Growing Up Hippie

To Grow up the way that My sister and I grew up, I am finding is very very rare. When my parents were having their children, it was a time of Tuning In and Dropping Out. My parents choose to Drop Out, in order to Tune In.
I was born in a tiny college town right outside of Santa Barbara, our house was another 30 miles north in a rugged canyon called Refugio. It was a large house that my parents rented from a lady named Mrs. Brown. She owned about 1500 acres of land, and would rent out cabins and houses to people who didn't mind going a wee bit primitive.
The house the we lived in was called Mountain Cove, and it had a barn and a duckpond, and my Father had about the greenest thumb I have ever seen. His vegetable gardens always looked like Mr. McGregor's Garden from Peter Rabbit! There was about 12 really close friends that all lived at Mountain Cove on and off, and I was the first child born into the circle of friends. I remember Mountain Cove with painful longing to return to that place someday. Two days before Christmas a gas line blew up and burned the house to the ground, hence the reason we moved up to Northern California to a geodesic dome where my little sister Athena was born. Now with all this primitive living, my father told me just before he died in 2000, that he thought we would be so much more butch as far as girls are concerned, but we were into fashion from the start, and no amount of living without electricity or toilets was going to change that!
Granted it was our Own Fashion, but we were Girls, tough as nails Girls, but Girls non the less.
It gave us a toughness, and an ability to adapt to just about anything. I couldn't understand at the time, but now the understanding of how Not to be helpless, and how to work with what one has, is one of the most valuable things I have carried away from Growing Up Hippie.