It has recently been suggested to me that I should provide a little personal background..
I didn't grow up in a rural area. In fact, as a kid I prided myself on my urban-ness. I had family in the country, but I thought they were uncool because they didn't wear jordache or listen to Madonna. In college when most people were experimenting with sex or communism, I was developing an obsession with... farming. I had moved to a rural area for school because it was cheaper, and at first I dreaded every interaction with "large animals" as they are called in veterinary medicine. However, certain utopic aspects of the agrarian lifestyle started to appeal to me. I began to garden on my patio, I started reading Wendell Berry, I became a foodie.. you get the idea. Since I was already committed to a career track at that point and needed to go where the work was, I spent the next 15 years or so working in veterinary specialty practice and gardening where I could. At night I read seed catolouges, Mother Earth News and other "farm porn". I worried about local food resilience and carbon footprint. I schemed feverishly about what I would do if I could get my hands on a little useable land of my own. In the midst of my self cultivation as a fanatically self reliant, solitary Luddite, I met my partner Mr. High Tech. I'm not kidding, this guy has a technology radio show. He thought that zucchinis grew under the ground. But good natured fellow that he is, he picked up a shovel to help out after only a couple of years. I've even heard him get on a soapbox about eating locally at parties. I'm so proud. While his first question while house hunting remained "what kind of Internet access can we get here?" the second one was "can we grow food?". So here we are, the yin to each others yang. Our daughter will know how to program a computer, AND how to graft an apple tree. We hope.
Yay!
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