I am sitting in a bathroom with a duck.
Couldn’t tell you what I expected from our move to this farm, but I don’t think it was that.
The space between reading about homesteading life and actually living it is remarkably wide.
You may watch videos online about it or read books, fictional or otherwise, but how many of them describe a real day? And even fewer talk about how it actually feels to live it.
It’s all fun and games until you’re cleaning out the duck bedding. You can wear a mask and shower immediately after, and you still somehow smell like duck shit for two days afterward. And yes, I am picking on the ducks specifically. In all my years of owning animals, their mess, and the accompanying smell, are next level.
Farm-fresh eggs are peak homesteading goals, but not many people will tell you how much time you’ll spend chasing the birds to get them where they need to be, at bedtime or otherwise. Or how hard that task becomes when your glasses both slip and fog up because it’s so hot and humid that the sweat coats literally every part of your body. Those buggers are fast, too.
I’m sure it helps to be young and coordinated, but I am neither of those things. I wasn’t even particularly coordinated when I was young either.
Even watching others sharing their honest and raw experiences isn’t a close substitute for the stress and confusion of trying to diagnose your own animals. Googling how to clear your duck’s vent from an internal broken egg and trying to convince the algorithm that you are, in fact, looking for duck info and not tips on cleaning your dryer.
Or the weight of making life-or-death decisions for your animals. Nearly every day.
And yet, this life and its often harsh realness are exactly what I’ve been craving my entire life. There are no hidden social rules here. No internal corporate hierarchy.
A goose is a goose; expect otherwise and you’ll be sorely disappointed.
You can’t negotiate with nature. It is what it is, you can’t speed it up or slow it down, and you won’t get what you want unless you’re willing to do the work. And sometimes not even then.
Leave something untended long enough and it’ll be reclaimed. Work on something long enough and it’ll start paying you back. Probably.
I love this life, I truly do. Every hard moment here has made me stronger, more capable, more settled.
But the idea that this life is simpler than the average suburban life is comical.
Days usually include some new side quest. Life here is endless researching to identify the bug, the footprints, the scat. Learning what kinds of fences work for each purpose: one will keep out foxes but definitely not raccoons, and not much will keep the deer from your delicious garden. Oh, and don’t forget the overhead protection too, unless you don’t want a blueberry harvest or to keep your chickens.
While we can, and do, shop at regular grocery stores, the long-term goal is to do a lot less of that. Which means learning pruning techniques, pest management, water retention, soil health, and carefully watching the weather for impending dangers from drought, extreme heat, dangerous cold, winds high enough to blow over trees, and record-breaking snow and ice storms, all things we’ve encountered during our first year here.
My bedside table looks like a mini weather station, tracking several outbuildings to make sure the animals don’t get too warm or cold. I know where all our power and new fiber lines are, to keep me from digging in the wrong spot and destroying our internet access again.
I may not want to ever have an HOA, but a phone tree for emergencies and planned road maintenance would be swell.
This definitely ain’t the simple life.
It’s a life that leads me to gloves and coconut oil in an attempt to extract a broken egg from a five-month-old duck limping around the bird yard one morning. And a life that has me putting her back with the rest of the flock after two days of treatment in the house, unsure exactly what was wrong or if it’s been solved, though she appears healthy again.
It’s a far cry from the Instagram montage with the beautiful melodic background music. It’s filled with dirt and sweat and stress, crying, itching, and bleeding. It’s as real as it gets. And I love it.
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