Homeschooling and Homesteading
Today officially marks one month since Governor Gavin Newsom announced the Shelter in Place order for California. That news brought my daughter home from college and two more kept home from junior high and high school. Because we’re social distancing, it also means my parents are in their home, an hour and a half from our own, just when I would really like to call on their resourceful skills right now.
Growing up in the 70’s and 80’s, my parents were ‘modern’ homesteaders. They would never call themselves that, nor did I even know what the term meant at that time. But now I see that they were. ARE.
My dad was a school principal, my mother worked at home, raising my brother and me. Dad usually arrived home before 5 and only on occasion did he have an evening school function or meeting. I think being around kids and peers who were also learners, was not only rewarding but also energizing (and sometimes exhausting) for him. School days or no school days, he had enthusiasm for a number of other outlets. He was an avid tennis player, often meeting his friends in the evening for a singles or doubles match, and then returning to our home where he doled out a Budweiser to his opponents as they sat in the backyard teasing and laughing for a good hour or two. On other evenings, he would work in the garden, tending to the vegetables he and my mother grew year-round, or turning the fruit that was being dehydrated on his makeshift dehydrator. There was always a project: trees to be pruned, a fence to repair, gutters to be cleaned out, beehives that needed tending.
My mother too was a force- she ground the wheat for her bread baking, prepared the jars for canning and preserving, prepared beautiful bouquets from the flowers that bloomed in the garden, she toyed with new recipes, new paint colors for the walls, new crafts to decorate for the seasons, and left the door open to friends who frequently popped in and stayed through dinner and a hand of cards, where I often fell asleep under the busy round table. In fact, that round table was an inheritance from my mom’s grandmother, and flanking it on either sides of the wall, were two beautiful hutches my dad built using beveled slip glass from cabinet fronts in my grandmother’s ranch home. Dad built a number of furniture pieces in our house: bookcases, tables, and desks, shelving, a bay window overlooking the yard, and the garden furniture too. To this day, one of my favorite smells is saw dust. Between the two of them, there was nothing that couldn’t be done. And they seemed to have just the right amount of money and freedom that it all appeared like play.
But we never owned a new car, we lived in the same house from the time I was eight, despite my friends and theirs too, moving to larger, more extravagant houses. We traveled extensively, but always on the frugal side, staying in lodges or camping and eating picnic style rather than in restaurants, where my parents could control the quality of the food. We enjoyed someof the fashion of the day, but my closet was lean and each item well loved. We didn’t have the latest video games or cable TV, but we could play a mean game of charades on a moments’ notice and I filled dozens of journals as I sat in bed each evening. Before I could buy my own set of wheels, with my own earned money, my dad said I needed to know a few things about cars. So I learned to change the oil, rotate tires and use the gauge to measure and fill the appropriate air pressure. I learned how to jump-start a car, how to assess whether the brake pads needed to be replaced and where the carburetor was located (not that I really understood what it or many other doodads under the hood were good for.).
Now, more than a few decades gone by, and like so many, I am essentially being called to homestead; cooking and caring for the people and the things that are meaningful to me, and with children, that includes doing more of the educating; homeschooling, if you will. In fact, homesteading and homeschooling seem so perfectly paired.
So although I miss visiting with my parents right now, their values and their teachings are present as I channel their natural homesteading tendencies to lead the way for my family and me. Ideas abound: a car engine to take apart and put together again? The table and miter saws to build a chicken coop? A DIY compost bin to begin our vegetable patch, rather than throwing scraps, etc. into the green waste? We’re sewing fabric shopping bags (for the future), and masks too. We’re cooking together and eating three square meals as a family, discussing social, political, economic and ethical issues of our present and our past. We’re dreaming of possibilities- the kind that comes from examining a life well lived. We have resources like never before. We can learn or re-learn anything we care to.
My parents’ natural homesteading tendencies and the opportunity to quiet the noise (both external and internal) have had me questioning the idea of a successful life. Could it be that a modest lifestyle can be filled with unsurpassable joy and creativity and that the pursuit of self-reliance is an honorable endeavor? We have an opportunity right now; to slow down and practice a more playful, and purposeful way of living as we homestead and homeschool.
What are you practicing today?