Living Like On the Banks of Plum Creek ~ Country Girls

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Oh I had a plan today to get up and make a recipe out of On the Banks of Plum Creek, but my days never seem to turn out the way I want them! So watch for that next week. 🙂 This week I was reading through the book and I just had to smile when I came across this phrase…

“Nellie Olsen was very pretty. Her yellow hair hung in long curls, with two big blue ribbon bows on top. Her dress was thin white lawn, with little blue flowers scattered over it, and she worn shoes. She looked at Laura and she looked at Mary, and wrinkled up her nose. “Hm!.” She said, “Country girls!” ~ On the Banks of Plum Creek p. 148

Growing up I was always the country girl. I played outside all day. We made towns in the dirt, I had a fort under a Russian Olive Tree. I didn’t really think about it, that’s just the way things were.

Well I grew up and went off to school. I was made fun of for the way I pronounced “South Dakota” and for the fact that my hometown had a grand total of about 300 people. I brushed it off because I didn’t care. Those were my roots and where I came from and I was proud of that.

I didn’t start to really “know” myself as a country girl until after I got married and we moved out to our acreage. I talk to friends all the time over the computer that don’t understand why I make my own cheese and why I have chickens in my backyard. They can’t wrap their head around the idea that we will soon butcher our chickens so we have meat, or the fact that I want to milk a cow or goat so I can make my own butter and cheese. They don’t know why I run around barefoot in the summer and don’t understand why I love being in the dirt in my garden.

But these are the same people that also don’t know the joy of growing their own produce and having a fresh “farmer’s market” meal right from your backyard. They don’t know how to make meal from scratch that’s so good you feel like a hero for making it. They don’t know that fresh butter tastes nothing like the bricks you buy from the store.

They don’t see the joy in having a line of chickens or ducks follow you around the yard. But that’s ok. Everyone has their own ideas of how they want their life to be. Everyone isn’t cut from the same cookie cutter. But us country girls, we will always have a different view of life, know a different kind of happy. This is life to me, life as a country girl.

Make sure you check out the entire Living Like Little House series!

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7 Comments

  1. You said it! I was so excited when my first bean sprouted today it was just crazy. I can taste them now. It really is the little things in life that make us happy!

    1. Oh I can’t wait to post pictures of my little pepper plants, they are so big already after only a week! And nothing made me smile bigger today than seeing my two little tiny kittens getting a little chubby:)

  2. This is so well written Merissa! I feel the same way about country life. Glad you and David both had wonderful childhoods, and a wonderful little homestead on the prairie. Some people can’t understand why we like to live so far out on a gravel road, but I say all the gravel roads I’ve loved to travel led us here, and this feels very much like HOME!

  3. I have lived on a farm my whole life, and love every minute of it. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else!

  4. you have a very nice story. i also encounter a lot of those kind of people
    here in the city. they cant appreciate the simpleness in life. but i vote the kind of life you had. it is nice to be a country girl and to be different from normal ordinary people. the life and the people of the city is full of problems, lies, emptiness, boring and unhappiness. a real life is in nature. i appreciate your site a lot since i also have a heart of country girl. it is nice to visit your site often because i can learn a lot of things of living simply and homesteading.