Growing up rural

The view from my dad’s back door

Seventh grade was traumatic for me. First, I made a bad hair mistake I would come to regret for months. One day I decided I didn’t like a shorter piece of bangs so I cut it off right at the part line! It looked fine for a few days until it started to grow back in a spikey tuft. What was I thinking? For awhile I kept cutting it off until I admitted I would eventually have to let it grow out. For the rest of that year, my photos show me with a small barrette holding back that little bit of hair and moving further and further down the side of my long hair. At the tender age of twelve, my vanity was alive and well.

Then, a few months later, came a bigger blow to my already self-conscious identity. My parents let me and my three younger brothers know that we were moving to the country a few miles north of town. With my grandparents settling into their newly-built house, we’d be remodeling and living in their old house, on the opposite end of the farmyard. This was the home my mother had grown up in and while it probably felt safe and familiar to her, the move felt cataclysmic to me.

I was terrified to become a “country kid.” Even though we lived in just a smallish South Dakota town — I was certainly no city girl — my “me-ness” was based on being a town kid. Country kids were way different: they rode the school buses, they worked in the fields, they milked cows, and they had chores to do. It wasn’t that I felt superior, I just didn’t belong in their group. In my mind, farm kids even looked different, though I likely couldn’t have described why. They probably found us “townies” equally strange.

Ponies

To sweeten the move to the farm, my parents surprised us with a Shetland pony named Dusty. Dusty wasn’t as cranky as some Shetlands, but wasn’t the most lovable either. My dad made a little cart that Dusty would pull around the barnyard but I was too scared to take the reins, so it was up to my dad to guide us around the circular driveway and down the dirt lanes along the fields. Dusty only barely made the move tolerable for me.

Eventually, I got a larger horse, a Welsh pony, that I learned to ride. I made friends with a neighbor girl who was experienced with horses and we became inseparable. I joined 4-H (as the third generation of 4-Hers in my family) and had an instant group of friends who gave me a sense of belonging as I learned new skills like sewing and baking and public speaking.

I discovered other benefits of living in the country too. Places to go when I needed to be alone, like the leafy, easy-to-climb branches of the big elm tree in the front yard, or the huge flat-topped quartz rock at the edge of the shelter belt, or the haymow of our big white barn during snow days when school was canceled.

Smells like home

As my country memories go, it’s the smells of the farm that remain most vivid and I can conjure them even as I write these words. The dusty hay and dry old wood of the barn. The sharp tang of oats in the granary. The combination of warmed-up leather and earthy horse sweat as we rode on a hot summer day. The stinky, oozy, assault-your-senses Springtime smell as the snow melted and the frozen cow manure in the feed lot began to thaw. All these are permanently engrained in my olfactory memories.

Looking back, now that I’ve moved from the farm to San Francisco city life to the suburbs of California and finally settling in Eugene, Oregon, I recognize with gratitude the values I learned growing up in the country. The work ethic that came from my summer jobs detasseling and rogueing (cutting out the undesirables) for my grandfather in the scorching corn fields. The pragmatism that came from accepting the harsh realities of life and death for the 4-H steers I fed and groomed and attempted to tame enough to lead around a show ring — and then had to lead into the truck bound for the slaughterhouse. The connection to the land that still makes me itch to get my hands in the dirt as soon as the winter rains have stopped.

Though it’s not just country kids who have these values, perhaps there’s a toughness, an I-can-do-anything fortitude in those of us who have grown up rural. There’s certainly our farm heritage that sets us apart and makes us unique. “Country kid.” That’s me — and proud of it. It’s hard to imagine a better way to have grown up.