Home

This week, I found myself in the parking lot of our local grocery store, stars twinkling, the air warm and humid, heading home.

I realised, for the first time, I no longer felt like a stranger here. I felt at home, like this is my town now. I suppose it is hard to explain, since we have lived on the farm just south of town for almost five years. I have always felt like a stranger here though, often folks ask me if I am visiting. Since I started going into town to grade papers and make an effort to shop local for almost everything (still use Amazon since we have no bookstore!!!!), slowly I started to let people know me and making a painful effort to recognise and remember names. Painful? I don't recognise faces, sometimes to a scary degree, I don't recognise the faces of my own family. This makes trying to remember my neighbours and even friends a difficult task that requires other compensations and memory tricks. An effort worth it though. Facebook actually helps with this a lot, more so since it is on my phone, and then not so much when people use generic pictures of animals for their profile pictures. Still, I am working on it.

I am a strange bird. This is not a secret, but it took me a while to feel at home enough to go back to purple hair and dressing like me. For too long I toned it down, trended towards normcore even. I felt like a fake me. So now, I can relax into the creative being.

Not that this doesn't have its downside. I am sill regarded by some folks as too extreme and this makes arranging playdates and even girl scouts complicated. 4H was a big fat fail this year to the point that Lily gave it up, or rather refused to go back, even though it was her favourite activity. It seems strange to me that people view us as dangerous. I don't drink. I don't have crazy facial piercings (yet), not a single tattoo (yet), and I'm not an extremist to either end religiously. Sure, we homeschool, ok, radical unschool is closer to the truth, but I'm not recruiting for our school. I have plenty enough students. Ha!

It was pointed out to me that our entire lifestyle, unschooling/natural health/permaculture farming, is basically seen as an insult to pretty much everyone in town. Why? The three major employers in town are Hyvee grocery, the school district, and the medical centre. Oh and then everyone else is connected to conventional farming. While I see the point in that observation, I don't think that it is entirely true. I think there is a place for us here. I hope there is.

Church helps. I mean, praying for people to be kind to my children as we navigate life is one thing, but actually going to a church that shares a message that lines up with our own values, accepts us for who we are without disdain, and allows people to get to know us to more of a degree than just seeing us shop at the local grocer, this helps. This helps so much.

And the longer we root here, the more people we meet that do what we do and some folks have been doing it for decades. It is exciting to build community! A relief too.

I think that this is the unspoken of hardest part of moving from a city to a small town that we have no familial connections to. Finding community. Part of my issue was that I had found community in the city and the Internet allowed me to stay connected. I had no immediate need to fill by finding friends locally for myself or my kids. Plus, we would go to the city regularly.

Well, gas prices are sabotaging that in a big way. I realised that my kids are also craving more playdates, more adventures in the woods, more things to do. Driving 4 hours total to do these things is expensive and exhausting for me. I need that time back.

Brewing all of this in my heart and mind, I decided to open invitation folks to drive to the farm, but cancel all of our summer camps (which seems like the opposite of what the kids need, right?) Instead we are going to save and squirrel and work on exploring free activities close to home. Use the local pool, visit museums in town, make regulars of ourselves at the local library, and ride bikes on the trails here. Take the boat out more too. Invite folks into our lives and adventures. Invest time into relationships here, nurture the ones that need it that are far from here. Pen pal with dear friends.

It isn't easy for me. If I had my way, I'd be holed up alone at a remote unplugged cabin with my notebooks and a CD player ALONE, did I mention alone? I have just been feeling this need to be in my own head for a bit. Even my husband and kids are intruding on the goings on in my internal narrative and I know they are annoyed at my spacing out, not hearing them, daydreaming. I will try to be more present for all of them while carving out time.

I digress, I started out meaning to write about that feeling I had, just after a lovely rain, the heat of the asphalt still radiating and humid, and feeling at home. Not like a tourist anymore, but a part of this community. Even if I am the strange square on the edge that is a private joke of the quilter, I am still part of the larger picture, important to it even.