02/28/2026
A Tale of Two Me's
"Homesteading in Place": A mindset-driven approach focusing on skills rather than land, such as baking bread 🍞, fermenting foods 🫙, DIY cleaning products 🫧, and preserving store-bought or farmer's market produce 🌽.
What kind of homesteader 'are you' anyway?? 👩🌾
Most homesteaders never hear that question.
Most homesteads have acreage and livestock. 🐓🐷🐮
I can tell you now, we don't have either unless you count the 6 dogs 🐕🦺, bearded dragon 🐲 and box turtle 🐢 that rule this house as "livestock"
What we do have:
A single wide trailer that's seen better days. 🕸️🏚️
A stubborn woman who ended up in a wheelchair 👩🦼 about 11 years ago and a stubborn man who loves her enough to try to give her what she wants even when it seems unreasonable.
This is my story.
I was just starting my homestead journey when an accident put me in a wheelchair ♿ and doctors told me they doubted I'd ever walk again. They said that even if I did, I'd never walk well and the pain it would cause would be horrific.
We'd gotten a camper and moved into it and had plans of fixing it up, planting a garden, living simply and intentionally.
We had plans to get a little spot of our own one day and start a true "micro homestead" with micro breed farm animals. 🏡
That night in June, everything changed.
I spent my "recovery" in a room in a double wide that had a window🪟 that looked directly out at the camper I could no longer walk to get in. I cried. A lot.
For 11 years I wandered, not really sure what to do with myself, believing that because even though I defied the odds, Homesteading was out of reach.
A few years of extremely painful walking and a long, bad run with depression saw me back in a wheelchair and this time, that's where I'd stay.
It wasn't pretty.
Did you know that when your life changes so dramatically, so suddenly, that you can find yourself going through a process very much like grief?
Essentially, you grieve the person you saw yourself as, you grieve the things you believe you can no longer do or have.
At the tail end of this grieving process I found myself so depressed and angry that I couldn't function anymore and I spent nearly a year laying in bed feeling sorry for myself, unable to cope mentally and emotionally with what was my new normal.
I had left the state I'd planned to have my homestead in. I didn't realize it then, but I was running from the life I thought I'd lost, hunting a new dream and a new life that I didn't know how to live.
For a while, I thought I could trade in my dream for someone else's and find happiness living what my mom would have called "a normal life".
Then I thought maybe I was just trying in the wrong place and moved again practically living in our truck for a couple of months.
One morning I woke up in the passenger seat of our pickup, parked behind our storage building and went inside to try to clean myself up in a bathroom sink and I broke down. All the grief and fear I'd been fighting all those years finally released in a flood of tears.
I looked around and asked myself what the hell I was doing?
That's the moment I knew beyond a doubt. I had to go home.
We were lucky. We'd met a girl years before the accident and she'd spent most of her 20s living on my couch.
We'd become family in those years and right before we left the state we'd been living together again.
Lucky for us, she still loved us and understood that sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do to figure yourself out and she welcomed us back.
Now here we are again.
Back in the Upstate where I was raised.
Back in the county I spent my teenage years and most of my adult life in.
Down the road from where the accident happened.
Back with our extended family that somehow, thank God, doesn't know how to give up on me even when I've given up on myself.
Back where we always belonged to start with.
On a rented lot in a trailer that's seen better days and needs a lot of work in a neighborhood that isn't zoned for agriculture.
A woman in a wheelchair that finally stopped running.
The man that loves her too much to leave her.
With the friend that never gave up on her.
So, what kind of homesteader am I anyway?
One that's doing the best she can, with what she has, where she is.
Living intentionally, putting her life back together one piece at a time.
Welcome to Dragon's Lair Homestead...
I know I am not the only one who has had to completely rewrite their story. Have you ever had to redefine what your 'dream' or your 'homestead' looks like? Drop a comment and tell me how you are blooming exactly where you are planted. 👇
If you are looking for a little help along the way, we are here for you. Whether you need a fresh loaf of bread from my cottage kitchen, a hand tracing the roots of your own family tree, or you need Paul's handyman skills to fix up the space you currently call home—Dragon's Lair has your back.
Send our page a message to see what we are baking, researching, or building this week. Let's build something beautiful right where we are.
