Share a story about someone who had a positive impact on your life.

I always knew growing up that I loved the outdoors. When I was a child, and we were visiting my grandparents in Oklahoma, I could be found playing in the dog houses with their 3 large farm dogs, chasing after the barn cat named Toby, or playing in my grandmothers old fridge that she had layed on its back and converted into a worm farm. I loved digging through the rich soil, searching for the large Nightcrawler earthworms that she and my grandpa used as bait for fishing.  I loved the smell of the earth, the gritty feel of it on my little hands. I loved tagging along after my grandma when she went to pick okra from the sky rocketing stalks in her garden. They seemed so tall to my then 7 year old body.

I have very few solid memories of my grandma, because she passed away when I was 8, but now that I am finally beginning a life that is similar to hers, I am discovering more memories of her that I had previously forgotten.  I love how smells, sounds, and textures can bring someone who passed so long ago back into the forefront of  memory.

Today, when you have a question or you need to learn something,  you go on YouTube and within a few seconds, you have hundreds of possible videos to watch that most likely have the information you are searching for. My grandmother was born in the first part of the 1900’s. A time when most of a person’s knowledge base was passed down from family that came before them. It seems that so much of what we should know about growing food, feeding your family, and simply being able to provide for yourself has been lost to history. I want to be able to be more like my grandma, I want to grow okra that is taller than me, raise chickens for eggs and meat, I want some big farm dogs and a mouser barn cat named Toby. I want to learn to make biscuits from scratch that are even almost as delicious as the ones my grandma was famous for. I want to bring back some of the old ways of doing things, and the best part about the beginning of this homesteading journey is that it feels like my grandma is guiding me along the way.