For my first post, I would like to tell you a little about myself and tell you how I came to be a suburban girl seeking rural life. I grew up in the suburbs of Kansas City for the majority of my life. Any exposure I had with the country came from going to family reunions in rural Missouri where many of my family members lived on acres of land and raised various livestock. As a suburban girl, I couldn't believe they had to drive more than 30 minutes to the grocery store.
As I grew up in the 'burbs, I became a good Starbucks-drinking, Target-loving suburbanite. Yet, when it came to choosing a college, I ended up going to Kansas State University, a large state school about two hours west of Kansas City in the middle of pretty much nowhere. I could have gone to the more suburb-friendly University of Kansas (30 minutes from home), but I was unimpressed with their tour (sorority girl bragging that you can be dunked in the fountain on your birthday....giggle). I did go there for my master's degree though, so don't think that I don't like the school. I chose K-State because they bragged about how many Fulbright scholars they had; that's how you impress me.
When I arrived at K-State with my best friend, we were aghast that Manhattan (where K-State is located) neither had a Starbucks nor a Target (gasp!). In the four years I was went to school in Manhattan, the city eventually got a Target and a Starbucks. Target was hard to ignore (there weren't a lot of options), but by the time Starbucks was built during my senior year, I had already found a favorite local coffee shop that I thought was much better. I enjoyed that Manhattan offered beautiful bike rides on country roads, great hikes through the prairie, and really friendly people from all over Kansas. I started to prefer this type of environment over the one I had been raised in. It's funny because my parents always talked about how much better it would be to live in a more rural environment in an older home on a little bit of land, and now I wanted that too.
My boyfriend bought a house in the suburbs of Kansas City during my senior year of undergrad. I was disappointed when we rolled up to a fairly new cookie-cutter suburban house in a tiny-treed subdivision. This was not my dream house. Lucky for me, he soon realized this was not his dream house either. As we spent our weekends together ( I was two hours away, remember?), we started imagining our dream house. We wanted land (ie- more than 5 ft between our house and our neighbor's) and everything the homeowner's association (HOA) said we couldn't have: a garden, a compost pile, and a pick-up truck that doesn't have to be moved every week to appease the HOA. Also, we didn't want a HOA.
My boyfriend sold his house after we got engaged, and we moved into an apartment. We got married in June 2011, and we realized we could start looking for our house. We started looking for our dream house in March 2012. We looked in more rural areas around Kansas City, but we hit a handful of duds: a house that turned out to be a trailer home on a foundation, the perfect house but right next to a highway, the perfect house with a 45+ minute drive to work during rush hour, etc. The house we ended up buying was one we almost didn't go to see because of the picture on the website. As we pulled up, our realtor said, "I've got a good feeling about this!" We soon did too.
We now live in a home on an acre of land. We now have a garden and a compost pile. The town we live in is a weird mix of country and suburb, as the suburbs slowly grow westward. The town doesn't have a grocery store, though, so it still feels small. We've only lived here for two months, but I'm slowly learning how to make a garden grow, how to make compost, how to get along with country folk, how to ride a lawn mower, how to raise chickens, and how to become a country girl. These are my trials and tribulations. I hope you can learn from my mistakes, or at least be amused by them.
Looking forward to reading more of your stuff!
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