Possum Living
If
you're looking for a homesteading beach
read, look no further than Possum
Living by
"Dolly Freed." The chatty, informative, and
learned book was written by an 18 year old who dropped out of seventh
grade to live the "possum" life with her alcoholic father (before
getting her GED, putting herself through college, and going to work for
NASA.) The duo practiced urban
homesteading long
before it was cool, raising chickens and meat
rabbits in their basement, trapping pigeons, and rescuing wilted
produce from behind grocery stores. They lived on $1,400 per year
in 1978, using the library and the garden to keep body and soul
together.
There are plenty of gems of
information in Possum
Living that you
won't find
in more smooth, modern homesteading books. For example, the
author recommends that you eat seed potatoes and wheat from the feed
store to save cash on staple foods, walks you through moonshining on
the cheap, and reminds you that gleaning the food left behind in fields
after the monster tractors do their harvesting is a tradition that
dates back to biblical times. (Well, without the monster
tractors.)
The facts are fun, but
the reason I call Possum
Living a beach
read is
because it's really the heart-warming tale of a girl and her father
living the good life. Yes, there are plenty of passages that made
me roll my eyes and
imagine the book I might have written at 18 before adulthood had given
me a critical lens through which to view the words of my smart,
opinionated father. But how often do you read a book by a
teenager who is so thoroughly enamored of her daddy? To best
appreciate the bittersweet elements, flip to the back of the new
edition to see what the author has to say 30 years later. And
don't miss the embedded video, part one of three.
Or explore more posts by date or by subject.
About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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I love the way she makes the incredibly simple observation that animals in factories can smell blood and feel fear before they die, and how she and her father dispatch animals away from other animals, quickly and painlessly. She says it like it's the most obvious thing in the world. Yet another reason small-scale permaculture seems more of a right livelihood than the work, consume, work, consume culture.
NB. I haven't finished your ebooks yet. I know I still owe you a review on Amazon! Coming up!!
This reminds me of the Scavenger column on Salon, which I had been meaning to point you to, especially the first article here
http://www.salon.com/life/scavenger/index.html?page=3
Daddy --- Of course I wasn't referring to you when I mentioned a smart, opinionated father.
J --- There's a lot to love in those videos. I watched the full half hour, which I'm pretty sure makes up 20% of the video/movie/TV time I've experienced in 2011 so far. I usually can't stomach even youtube videos, so that's saying a lot. The found-meat parts of her book and video were actually some of the most powerful to me --- catching snapping turtles, endless fishing, road kill, etc. Well, and of course the part about not having a job.
Joey --- Great article! I especially liked this series of lines because it reminds me of how I eat. Just replace "store" with "garden"...
"The true budget shopper enters the store with a blank slate, looking for the best deals. The true budget shopper snaps up the best deals and worries about how to marry ingredients later."