Want to know who Alley is and what Rural experience she has? This episode will answer your questions.
Episode Journals: Alley Who?
Welcome. I’m Alley! For those of you who are wondering who the strange lady cracking jokes is and what rural experience does she have, well let me tell you!
In my early years, I grew up in a home that did urban homesteading. We had a garden and small livestock. Small, meaning chickens and similar animals. Fun fact, you do not name farm animals (at least in my home), but I was a stubborn child. So I named all of them Buttercup! Because I was not going to be told what to do, but not so far out of the rules that I would get in trouble.
There was also no air conditioning until I was a teen. Not so bad when you grew up without it, but every year there were at least a few unbearably hot nights in the summer. So hot and humid you could not sleep.
Another thing we didn’t have was precooked meals. I didn’t even know they existed until I was a preteen. We cooked everything from scratch, and yes, I can make bread too.
As a teen, I hopped between country and city life. It came with a lot of new experiences, like heating solely with a fireplace, cooking and baking in the fireplace, woodworking, and blacksmithing. Although, why anyone trusted me with a red hot piece of metal, I will never know. For over a year, I washed the laundry solely by hand. Going from urban to the country brought the chance for not only larger animals but more variety. Pigs, cows, guineas, turkeys, and the like. Did you know geese have teeth? Yep, I learned that the hard way. For those sticklers saying that the teeth are really spikes of cartilage, let me know if you call it “clamped on by cartilage” when you get bit.
As an adult, I have lived both with and without electricity. I’ve had my own livestock. There have been gardens from small tire gardens, to large full-acre gardens. I did laundry by hand when I had little kids in cloth diapers. That was time-consuming. There has been plenty of hunting and fishing. Some years if we didn’t grow it, hunt it, catch it, or forage for it in the woods, we didn’t eat it. I even spent roughly a decade living around Amish and Mennonite communities.
All that is to say, if the zombie apocalypse ever happens, I’m going to do great!
I have definitely had my fair share of things going wrong. Livestock escapes, tornados, accidentally burned the front half of my hair off, manure nastiness, face plants in the mud, viscously attacked by geese, and even had my house burn down once. I can’t forget falling off a roof or five, and out of a dozen trees, a few tailgates, a moving vehicle but oddly never a ladder.
Thanks for listening. Now that you know a little about me and my background, I hope you’ll stick around. My first episode comes out February 6th. Until then, happy wordsmithing.
