Guest Post by Hardscrabble Farmer
Every single day we concern ourselves with food. There are the chores- feeding the livestock, making sure the flocks are watered, the cattle have fresh hay, the sheep get their grain, the hogs are content with their share, the dogs get their bones and scraps, the barn cat has it’s bowl replenished and then we make ourselves breakfast.
Then it is either slaughter- a weekly task throughout the Fall and Winter- or the breakdown of the various primal cuts, the curing, grinding, mixing, smoking, packaging and freezing. Often when we are making either sausages or some other product we’ll cook samples in a cast iron pan on the woodstove, add a pinch of salt and pepper and enjoy a few bites rather than sit down to a lunch and continue on with the various tasks. I usually spend about 7 or 8 hours at this every day unless there is some other emergency or project that requires my efforts.
I listen to either podcasts or stream music- Pat Metheny is my favorite for that kind of work because it just goes on forever with no real beginning or end to it- and my sons stop in between their various responsibilities and visit for a few moments or pitch in if they’re all caught up. We also press apples and press the sweet juice into ciders. We chop cabbages and root vegetables and make kimchi and sauerkrauts in large crocks that continually bubble ferment until it’s time to jar them up.
Usually a customer or two a day will stop by and ask what we have available and the smell of smoking bacon or the sight of fresh ground pork sausage being mixed with herbs and spices will catch their attention and we’ll fill their boxes or bags up and send them on their way with load to fill up their pantry or freezer.
This is our life. Food, people, hearth, home. The seasons spin by day by day as the Sun either rises in the sky or declines to the south in its circuit. There is snow outdoors now, but shortly, in just a few weeks really, we’ll be back to tapping the maples and then behind the furnace door evaporating the sap and turning it into sweet syrup. It never gets old, never feels like a burden or a drudge.
Some days I leave the farm either to run an errand or to help a friend with a project, but most days are spent within a couple of hundred yards of where we sleep in our beds. While I certainly feel the passing of time, understand the decline of my own body as I move into the back forty of life, each day brings me closer to some kind of deep peace I never knew in my past life. Whenever my wife passes near me we come together in a short embrace, giving and receiving the affirmation of our love for each other and then continue on about our day.
I don’t know where we got out of sync with our purpose in life or why we grew accustomed to doing things we hate in order to obtain things we don’t need. We agreed to submit to a life absent purpose in order to avoid labor with real value and never did the math required to determine if it was a fair trade.
Food is central to our existence and our life should be built around those things that we require daily to have a purpose.
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1000 up votes, HF! Sounds awesome!
Yes. What a beautiful lifestyle.
Tick tock the clock rolls round ; time flies by, unnoticed my my; a sweet lullaby.
I believe the live you live, or some semblance of it, is the way God intended it to be for all of us. However, early on (way early on) we mucked it up.
I only have a small property (semi-homestead??) with some bee hives, chickens, and a small winter garden. I look forward to starting the seedlings for my much larger spring garden under the grow lights and heating pads in my little barn. I find peace in my own little slice of heaven in the mountain area of NE Georgia.
Is that not one of the best pieces of modern music ever composed? I have listened to that a hundred times, the perfect soundtrack to life.
The first time I heard it was years ago when I lived in South Florida. It was used in a Publix Store (grocery store chain in Georgia and Florida) commercial around Thanksgiving. I’ll see if I can find it.
Here it is.
I have a big repair/repaint project. I’ll have to put on Pat and friends today…
Thanks and best wishes for 2022!
Totally agree about Pat’s relistenability over anyone else. I’d make a loop of Last Train Home, Are You Going With Me?, and Have You Heard on eternal repeat if I had one cd size or less choice for life.
You wondered… “I don’t know where we got out of sync with our purpose in life or why we grew accustomed to doing things we hate in order to obtain things we don’t need.”
I say usury – the predatory infection of heartless and greedy overlording that leads everywhere else soulless and inhuman. The predatory usurers consider themselves above one honest day of human, life sustaining hard work like you described, want to profit, benefit, be served by and control slaves doing that work and make creating that their ‘purpose’, even smugly enjoying the vast array of ongoing dark deceits necessary to create the systems enabling them to eat off you.
The usurer/predators have been the original deadly infection invading countless otherwise self sustaining/interactive communities throughout history. Though eventually kicked out 100’s of times, the honest and simple minded also keep letting them in and never seem to learn from history either. Now we’ve got the biggest infection ever and it’s not CV.
Totally concur with “Are You Going With Me” as P.M.’s older stuff just seems to sound better evry time I hear it.
Best of luck, HSF, with your harvest of Maple Gold.
Music goes great with chocolate milk!
And vice versa.
Last train is a top favorite to me.
Retirement is a death sentence.
I asked my grandfather, when he turned 90, what the secret to his long and healthy life was. He told me “Get up every day with a purpose.”
He told me ‘retirement’ kills men early.
He almost made it to 100.
My dad told me years after he retired that he couldn’t see how he ever had time for a regular job.
been retired 18 years now, I say the same thing, im only 61, how did I do all the work at home when I had a job
An old guy on my mother’s side (Old Dutch) was very successful in the late 19th century manufacturing metal farm buildings in Indiana. Upon retirement he would from time to time get visits out at his farm from ‘financial advisers’-all of whom had a sure fire/can’t miss scheme they wanted to let him in on. He would hear them out, saying little, until they wound down, as which point he would tell them “Sonny, if I was smart enough to make it I’m sure as hell smart enough to keep it. Goodbye”.
I beg to differ Flash. If you give up it is a death sentence. Other than that it is just another stage of life. Put some effort into enjoying it.
Jackasses always with the ” but, I’m not like that”
If you’re still working, you are not retired.
retire
: to withdraw from one’s position or occupation : conclude one’s working or professional career
That’s me! Rocking chair time with the wife of my youth!
ditto…
Retire: retreat, or go to sleep.
I am old and have been retied on my own dime for sometime now. However the last two years have been stolen from me by incompetent governments and stupid fearful people who believe that the whu who flu is the end of the world. It isn’t, but their level of stupid just might be.
Most people do not have the opportunity to live as hardscrabble does, many would like it. I would just like the freedom to live out my life as I wish, not as some asshole from a government agency thinks I should.
I am now 15 months into retirement and have not been so invigorated in years…. or meaningfully busy.
It was actually 54 weeks of working projects around the house and yard before I had a chance to down tools and pick up my fly rod.
If you think retirement is a death sentence then, IMHO, you are doing it wrong.
Da P
This ^^^^
Not only are they doing retirement wrong, but life wrong. People who have a passion for living before they retire. Will have even more passion for living when they retire.
You will die at the end of retirement, thus a death sentence. Make the most of the time!!
I’ve been retired 10 years now, almost to the day. I can count the times on 1 hand that I felt bored or thought I needed to get another job. I jump out of bed most mornings to experience what each day may bring.
I’m retired for 8 years, and it’s awesome. You have to have interests and most of all purpose.
Some days my purpose is only breathing and blinking. Other days I actually accomplish something.
What? You didn’t include pooping?
Might want check out the colon conversations in the Dead People thread.
Sorry I left that outStucky! I’ll be more careful next time.
Tell him to mind his own business, Balbinus! Stucky does NOT own the toilets around here!
Does he?
Stucky is toilet trained?
That’s not what I heard.
Maybe by proxy.
I’ve been retired for 7-8 yrs now, and I am busier than ever b4. Things overlooked in the past can keep me busy for another lifetime to complete. Sometimes I’m too busy to even get at some of those projects. In my extra free spare time I’ll get right on it.
Yes it is! The trick is to die as slowly as possible. I am on my 20th year of the journey to the grave.
Bal-
The real trick is to live forever. That’s my plan and so far it is working.
Not when Retirement permits frequent Farm visits.
Spent a lot of time on the farming my youth. Live in a nice subdivision along the lake 5 miles from town since 1998. Paradise with lots of likeminded neighbors. My next scheduled trip will be to meet Jesus face to face.
Paul Harvey said retirement is “practicing up to be dead”
I plan to retire like my neighbor, he retired from dairy 22 years ago, works every day now logging, sawmill, and timber stand management.
84 and in great health.
Sometimes when my husband comes home from work, I have nothing to show for what I did all day.
I prepared meals, but the dishes are already washed and put away. I folded the laundry and put it back into our closets. I picked up Legos, vaccuumed, but there are toys all over the carpets again. On a day like this, when it is rainy and grungy, we will do nothing but read books, play, cook, sing songs, eat, clean and paint or draw. Not rarely, I keep my pajamas on all day, because there is no place where we need go to. This life is so much more fulfilling than when I dressed in my pretty clothes and had meetings to attend which almost always are a waste of everyone’s time.
A few years ago, I asked my husband whether he also has this feeling of not doing enough with his life, that we were meant to make more of an impact in some ways. He said that everyone always makes an impact, even when you don’t even realize it. Even a person as small as a miscarried fetus does, because maybe it makes you appreciate your healthy children that much more.
I am glad that now I have found my place to make an impact where it matters most, our little family. There will never be regrets of not spending enough time with our children, since I spend all of my hours with them. I don’t quite understand the women I often overhear on the playgrounds, who cannot wait for August to come around so they can send their kids back to school. They make it sound like it is such a hardship to be with their children. I think our kids are really cool little people, among my most favorite in the world, and I love hanging out with them.
Yesterday, I met a friend after not seeing him for a while. He asked me, grinning, how I am enjoying the apocalypse? We talked a bit about what we have been up to and how we are muddling through given the circumstances.
I regret not telling him what I really think: That fear is the cancer in our lives, and we should try to eliminate it altogether. That if we are fearful of vaccine passports, we are no better than those that are fearful of becoming sick. And that screens are the toxic chemotherapy against the fear, which we should also avoid as much as possible.
Our family is doing a screen free week from Jan 1-7. No screens of any kind for anyone. I think it will be at least as hard on the adults as on the children.
The most important lesson I learned in my life was when I understood that the opposite of love is not hate, but fear.
Fear shows a lacking of love in some aspect of your life. This is why we need to show patience to those who have given into the fearmongering during these times of the plandemic.
The ‘patience’ comment rushed in the thought of,
“I’m here to chew bubble gum and kick some ass, and I’m all outta bubble gum”
Thx… it brought me a smile…
That’s an interesting point John. Something to consider. I’ve always viewed indifference as love/hates opposite.
Hate and indifference are ways we express fear. As Divine love, Philadelphia, grace, etc… are ways we express love. To understand those concepts completely changes are spiritual view to accepting more of God’s grace.
Kind of… this is a tough one. If I am indifferent toward a thing, I likely neither hate nor fear it. I’m not affected by it.
Certainly God has not given us a spirit of fear; that’s a gift from the devil.
You got me to thinking! Where is fear on my “graph”… Fear it’s said (not necessarily by the Bible) is the mother of violence; active hate is fears byproduct. Active love is the product of grace! Good stuff!
Time to make the ice cream… 😊
Contemplation on Spiritual topics as love and fear is very powerful. What you are calling indifference, I call detachment. To me indifference is hate. In Nazi Germany people were indifferent to the persecution of Jews. Detached is we live in this world, but not are of it, especially the evils. Nice chat. Thanks.
IMHO, ‘indifference’ is painted with a wide brush. It could well be known for some people as ‘patient indifference’-sort of like (especially when working in a large organization) ‘choosing your battles’. I am indifferent because I don’t want to deal with stupidity and feel no obligation most of the time to attempt to correct that stupidity. Other times I am not indifferent and am quick to jump into the fray. Does either version of my indifference make me a bad person? Or a better person?
We all make our own definitions. Thanks for the incite.
Opp of love is apathy
The most important to not only you but the nation as well. Which is why the god of this world and his followers, ie communists, work at destroying first.
The family structure and the wife/mom is not a secondary or subservient role for a woman but is a pinnacle component of stability and very honorable.
Well done…
This 1000x
Beautiful comment.
I didn’t realize that the photograph was of our farm when I saw it. It was so beautiful I thought it was clipart.
You have no idea how good that made me feel to realize that my reality is just as inspiring as I imagine it.
HSF, that photo pales compared to the pictures you paint for everyone’s imagination here reading you.
Beautiful
Was in such a hurry as a kid to leave that life style for “The Real World”…………..then spent the last 30 years getting back to what was “The Real World”.
Thank you, Mr. Hardscrabble
Exactly
All the military retirees I know want a farm
HSF,
Pat Metheny’s disc “SECRET STORIES” is his best and one of my favorite albums of all time. A lot of his stuff is so-so.
You’ve probably never heard of the “Crusaders”. AWESOME instrumental music with a blues, jazz, funk vibe. They got national attention years ago (1984?) with a vocal song “Street Life” but 99% of their stuff is instrumental. I have like 12 albums/discs and all are very good…if you’re into jazz, blues, funk.
I heard it there first. Bought the soundtrack. Vinyl. First time I saw Rachel Ward, too. Which also made an impression.
My favorite version.
So much so that you couldn’t even post her pic…….here, IFIFY.
Thanks
No, thank you. What does IFIFY stand for?
I fixed it for you.
I also have found music one enjoys make tough work seem easy,why being in a band was a great joy.
I while never see meself having a farm am in baby steps getting into being more self sufficient.
My hope is I last long enough to have a no kill shelter for critters of all sorts on the land,feel that would bring back meaning in my life,which I have lost to a large degree the last 10 years.
Time spent doing the thing that I loathe more than any other is what is necessary to provide an opportunity for my family to have a better life tomorrow than we do today. Not a life based on materialism, but rather a life based on achieving one’s purpose.
My son went through college debt free and has a job he loves doing what he enjoys because I got up everyday and traded my time for money. Soon my daughter will do the same. I raised two appreciative and respectful children. My gift to them is opportunity not things.
My employer has told me that I will be terminated 2/1 if I don’t get Clot Shot. Now they are backtracking since they realize those without are dug in. Any goodwill they may have gotten was vaporized and I will take the 1st exit off the corporate highway to hell that I can. However, the farmette I looked at in 2020, in a place I want to be, (Toccoa/Estanollee, Brewer55) is for sale again but $100k more in just that short time.
The Man may purchase my time but he doesn’t own my soul.
It could be that employers are eager to use the mandates as a tool to prune headcount and get rid of marginal workers they otherwise keep in normal times. The progressives throw the opportunity to purge the unvaxxed at the employers with a wink and nod; employers with too many employees-and an opportunity to maybe avoid the ding to their unemployment insurance premiums levied by the state because the state allows that and the courts probably will also. Sadly, we are learning how many employers and how many professions are spineless.
Intelligent people always have a simple life. Your posts and music reflect the Wisdom at the core of your being. Many blessings.
That’s what keeps me going and strong every day at my age. Hauling hay, grain, bedding, water, coal and manure every day morning and night.
“…the hogs are content with their share..”. That sounded humorous to me. What happens if they are NOT content? Do they write you a nasty note; threaten to unionize; give you the stink-eye as you walk past?
Once in a while the pigs get a special treat of fruits and/or vegetables.
Pig enrichment day gives them something to look forward to.
Ever see a pig latch onto a snake that makes the mistake of entering the pig pen? It gets real exciting when it is a rattlesnake!
Brings to mind that epic line from “The Lion King”:
“They call me Mister Pig!”
“I don’t know where we got out of sync with our purpose in life or why we grew accustomed to doing things we hate in order to obtain things we don’t need. We agreed to submit to a life absent purpose in order to avoid labor with real value and never did the math required to determine if it was a fair trade.”
WOW…that hits home.
Thirty years ago I took my three kids to a farm so they could see where food came from ( not the produce section at Safeway). They were fascinated by the whole operation, a thousand questions. Later I took them to a slaughterhouse for lambs and cattle. They were horrified, again, a thousand questions. Two of my children are 100% vegetarians, my younger son loves a good steak. We all farm on a small scale today and you are absolutely correct, planting, growing and harvesting give us all a reason to be. If we all tended our own garden we would be less likely to fuck with anyone else.
If we all tended our own garden (materially/externally; spiritually/internally) we would be less likely to do ANYTHING which displeases the LORD.
I have never been taught by God faster or more effectively than when I was at work in the field, living the way we are told to live in the Book.
I spent most of my life doing hard manual labor and just plumb wore my body out. Can’t garden and do all those things I loved to do any more. Cut firewood for example. Still lovin’ life every day and manage to keep occupied somehow every day. Church, family and hobbies eat up a great deal of time.
Putting the inner house in order — i.e., tending the garden within the man — is by far the hardest and most rewarding aspect of our work. And it’s something you can do at any age or physical condition.
Try reading the Bible from the viewpoint that everything described within the pages, is also reflected within the inner man.
The first chapter of Genesis gives us the blueprint for the task: the separation of Light from Darkness; Day from Night, etc. But even Joshua battling the armies of the Seven Nations after crossing Jordan is applicable to understanding the inner world.
There really is no way to put our house in order unless we have a working understanding of these things. And the clincher is understanding that the battle going on out in the world, is also going on within each and every one of us, of Mankind.
I walk with the aid of a stick (but, hey: A new knee!) and appear to be an absolute circus act coming down a flight of stairs. I, too, know ‘strenuous’. No ‘Handicapped’ sticker hanging from my rearview mirror, yet I’m asked a lot, “Why not?”
‘Cuz I ain’t handicapped.
I see folks my age walking bithely about in the grocery store parking lot and think, “They didn’t do half the shit that I did.” And, that makes all the difference.
Took our kids to a dairy farm event and they were horrified when I offered up my thumb to a baby calf and it started sucking like crazy. Told them the sad part was because the calf’s mother had to go back to the herd and give her milk for people and not for the calf.
When we were back home I then told them how easy it was to get a calf like that to drink from a bucket: you let them start sucking your thumb and then slowly drop your hand into the bucket full of powdered milk; the calf starts to get both the idea and the milk. The memorable thing was you could later offer up your thumb to the growing calf and it would gently take it.
I spent all my early years working for farmers, driving tractors, combines, bucking bales of hay behind a hay baler. Kudos to your wife from those of us who have been there.
Was working for a farmer whose wife would get up at $ AM to cook breakfast for us half dozen hands on site, and then prepare lunch for a table in the back of a converted school bus to drive to the field where we were, then go back to clean up and do the preparations for supper, while doing all the other chores around the place.
John Denver tune was written for all the farmers! Wish Reno was not so far away would love to make the July 4 gig.
Friday is my last day working for someone else. After that I’ll work on my little farm and for myself. My father is 92 and goes to a little job he has had since he retired in 88. Its not “real” work, but it gives him a meaning for each day, and a bonus he gets away from my stepmother, LOL.
HSF you are living the dream, I can only hope my next few years are as rewarding as yours!
i find myself kind of on the flip side of that sentiment. worked my ass off trying to save up enough to get out of the rat race with a small farm. chose absolutely the wrong location and got myself very stuck in it by marrying there.. and in the course of this year while closing up the last bits of my city life (even a shitty couple acres in the country (in a shitty european country) is better than nothing at all and it seemed/seems unlikely i have any chance at starting again in a better location) and moving the last things to the home in the country.. twenty years of bank-proof life’s savings were removed from my possession by goons with uniforms and weapons (in the us they call it civil asset forfeiture, in europe they just call it confiscation).. hey looky here this guy has a shitload of valuable stuff in his car, lets help ourselves, ok, now gtf out of here and if you want to get any of this back sue us and watch us laugh at you. so, suddenly also went from having a comfortable pile saved up from many years slaving away at tech work, to being middle age , almost broke (at least the house and land etc are all paid for), in a country with one of the most hysterically tyrannical governments blasting full speed ahead with the Davos plan.
The seasons dont stop and theres always work to do around here, but motivation to continue has been very low and often just falls back to ‘shit still needs to get done somehow’. arms still sore from three days of plowing (with a walk-behind plowing machine on stony ground), i finally got a bit of some fields planted rather late in the year but now’s when we finally got some rain.
“I don’t know where…”
Prolly really tho you do, it’s just a different part of that startless-stopless music that goes on forever – but just not the emphasis of this simple part of the tune you’re whistling.
I put up the vid clip of cruise & kidman representing the Oklahoma land rush the other day. & I characterized it for what it was, a carrot dangle.
(Before that those carrots were known as Indian Territory & had been “assigned” to the Creeks & Seminoles, who didn’t want it, but had little choice. They didn’t have to not want it for long.)
But the coming on Black Friday-strong white tribe gobbled that root crop right up in 1889. “Why have all this infantry, err, homesteaders & farmers, if not to use them up?”
Another root crop, oil, had been found, accidentally, in OK in 1859. But when a well swelled near Bartlesville in 1897, here come the exploration companies. And they weren’t all just wildcatters, neither. Rockefeller, among others of the oily ilk…& his/their local/national/international politicians, all of whom, save a smidge of rule-proving exceptions (TP Gore, Gore Vidal’s grandfather, died graft-riches-free…according to his grandson) were just as pelosi-spoliate then as now.
How do homesteader-farmers do when it comes to oilers? You saw There Will Be Blood?
Longer details cropped: 1913, 1917, roaring ‘20’s, 1929 (& “climate change” comin’ on) … and the dangling carrot meta’d into some really wrathful grapes.
Cruise & Kidman played Irish immigrants in Far & Away. Being driven off ancestral lands didn’t give them eyes to hear the reprise-to-crescendo they were taking part in OK. And since it wasn’t scripted, movie-goers mostly didn’t notice it either. Happy Trails Endings, for you ♪♫♪.
1889 to 1929. Everything need known in one 40-year slice of American Pie. But that’s just a brand name. It’s pi r squared, & then cubed, the whole borg-world wide.
Maybe my daily purpose, or a large part of it, has been, is to, figure wtf it’s all about. Geometry. And dodging, as many as can, the geo metros in this demolition derby.
Remember what Alfie’s character was (& that character is only “transcended” if that’s also part of character – which it rarely is). Don’t forget what lurks in the hearts of Alpha. Know the Shadow/s! on allegory cave’s walls.
“Alfie”
(originally by Cilla Black)
What’s it all about Alfie
Is it just for the moment we live
What’s it all about
When you sort it out, Alfie
Are we meant to take more than we give
Or are we meant to be kind?
And if, if only fools are kind, Alfie
Then I guess it is wise to be cruel
And if life belongs only to the strong, Alfie
What will you lend on an old golden rule?
As sure as I believe there’s a heaven above
Alfie, I know there’s something much more
Something even non-believers can believe in
I believe in love, Alfie
Without true love we just exist, Alfie
Until you find the love you’ve missed
You’re nothing, Alfie
When you walk let your heart lead the way
And you’ll find love any day Alfie, oh Alfie
What’s it all about Alfie?
Eponymous youse has just got to have myths to-be-or-not-to-be proceed, & that has everything to do with why such youse are just leaves on Thoreau’s tree of…Nawlege?
Myths are lies. They are wall-to-wall carpets a’lyin’ & a’ttacked down in those ice water mansions that Gordon Lightfoot sang about.
“That’s our story & weus sticking to it.”
The Brit lady from Last of the Mohicans, again. She feels the spirit of independence & self-reliance/sufficiency burgeoning-coursing in her veins, too now, having had it rub off on her the more she rubbed against Hawkeye (not truly…say it with me…she always had that stuff in her veins…nuthin’ “rubs off” post-conception inter-rubbing/leaving).
Here she explode-responds to the Brit officer – who wants to rub against her – when he rhetorically questions “And who empowered these colonials to pass judgement on England’s policies in her own possessions, & to come & go without so much as a ‘By your leave’?
Shexplodes: “They do not live their lives by your leave! They hack it out of the wilderness with their own two hands, bearing their children along the way!”
Yeah…. But “not by your leave” is a by-her-believes myth…& not just hers alone, either. And will continue to be broad spectrum belief amongst Thoreau’s leafs.
The bubble, boys – whatever moor’ing lines are thrown around it & however spelled or misprinted – is inside other bubbles. Matryoshka bubbles butts Bettys Boops?
Not starting at the start, with the truth, instead opting for the myths, is the soapy Oops that keeps the bubble factories cranking at full capacity…
…correction’d: not being able to start at the start is what does it.
Nobody would start inside an undistributed middle, & stay inside of it, if they had a choice.
But choice is myth, too, & has nada to do with the real cocaine-cola thing that keeps District Columbians energized to tote those barges up & down those mountains.
Everybody gets what they get, & then they’re got. For most, far too many, got is GOT.
But Winter ain’t comin’. Because it ain’t ever left. The biggest bubble, the one that contains all the lesser/smaller bubbles, is a fookin’ snow(‘d)globe…&, lately, that’s racist (to boot…human face, or head…forever…etc)!
Which king doesn’t preside over undistributed middle kingdom? (where are kings of the north that locate their dom’s above, & beyond, “true” north?) Just the first vidal-buckley vid…gapped the plugs on the rest of them such that any interested’ll have to regap. You don’t see debates like this, get to laugh with, as opposed hoot at, anymore, & not for a long time, either…:
https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=jy68qXMcGn8
https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=9vgT7Wr7Nkc
https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=fcoMBkhOEfw
https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=0XGpc8gnc-Q
https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=OxR1tQqWq0I
https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=GsYk316Q23o
https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=UKzeMzc2pX4
https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=0_Alpumm_Mg
allies, & passin’ round those globes…:
Headline: Head lice in ancient Andean mummies could reveal secrets of ancestry and migration patterns
Cool. The science. But rarified as mummy head lice research is, it’s table-talk compared to head lies-ssss revelations. Way more than fifty ways to leave that truth-lover, & so left sacrificed on various altars s/he is. So/lar… eclipse comes, or future’s-so-bright-I-gotta-wear-welding-goggles, run like hell…& goad yer six to keep on chasin’. Huntin’ from the retreating front can despatialize Apocalypto relations real good sometimes….
Simple has it’s pluses. Some are surprised at how often simple isn’t also easy. I do like farmer’s simple-not-easy-situation.
One simple? Like one love? Of course not.
Complex Jefferson & his simple agrarianism. That’s the way to preserve – u-huh, u-huh (what’s simpler than KC &the Sunshine Band lyrics? – & flourish republicanism & all necessarily attached virtues.
Especially when that’s what everybody wants. Especially-especially when the hard candy-shelled Money-Monsters want that too. But…when did melt in their mouths, not in their hands, ever want that?
Anachronism/orsel in the jaws of industrialization, financiaization, right there. And an example, if taken at the face value intended, of a smart Jefferson being idiotic.
The good older old daze.
Southern agrarians brought twice the heart – probably even more than that – to half the northern meat grinder. And it was ¼ pounders, so well done you’d really have call them burnt, all the way to the sea.
Burgers On the Beach, long before whats-his-name wrote that other end of the world novel, set in that everything comes back into fashion penal island-continent down even further south.
I like the BBQ joint line I saw somewhere down there. “Put some South in your mouth.”
I also like the unintended irony of just who – or what (I do not consider these creatures to be people) – it is that has been gobbling “Southrons” up across the arcing reignbow of history.
Yep, those same M&M’s. But they have a lotta help from their little southron friends, too. All that help’s what makes it possible…correction, inevitable.
People…people who knead people…are the ______ people…in the whirld…♪♫♪
A good local friend just started a weekly like faith and minded men’s fellowship group out of his home.
A great way to keep connected and avoid isolation especially during the dark cold winter months.
Don’t tell Brandon.
If I was in heaven in my mind, I’d be running through the spring hay fields again, feeling like I could run like the wind, even tho I was only about 8….
Ever cut hay? I’d be on a little Allis-Chamlers with a side cutter, working a rectangular alfalfa field. As I would work my way toward the center the hawks would start showing up, taking perch on the hedge row trees. When I would be about 3 laps from being finished all hell would break loose: the baby rabbits would start running for their lives and the hawks would swoop down for a tasty mid-summer morning meal. Ya gotta eat to survive. But, the alfalfa sure smelled sweet!
When I was a child, living semi rurally in an area of dispersed houses mixed with fields and small farms, I remember biking home from school and seeing the wheat harvest with all the bunnies running out and hunters behind, shooting every one of them. It was really traumatizing to a 7 year old, since they never stood a chance.
Is that us, now?
No, but we’ll have to be as clever as Hazel in “Watership Down”.
I shoveled some wet snow by hand yesterday and have certainly become conscious of my own physical fade. As for now, though, it’s like that country song: I’m not as good as I once was but am still good once as I ever was…
Indeed. The world turns and wealth happens when labor is applied to resources.
Butternut food porn… gotta luv it
Dribble a few drops of Franks on those babies and enjoy.
Amen, Hardscrabble. I’ve got to get up to your farm for a visit (and I’m sure some purchases)one of these days. Only about an hour away. Life as it should be…..
Ditto. I think I’m an hour and half.
Only one barn cat?
I like the article but must point out, the system in which we find ourselves enmeshed arose from physical want. Electricity requires equipment and skilled labor. Water to the faucet, hot and cold, require the same. Rapid transportation, glass jars with sealing lids, salt, disinfectant, heavy and light cloth, I could go on. Without these fruits of technological civilization the farming life is a much heavier load. Industrial civilization came about through physical want, the often desperate want of the marginal subsistence farmer.
Heather McDonald writes that the last successful mass migration to America-that being from Europe from approximately 1880 to 1915-was successful because the immigrants were somewhat more capable than, as you aptly describe it, the marginal subsistence farmer. In fact, many European immigrants of that period helped pull up both themselves as well as their American hosts (my immigrant grandparents being a good example). She makes that point not to denigrate the American farm families of the period but to contrast with the highly detrimental illegal immigration that was foisted on America starting with Teddy Kennedy.
Having said that, I enjoyed the picture of the hogs. One year, for a 4-H project, I had pigs; what a project! About the only things on the place smarter than my pigs were the coyotes, my Mom, and our Collies. And a hell lot smarter than a sizeable majority of today’s population.
Well said Walter.
It is work yet relaxing at the same time.
Sir HSF this is a review of your local politicians actions that needs serious close attention.
https://doomberg.substack.com/p/new-england-is-an-energy-crisis-waiting?
Sir HSF, this is an important heads up for your local power availability that needs shared with the neighbors.
https://doomberg.substack.com/p/new-england-is-an-energy-crisis-waiting?
Admin,
Have you ever read Ted Kazinski’s manifesto? He eloquently states all of modern Man’s psychosis stems from his disconnect from the value of his work. How such logic flowed from such a disturbed person is truly bizarre.
I encourage you to read it, if you have not already, then comment. I believe you two would have agreed on a great deal in our society, as well as the remedies.
I can still remember reading it it the NYT when it first came out. I had followed the story off an on during the manhunt years and when I read it I couldn’t figure out how someone who was as crazy as he was portrayed could be so lucid and make so much sense.
Remember what Vonnegut said?
“A sane person to an insane society must appear insane.”
Made me think of this song from longagoandfaraway:
Farmers wisdom. Always soothing.He’s a better man than I.
A wonderful article, as always. It is easy to envy what you have.
Yet I do not. I am in the 8-5 workday world. Worse, I am a state employee. But I believe I am using the gifts God has given me, and making a difference. Sometimes I shield those whom the state has targeted. Sometimes, I am able to get relief to those who deserve it. Sometimes I am unsuccessful in my efforts.
Am I playing God? I do not know all of the facts as He does. I can only go by the facts which I can determine. I do my own review of the facts, and do not accept what is handed to me. Nor is the final decision mine — the judge makes the final ruling.
But I have been told, and do believe, that the system works better because I am there. Decades ago, when I first considered working for The Man, I asked a close friend and adviser whether I should devote my labors to serving such a master. He advised that the world always needs more Obadiahs.
I am approaching retirement age. It is tempting to leave and collect now that which has been promised me — particularly in light of the approaching rapid diminution in the purchasing power of the medium (so-called “dollars”) which I have watched being taken out of the wages I have earned for lo these 50 years. But I continue to make a difference. And I am exercising my gifts. So, at this point, I have decided to keep working as long as my immediate superiors don’t force me to take an action (e.g., be vaxxed) that I cannot in good conscience take.
It is good to be planted where you can make the world a better place, and minister to your family, your community, and those whom God brings into your path. It is a great blessing to be grateful for what you have and are, and not grieve over or grasp for that which is not. I Timothy 6:6.
Thank you for what you do.
Happy New Year!
Yay food preppers! That all sounds like you have found the calling for your life. I have been a nurse for over 50 years (retired now). And living your calling is the third greatest gift God has given us. The first is Christ of course, and second is family. God’s blessings in this new year!👵😇