Nearly six months ago, I moved away from the big city. Seldom have I longed for the restaurants, bike lanes (paved roads, for that matter) and friends, despite the fondness for them that I had developed. I now call this place home—the vast, wide open skies and rolling hills of North-Central Wisconsin—and I couldn’t be more sincere in my love and appreciation for where I live.
Mostly, it’s because I have learned, experienced, and accomplished more things recently than during any other time since childhood. In fact, it often reminds me of that period of my life: constant discovery, invention, failure, and recovery. Never, though, has my learning been in such a different area of knowledge: mostly farm related. I have also learned a lot more about food, programming, and design (three things I love, but already knew a lot about).
To give you a taste of my current life, here’s what I did over the past 2 days:
- Tweaked the Barn Dance poster
- Cooked a big pot of really delicious soup
- Weeded a 300-foot bed of carrots, three rows deep
- Integrated a client website with several social media plugins, including a language switching feature (between English and Arabic)
- Read a book, the subject of which I am not allowed to disclose
- Helped dig a 11’x12′ hole for the foundation of a wood-fired brick oven that we’re building over the next several weeks, pictures to come (the plans for which I modified to make a 3’x4′ cooking area)
- Wrote an article for the farm newsletter, entitled “Who’s the Sauce?” (hint: not Tony Danza)
- Learned a new song on guitar (Home, by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes)
Since moving here, I’ve also:
- Driven a tractor
- Produced maple syrup, from tapping trees to cooking down
- Learned to drive stick shift
- Built websites for several clients, with more lining up
- Learned Drupal enough to build high-end, custom website templates and integrate modules
- Become proficient with jQuery
- Cooked for 50 people (with a little help from my friends)
- Learned an incredible amount about organic and sustainable farming
- Learned to run quickly through the woods
- perfected my bread recipe
- handled bees
- pulled ticks off a dog
- chased pigs and cows back to their pastures
- picked raspberries
- cooked meals with freshly picked produce
- learned to become part of someone else’s family
- helped with wine-making
- harvested wild ramps from the woods
- loaded hay into the barn
- learned how to fingerpick on guitar
- made nearly 2 gallons of raspberry jam
- greatly improved my ping pong and pool skills
- learned more about state and local politics than I ever expected to
- hung out with a toddler, witnessed him seamlessly attach an initial fricative to the rest of a word which he previously pronounced in a toddler-variety of English.
- butchered chickens
I’m sure there’s more that I’ve forgotten, and even more to come.