Growing up and seeing life di erently

What does it mean to live in a rural area now? Growing up, I thought of going to the farm [and eventually spending most of my time on the farm] as going to another world.

Most summer holidays would be like another lifetime of fishing for eels, shovelling horse poo, milking cows, riding quad bikes, falling off of a pile of hay bales, and essentially becoming feral.

As I got older, my life was divided almost half and half between the farm in Taranaki and home in Wellington. It felt like two lives rather than a different lifetime.

I’ve always had this sense of being a mix of a city kid and a “country girl”, I’d carry both with a tinge that I wasn’t enough of either.

What I used to see the “country” as was mud, rain, and cows. My friends all lived too far down the road to walk and having a party in some form of shed was a rite of passage.

Between the ages of 14 and 16 the vast majority of my spare time was spent doing something with my horse, possibly to the point that I treated him like a dog.

The horse, Andy, has moved with me since I was 14, and he’s still with me today.

I can attribute many of my “farm skills” to Andy breaking something – be it a fence, a pole holding up a lean-to, or himself.

Living rurally feels different now, there seems to be less of a sense of adventure and more stress. This could come with age, but I see the community differently.

Living in a tight-knit community used to mean having free reign in the neighbour’s bush block and knowing all the kids at the swimming pool.

It used to mean standing outside the dairy for half an hour while my uncle talked to Tom, Dick, and Harry about the grass.

Now, I see far more arguments and tension, it gets political.

I no longer see the world with rose-tinted glasses. It has been a part of growing up.

The town I used to live in was the “murder capital” of New Zealand, like many small towns, there was also a huge meth problem.

Dairy prices dropped, and people I knew moved away. So did I.

Being older and in Wairarapa, I see the bigger picture and why reasonably small issues mean so much to people.

I could never fully get my head around the town hall debate, but if it was the shoe store building in Inglewood, I’m sure I’d have some feelings about it.

It’s a part of my past and hanging on to that would feel essential. We like to preserve the past.

One thing that sticks with living in a rural area is knowing people and having someone to turn to when you need it.

Maybe I haven’t grown up at all. I still spend my time in the mud, and my horse still makes a decent ladder when I need him to be one.