Being weird is paying off!

  I had an unusual childhood. My city bred, college educated mother taught me things like finance, how to shop to get the most for your money, and interestingly enough, how to drive a stick shift. My country bred, grew up too poor to be a dirt farmer father taught me about the outdoors, guns, hunting/fishing, boating, building, and gave me a love of reading. There were no children living anywhere near our home and my siblings were all much older than me, so I spent all my time alone, reading and acting out the things I read about. We had a large yard, and an abandoned pecan orchard behind the house where I built lean-to shelters with a rope and leafy branches, pretending to be a primitive person. Sometimes I was a Native American, sometimes a Celtic warrior, a space traveller on an alien planet, or a Cimmerian from the world of Conan, it all depended on what I was reading that week. 
  My parents would take me everywhere with them, and often the older people at the various gatherings would tell me stories to keep me entertained, usually about what they did when they were my age. I was fascinated hearing about life in the country, farming or ranching, growing a garden for food, wild gathering other foodstuffs. I paid attention, and often the older person would be happy to teach me the skills they knew.
 As I grew older, I became even more interested in primitive living. I was born in the early 60s, and the hippy culture was full steam by the time I was 10 or so. In Jr. High I met a classmate who had an actual hippy for a mother, and she introduced me to the good and the bad of living with less, or as my parents called it, dirt poor. I learned much at her knee, and she was happy to pass on her knowledge to anyone who was interested in learning. 
  Freshman year of college, I was rummaging around in the magazine bins at a local used bookstore, and stumbled across a magazine called Mother Earth News. I opened it, and became hooked immediately. I dug through the bins and found the entire first 5 years, all in good condition. I think I paid something like five or ten cents each, the bookstore owner was just glad to get rid of them. I took them home and devoured them. Some of the things I had already learned over the years, and some things were totally new, or things I had read about but never tried. As time went on, I found books in the library on homesteading and other things, and began teaching myself. I learned to spin and weave from a book, hand carving a spindle from scrap wood and picking up spilled cotton bolls on the side of the road around the cotton gin. I got hides from local hunters and learned to tan leather and fur, learned how to knap flint and make tools and weapons, how to wild gather food, how to build a solar still or oven, pretty much anything I took an interest in, I was able to teach myself or learn from the area older population. 
 I was always the weird kid that no one really wanted to play with. I did find a small group of other weird kids in Jr. High, but only a handful. Even in college I was fairly isolated because I had such different interests from everyone else. As I grew older I continued learning new things, and doing a lot of homesteading practices. Even after I moved to the city I continued to read, research and learn how to do 'old fashioned' things. I would buy large amounts of food and can/dehydrate it, grow some of my own food, and raise small livestock. As time went on I met a few more people with the same interests, but it wasn't until the Internet that I really found my tribe. While it is no longer feasible for me to live in the country, thanks to others like me who have learned to adapt and overcome, a new wave of urban homesteading has sprung up, fueled by the economic uncertainties and food insecurities of the last decade.  People have always laughed and joked that when the apocalypse hit, they were heading to my house. With the current state of affairs, they have stopped joking, and started asking how to do things. Sometimes it pays to be the weird one.