City life to country life
Friends of mine recently invited me to speak on their fledgling podcast, Connection Chronicles, about my journey leaving city life for the country and setting up our homestead. At first I thought they’d gotten me confused with someone else as I didn’t see myself as a homesteader.
You see, we live in B.C.’s southern interior, where my husband farms our four-acre vineyard and I run a small, traditional B&B. We don’t generate our own power and water (both come from the village nearby). My husband doesn’t have a beard. I don’t wear cute floral dresses to milk the cows in (most of my morning chores are done in my crocs and housecoat). And I don’t have a cow. So clearly, I couldn’t be the homesteader they were looking for.
But, after confirming they knew who I was and hadn’t misdialed, the request got me thinking.
Wikipedia describes homesteading as a lifestyle that prioritizes self-sufficiency, subsistence agriculture, home preservation of food and small-scale craft work for household use or sale.
By that definition, I learned that I am in fact a homesteader. (Albeit a beginner).
So I agreed to an interview on their podcast and also decided to start writing about my adventures going from city life to country life and simple living. Because Lord knows it wasn’t always this way.
I wore All. The. Hats.
They say that teachers come when students are ready for them. My teacher came to me late one night about five years ago, when I was at the height of my career but crying a flood of tears of inadequacy alone in my kitchen.
I’d been back at work from my maternity leave for about a year, putting in long hours at a demanding job.
I was holding my own in boardrooms; fanning the flame of my marriage; and loving a son who spent his days in a caring day home.
My days were full from 6 a.m. until 10 p.m. each and every night. As pressure and responsibility increased at work, so did the money. When my husband and I were released for our annual vacation entitlements, we lived it up in cities and countries all over the world, getting our dose of la dolce vita so we’d be ready to hit the ground running when we returned.
When I look back at this time, the metaphor I see is a 1,000 acre canola field in full bloom. Planted with genetically modified seeds to maximize uniformity. Boosted with chemical fertilizers to enhance production. Sprayed with pesticides to reduce disturbances. Harvested efficiently with state-of-the-art equipment. Left bare for a few months. And then replanted again. And again. And again. Until the soil is so used and unrested, unrefreshed and barren that nothing at all that is natural will grow there again.
Over Stimulated, Under Rested
My senses were overloaded. I wasn’t meaningfully happy. And I distracted myself from that by buying things and pursuing diversions. Most evenings, my husband would come home from work in a foul mood. He was distracted, irritable, felt unappreciated and quite frankly was an absolute bear to be around.
I choose my battles very carefully, so I did my best to distract myself and him from this unhappiness with fancy dinners, fine wines and fun nights out. Which only added to our sensory overload and amounted to holding our marriage together with bubble gum and shoe laces.
I was throwing everything I had at being a good wife, mother and career woman but I still wasn’t cutting it. And I wasn’t really being great at any of it. Our marriage was struggling. My son was suffering from a never-ending spiral of ear infections and being prescribed ever-increasing doses of antibiotics to get it under control. My work was being patient with appointments and sick days, but I felt like I was on thin ice. I was pleasing no one and letting down everyone. Most especially, myself.
My husband and I both knew that something had to give. He was completely done with the grind and was in a position to take an early retirement from work. I was approaching the prime of my career but nowhere near being ready to retire as well. We weren’t sure how to reconcile our paths.
Spirit Animal
The night my teacher came, our backyard was lit by the light of a full moon. Through my tears, I noticed a movement outside and froze. My senses were on high alert to an interloper in the shadows.
And who should it be? But a humble little skunk, exploring my flower beds. Calmly nosing about. Minding his own business.
The shock of seeing that wild animal in our yard, in the heart of the city, stopped my tears in their tracks.
I let out a laugh of surprise and said: “What are you doing here? You don’t belong in this city…any more than I do.”
Skunk medicine teaches us to live with humble authenticity and confidence. To live life on our own terms. Firmly, peacefully and unapologetically. That little moonlit creature shone a slick LED city-light on the fact that I felt like an imposter in my own life.
Hippie girl. City girl. Country girl.
It will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me that I’m a hippie at heart. Happiest when I’m on an adventure. Obsessed with learning the old ways to grow and preserve food. Hopelessly homesick with hiraeth for a motherland I never knew.
Raised to prioritize financial independence above all else, I reluctantly tucked my inner bohemian away after a few happy years gallivanting around the world in my mid-twenties.
But, feeling pressure to keep up with my peers, I held my breath and stepped onto the corporate treadmill. And I’d walked that steady, predictable, well-groomed path ever since. I was welcomed there. And reaped its rewards. But I was most certainly an imposter. A skunk masquerading as a purebred cat.
Like that skunk in my backyard, I’d adapted to life in the city.
But eating from garbage bins and walking among the long-haired Persians just wasn’t for me anymore.
No skunk worth its stripe can hide its wild side for long. It was time to accept my nature and embrace the sharp claws and stink that lived alongside my soft furry coat and sweet face. This city skunk needed to go to the country.
It took awhile to find my voice. The right words to suggest to my husband that we leave some of the stability and comfort we’d grown used to behind. As a woman raised to look out for herself, it was an uncomfortable proposition to put forward. When we met, I was fiercely proud to be an independent career woman. Homeowner. RSP contributor. And debt free to boot.
Fast forward six years and suddenly I’m a working mom and a duck out of water, telling my husband that it turns out the city isn’t my natural habitat, after all. That there was this other version of me, deep down, and she wanted to come out now. She needed wilder paths to roam with her duckling safe beside her and to not know what every day was going to bring.
It turned out my husband shared my desire to leave the city and move to the country as well but knew how important financial stability was to me and didn’t want to pressure me into walking away from that. We were on the same wavelength and didn’t even know it.
Then, in the way that life sometimes moves mountains when you’re on the right path, the universe cleared obstacles away at an unsettling speed. The right house came up for the right price and together, we gladly stepped off the treadmill.
Let the skunk stripe show
The first thing I did when we left the city and moved to the country, was let my skunk stripe grow out. I didn’t intend for it to be a big statement. I’d always taken pride in my appearance and kept thinking I might go back to dying my hair. But then I just never did. Growing grey became symbolic of a very slow undoing of who and what I had been. In true Kafka-esq style, I went into my metamorphosis a long-haired Persian and emerged a skunk.
I won’t pretend it’s been all sunshine and roses on our new path. In fact, it’s been quite the opposite. Moving from city life to country life has sometimes been dark and scary and disappointing. Other times flooded with light and adventure and fun. We’re mucking in with the stuff of life and for all its messiness, it feels good.
Predictable isn’t a word I use to describe my life anymore. Each season brings new tasks, new challenges, new ebbs and flows of energy. And I’m finding my stride within that current.
Nothing connects me more to a place than experiencing the flora and fauna that feed and nourish the people that live there. So I’ll be writing here regularly about that. Life on and around Riverbank Vineyard in an orcharding valley in southern B.C.s wild and rugged interior, where this proud skunk is putting down her roots.
About the author
Jessica Johnson runs a small, traditional Bed and Breakfast from her vineyard in the Similkameen Valley of British Columbia, Canada.
Raised to be a strong, independent career woman but now a wife and stay-at-home mom on a fledgling homestead, she is clumsily yet happily establishing roots in her new landscape.
An expert at almost nothing but curious about nearly everything, Jessica writes about her adventures in rural B.C. where she raises her son and other wild creatures and is learning the old ways to preserve and grow food.
