Environmental Differences

My Grandparents

My grandparents both grew up in Chicago, Illinois. My grandfather grew up in the West side of Chicago, and my grandmother lived in the North side. In fact, they still live in a townhome located in the suburbs of Chicago. In urban environments such as the one I'm from, there is a lot of concrete, pavement, tarred rock, and asphalt. Am I starting to sound like a rock genius yet? However, the ample amount of rock goes hand-in-hand with the fact that there are not a lot of trees, save the ones that were strategically placed in the middle of nowhere to make the satellite picture look cooler. While this means urban people can use chalk on their driveway and people with gravel driveways cannot, this also means that they have more polluted air, due to the lack of trees. On the plus side, there weren't as many cars back in the 1940s, so there wasn't as much exhaust inhalation as you would expect today.

Me

I live on a small rural farm in Southwest Michigan, and because of that we often have to drive 15-60 minutes to get to the supermarket, choir classes, and hardware stores. Yes, we are big on hardware stores. This means we don't have to deal with as much pollution as opposed to people who live in a metropolis. We are surrounded by other small homes to the right and cows on the left. The cows' owner doesn't exactly know that we've named nearly all of them, but... oh, well. We get to live on a sustainable homestead with Nigerian Dwarf goats (see our buck Rocco above), Orpington hens, 3 roosters, Dexter cows, Indian Runner ducks, Muscovy ducks, 3 different dogs (see our Australian Shepherd Paisley above), and a barn cat named Oreo. We had the opportunity (pre-COVID) to sell chicken and duck eggs and learn farming skills like fixing heat lamps, milking goats, collecting eggs, feeding and giving water to animals, loom knitting hats, and picking fruit and wild berries that are often found around the farm, which conveniently used to be a tree nursery.