A farmerless farm blog?
When Lone Wolf and I left the Lower Mania six years ago to live on a farm in the northern BC bush, one of our friends asked me to start a blog about our daily life: “It’ll give us, the people who love and miss you, a window onto your world.”
I know that what she’s most interested in—what most people would be interested in—is the farm operation. Food self-sufficiency is more and more relevant in a world beset by climate change, where the choices at the local grocery store include GMOs and factory-farmed food, where most people live disconnected from the food that sustains them. A lot of people are interested in hearing others’ back-to-the-land experiences. Witness the popularity of books like Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life.
I think LW is amazing, and I’d love to blog about how she taught herself to raise and butcher pigs, plow fields, construct outbuildings, grow and cure garlic, pluck turkeys, operate and fix antique farm equipment (because she operates on a shoestring), and a hundred other practical skills. But she is intensely private and she scorns electricity, let alone the internet. The last thing she wants to do is blog about her life. Further, she doesn’t want to be the topic of someone else’s blog, not even—or especially not—mine.
So it’s a dilemma: how to write about what she’s doing without writing about her.
I’ll let you know when I resolve the dilemma.
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