Well, I guess it is about time I add my two cents worth to this fun blog! I keep thinking about lots of things I could write about, but then when I sit down to do it, I can't remember what I was going to write about. Such are the joys of getting older. Anyway, I thought a good starting point for me would be to talk a bit about what brought me to live this lifestyle that I do. When I was younger, I always said that some day I wanted to live on a farm, have lots of fun animals and do my best to raise food for my family and be somewhat self sufficient. It was one of those dreams that I never thought would come about. My life wasn't headed in that direction. I'm thankful that through several unexpected things, my life took a major change!
Eleven years ago I moved to the wilds of Canada. I am from Utah, lived there almost all of my life (spent a year or so in Arizona) and then met my second husband (I almost put current husband, but decided that sounded like I might replace him at some point) online. I was just recently divorced and felt like it was "safe" to get to know a man online that lived so far away because "I would NEVER move to Canada." That quote about never say never is so right. In less than a year, I had packed up my three kids, two cats and a dog and truly did move to the wilds of Canada. My husband had recently purchased some undeveloped land (166 acres with lots of trees), and that was to be where we lived. The first time I saw the land was when I came up to visit a few months before we got married. There wasn't even a road into the place. When he took me to see it, I didn't know whether to sit down and cry, throw a temper tantrum or run for the closest airport. I wasn't absolutely sure I was up for the adventure that it was going to be.
The next time I saw the place, it had a driveway into where the house would eventually go, some of the trees were gone from the yard part and there was a very small one-room cabin that my husband had built as temporary living quarters. The cabin had a wood stove for heat, a small propane stove for cooking, a partial wall and a bed on the other side of that wall. My husband and I got the bed, my three kids slept in the small camper parked next to the cabin and my stepdaughter slept in our jeep that first summer (she was headed off to college in the fall). We arrived in early June, and we had a summer full of interesting adventures. With no running water, or electricity, we learned to do things in a whole new way. We had an outhouse, heated water on the stove to wash dishes and went to town to take showers at the local laundromat! The kids made a game of it to see if they could get wet, soaped up and washed off on only one quarter. However, I looked forward to those showers and used as many quarters as I could.
We lived in our cabin for the remainder of the summer, a summer that had almost nonstop rain. With no grass growing, we got to really experience the mud in this part of the country. They call it Peace River gumbo, and I'm not sure that even truly describes it. My kids would walk over from the camper to the cabin and grow several inches in the process. The mud sticks like crazy, and they would literally have several inches of the gooey stuff stuck to their boots in just that short walk from one building to the other.
Even in the beginning of this adventure, animals were an important part. We immediately started preparing the land for our cows. Fencing 166 acres is a lot of work, and I am sad (but kind of relieved) to say that I didn't do much of the fencing back then. We also had chickens right off the bat. I hadn't raised chickens before, but they were animals, so I was up for the adventure. We built a chicken coop and started with a few hens. We also had two large guardian dogs, okay one was just a cute little puppy when we first came, but he grew to be a huge dog. Mufassa was a wonderful dog for my kids. He went everywhere with them. My boys were 10 and 12 and my daughter was 16 when we moved here, and having all this space was wonderful for them, though a bit nerve racking for their mom. I felt better once Mufassa was big enough to protect them when they were out and about! Duke was Mufassa's father, and he became my constant companion. They were such amazing dogs.
In the fall, we had a modular home brought in, and we sort of went back to life like we knew it before the move to Canada. We now had running water and electricity, so no more trips to Dawson Creek to take showers, no more need for the outhouse and TV and other electronic gadgets came back into our lives. Some of those things were nice to have back, but I missed all the family time we had spent together when we didn't have other things to distract us. We had read together, played games together and gotten to know each other better when we went without all those modern conveniences.
I'm grateful for what I learned that summer, and I am even more grateful for the things I have continued to learn over the last eleven years. We try very hard to become more and more self sufficient as the years go by. We provide all our own meat, have a large garden every summer (though our growing season isn't very long) and look for ways to lessen the foot print we leave behind on this earth. I try a lot of things, not always successfully, but isn't that part of the journey? We need failure to learn and grow, and each unsuccessful attempt at something leads me to improve on it or try something else. I'm excited to write about some of those things, to share experiences, stories and trials from living this wonderful lifestyle.
