Maybe it is Genetic?
Of late I've been digging into the history of my mother Evelyn's side of the family. Inevitably that leads to records of homesteading in Saskatchewan.
Carving up the western territories in Canada was the government of the day's way of blocking the suspected American plans to move into the prairies and take them over, As Wikipedia sums it up:
In a nutshell, for a $10 filing fee (and assuming you had the right coloured skin) you would be handed a quarter-section of land - a section of land was about one mile on each side - with the proviso that you had to clear and plant it, and build a home within three years.
One of my family ancestors, above had, after four years:
75 cattle
7 horses
A house
3 Stables
Hen house
Milk house
Two wells
And had cleared 8 acres of land.
Plus fences of course.
The buildings apparently cost a total of about $720. That's around $25,000-30,000 today.
Homesteading meant things like building a sod hut, not a wooden house, for the first winter, and spending weeks picking up loose stones and boulders on the land before you could start plowing for planting. No electricity. Outhouse. Wood stove. No cars or tractors, just horses.
At which point I asked: who in their right minds would choose this?
Then I started looking at my own history. I may not have built a whole house, or broken virgin land, but I have surely also moved all over the place. Off the top of my head:
Calgary, Alberta (born)
Kelowna BC (Grew up)
Victoria BC (University, Take One.)
Vancouver BC (Chefs training)
Toronto, Ontario (Cross country move with a baby grand piano in our 5-ton truck)
Hamilton Ontario (Victoria's job)
Ottawa, Ontario (my job)
Whitesburg KY (my job)
Hamilton, Ontario (after 9/11)
North Vancouver BC (Move to join Susan) (University Take Two)
Alencon, France
Liverpool, Nova Scotia (Bought a house; near grandkids)
Vancouver BC (University, this time for Susan)
Cambridge UK (The same)
Strangely, if you get right down to it, the home in Liverpool was an awful lot like homesteading, The potential of that land was endless, if only we had the time and energy to exploit it. And even now when I think of our next steps, I see a home where there's space to build, and renovate, and grow something unique.
