the work ourselves on our shoestring budget.

We looked at our soil to try and prepare a site for vegetable gardening. Not only is our soil mainly quick-draining sand with no rocks - talk about easy digging and planting - but one of our neighbors offered us organic cow manure to help start our beds.

Eleven metric tons of it. For free. It’s been a year, we still haven’t worked through half of it.

I needed a work-from-home job I could handle remotely while my stressful operations internship wrapped up at a local business, and I found one on craigslist that fit my needs perfectly, and I gave myself back the wage I had been earning while I worked for a large engineering company. I set my own schedule and was able to increase my hours during the lockdown, doubling my take-home pay and allowing us to continue paying down our sizable debt, and invest for our future while we prepared to start a family.

When we ran into painful and scary family planning obstacles, the medical team I had just signed up with turned out to also be the specialists I had no way of knowing I would need. I had lucked into an immediate appointment with them when I had first conceived because a new doctor had just joined their practice- a woman who is now an irreplaceable component in my physical and mental health.

Every obstacle that I had been able to define slipped from between my fingers, reversed, and slapped me in the face as a huge advantage. Eventually I learned to let go of my obstacles so my hands could be free to catch the perfect spirals life was irrationally throwing at me. I gave up trying to play every position on my team and just started booking it downfield towards the homesteading end zone, trusting my community and my previous moves were going to throw me the ball. I can tell you, I’ve gotten a lot farther this way than when I’ve tried to carry the ball all the way over the line myself, even though it’s a lot more horrifying letting go and just hoping your dreams will be there to meet you on the other side.

But enough with the poorly construed sports analogies. The reason I call myself a homesteader is because I am head over heels in love with the idea of myself being a homesteader, so much so that it is actually impossible that I am not becoming one. Every time I make a small decision to source my supplies locally, plant a seed in the ground, stay up too late reading about Nigerian Dwarf Goats, I am living my dream homesteading life.

Allowing ourselves to love what we love so hard that we see it everywhere everyday in every aspect of our lives (whether it’s physically there or not) is what makes me and my husband homesteaders.

Allowing ourselves to love what we love so hard that we see it everywhere everyday in every aspect of our lives (whether it’s physically there or not) is what makes me and my husband homesteaders. Cheers to spring, y'all.