Tag: Hardscrabble Farmer

I sure have missed Hardscrabble Farmer’s wisdom, perspective and truth over the last few weeks. But it was worth the wait. Enjoy.

Last night I dreamed of buildings. In the dream they were on our farm- a church, a small theater, a haunted house we had once looked at before we bought our place. I went from one to the other examining the flaws and estimating for repairs; rotten framing, new coat of paint, leaky pipes that ran inside the walls. I was overwhelmed by the amount of work ahead of me and in each building were groups of people I didn’t know, a cluster of young girls waiting to dance at a recital, college boys gathered in knots by a fire escape, old men and women in recliners on the porch watching the evening sky.

Everyone nodded at me as I made my way from job to job and at one point an old friend I haven’t seen in years asked me to help him move a fawn across a large field to the safety of the forest before someone accidentally hit it with their car. I remember clearly the mood of the dream- it was neither ethereal nor fantastic, but mundane and simple. I was required to fix what was broken, to make the repairs and work while others went about their lives doing what was expected of them. I recall my work clothes and tools, the turkey leg someone offered me to eat, the fact that nighttime was approaching and there was still so much work left undone.

When I came downstairs this morning it was not quite light but you could see the water vapor ascending from the surface of the pond like a pillar of smoke, obscuring the lower pasture in a lavender haze. I made my coffee and thought about my dream while it was fresh in my mind.

A couple of years ago while we were visiting our family for Christmas the barn burned down. The shock of that loss has long since passed, but the memories of what people did for us remains the clearest and most profound artifact of that event. It took me six hours of driving at speeds that should have landed me in jail to reach the smoldering ruin of what had once housed innumerable possessions and lives. The firemen were wrapping things up, a few of them were hosing off the last of the smoking hay bales that continued to burn, and where that beautiful barn had once stood was nothing more than a blackened pile of ash and twisted metal.

When I got out of the car I was surrounded by neighbors who all seemed to want to hug me and hold me as if that would help fix what was lost. It was already getting dark and as I stood there trying to come to grips with what had happened I noticed a steady stream of pickup trucks ascending the hill, filled with hay bales for our animals. I knew some of the people, casually, but most were strangers to me. This outpouring of concern and unfettered kindness continued for days. In the morning there would be casserole dishes and boxes of baked goods left on the porch, notes tacked to the front door wishing us well, checks in the mail from people we’d met only once or twice. That night as the last of the firemen headed off to their trucks my oldest son stood at the head of the driveway and shook each hand, one by one and thanked them for saving our house.

The past month has been busy for all of us. We have spread composted manure and planted grass seed in the new pasture, brought in enough timber to split fifty more cords of firewood and make boards for the new equipment shed. We’ve slaughtered of the last of the goats and chickens for the year and filled the freezers. We’ve pickled and canned and hayed and dried more than enough to carry our family and livestock through another New England Winter. We’ve set new fence posts and split oak rails to line them.

Through all of this we’ve managed to celebrate birthdays, go to concerts at the harbor, repaint bedrooms, build shelves together, make models, fire rockets, train the new puppy to the livestock, enjoy visits from friends and neighbors, keep to our Friday date night ritual and enjoy every minute together.Through all of this the things we do not concern ourselves with are what celebrities do, what happened to that plane, that football team, that politician, that foreign country, investments, the economy, McDonald’s annual sales, amnesty for 8, 11, 20 or 50 million foreign invaders or a host of other unpleasant and doomy thoughts. These things will continue apace with or without our input or opinion. Our concerns are local because that is how we live and that is our reality.

I am not unaware of where we are heading and I wish it were different, but one of the few things in life that cannot be altered is the time we are born into. This is the phase of a nation in decline and we are along for the ride whether we like it or not. The only thing we can control is what we decide to do with our time and who we decide to spend it with. Most people aren’t aware of where their food comes from never mind where we are going and they will likely remain that way for the rest of their lives.

Others sense that something is wrong but won’t make the changes required to prepare themselves for the inevitable. Fewer still have done the hard work of examining the details, of studying the data and relating it to the lessons of history in a way that puts things into perspective, but even these people remain tied to the modern world in a death grip, holding on to the things they think will allow them to escape the coming storm without having to change a thing.

Our decision to walk away from our old life was also a decision to walk towards a new one. Our plans are not based entertainment and escape, but on labor and reality. We no longer depend on other people far away to satisfy our dietary needs, but produce what we eat from our own soil, with our own hands. Rather than be identified as consumers, we think of ourselves as producers. We value the time we spend with our children and each other above all else and it it is far more satisfying than any other distraction or purchase could ever be. The time we give to various friends and neighbors to help with things they cannot do alone could never come close to what they have done for us with their casseroles and hay bales, never mind the risks they took when they fought the fire in our barn and saved our home.

The barn contained a lot more than hay and equipment. I had built a small studio where I could paint when I had the time and it contained all the drawings and paintings I had done over the course of the last thirty five or forty years. I had also stored my Mother’s possessions that I hadn’t the heart to go through after her death, stacked neatly in boxes waiting for a time when I could. There were mason jars filled with heirloom seeds passed to me from at least five generations in my family past and all of it is gone now, ashes to ashes. Such is life.

The Sun is up now and sky is clear and down in the pasture near the pond the cattle are grazing, heads down to the sweet grass. There are sounds of my children moving in the house, getting ready for another day and they are happy sounds in my ears. I have more work to do today than I can possibly accomplish, but I look forward to that particular kind of human failing. The old barn is long gone, but we built a new one with timber we harvested ourselves, with the labor of our friends and family and I think it is a fine one. I also think that I understand my dream last night, what prompted it and where it came from and if anyone could ever truly say that dreams come true, I believe that I can.

Some Saturday morning Hardscrabble Farmer wisdom:

Around here firewood is coin of the realm. About this time every year people get serious about putting in wood against the Winter ahead. Every yard has a pile of split cord wood waiting to be stacked, pyramids of sawed blocks ready to go through the splitter, or sheds crammed full of seasoned sticks air drying for the inevitable. You can tell a lot about the financial position of the homeowner by the way the wood is stacked. The poorer homes toss a blue tarp over the hill of wood and pull out what they need from under a cover of snow all Winter long while those with nicer homes feature stand alone wood sheds, or built in wood closets next to the mudroom where their wood is artistically stacked; black ash usually with it’s butter cream pith glowing in the sun, or the russet color of red oak the two most coveted hardwoods available.

Some people take delivery of picker loads from the local timber men, twenty of so sticks of mature leaders dropped by the side of the house where the homeowner has a chance to sharpen his chainsaw and splitting skills and save the premium for split wood delivered a cord at a time by dump trucks. The sound of Huskies and Stihls is a familiar one during the last few weeks of Summer and it lets you know that it’s almost over.

The calls start coming in around August and the early birds always ask the same question, “is it dry?” Fire wood is either green, seasoned or dry, with the last being the most desired and fetching a premium. Nothing is more frustrating than trying to heat a house when it’s ten below using green wood. It smokes, it hisses and crackles, it coats the chimney with creosote and it heats as efficiently as an oil lamp. Seasoned cord wood means that it was cut in one season to be burned in another, better than green, but not quite as good as dry.

Dry wood means that it was cut, blocked, split and dried in ricks for at least a year. For the really serious folks only standing dead wood will do. This is wood harvested from select trees that have died while rooted and air dried for years before harvest. There is little moisture left in these trees before they are split and next to nothing by the time they are fed into the wood stove. The old timers will actually ask for “deadwood oak” and pay a premium for it.

The key to heating with fire wood is to build the coal bank properly- first the tinder, usually split sticks of hemlock or pine ignited by sheets of white birch bark, then the kindling; white ash, poplar, easy to split with a hand ax and fast to catch fire. When the fire is good an hot the denser woods like oak and cherry, rock maple and apple are added until a bed of red hot coals fills the firebox and delivers a constant dry heat into the house, requiring minimal tending and only an occasional feeding of fresh logs.

There is plenty to be said for the convenience of an oil furnace and forced air heat, but they require expensive maintenance and ducts push dust and debris around the house and the cost of oil is never cheap. Wood heat is something special and the smell is comforting. It is easy to overlook where our warmth comes from when the only involvement we have is with a thermostat on a wall, but it is unforgettable when you use wood.

They say that if you chop your own wood it heats you twice- first when you cut it and next when you burn it. Whoever said that was one of the guys we deliver to. Wood heats you half a dozen times at least. When you timber the trees and limb them, when you load the stems to the yard, when you cut and block them, when you split and when you stack, when you load and deliver and when you finally burn them up, one piece at a time. Wood, as an agricultural product, is one of the most reliable outputs a farm has.

They say up here that New Hampshire wants to be a forest and it only takes a couple of years to learn that truth. Everywhere one can see the shadow of overgrown fields rapidly returning to second growth woods, the stone walls buried beneath the verdant cover of saplings and forbs. You cannot cut and split enough for your customers to satisfy their demand by the end of Winter if it is a hard one. The key to that of course is timing and location.

You can have enough on hand, but if there’s a hard snow getting it off the property when there’s two foot of cover on the stacks is another matter. Try as hard as we might, its impossible to get everyone to take delivery before the weather sets in. There is always the frantic call in March, right in the middle of sugaring when we least can afford to deliver a half cord, but do it anyway and the question at the end is always the same, “is it dry?”

Firewood is nothing more than stored energy awaiting release. If you think about the process, how the Sun plus the soil equals the tree, you realize the magic of the world. Energy pours forth and creates matter which in turn releases the energy. Summer in the midst of Winter, all contained in a block of wood. I feel more like a sorcerers apprentice at times than a farmer. I help control the chaos of Nature as it moves through it’s steady and seasonal course, but it is the inner workings of Nature itself, its mathematical proofs and physics experiments operating without surcease that create the wonderful act of transformation, of one thing into another and back again.

I used to live in the world without thinking much about it. I stood in front of the Great Pyramid of Cheops when I was a younger man and I probably accepted what was said about it and all pyramids for that matter, that they were temples or tombs, that they represented the kings and pharaohs, the potentates and poobahs of some distant past and were ceremonial in nature, but I think I understand them better now.

Everything we produce in surplus, from composted manure to feedstock, grains and firewood, hayricks and mulches are piled for storage around the farm, stored energy in the form of matter and from a distance each one appears like a pyramid. I think those civilizations and cultures of the past saw it too and if they worshiped anything it wasn’t men, it was Nature’s ability to magically transform one thing into another so that we might last through another year and begin again to prepare for the next. And it was to this magical truth that they built their monuments.

 

It wouldn’t be a Monday morning without some Hardscrabble Farmer wisdom:

Every couple of weeks I get a call from a woman who runs a non-profit in our area. It helps to provide hospice services to elderly and dying patients in the region who prefer to remain at home until the end. This organization is supported entirely from donations and by a small resale shop where people can donate old furniture and household items and those looking to decorate a Summer home on the lake or a dorm room at the college can find a few pieces for a good price. I have a truck and a couple of trailers and a teenage son. That qualifies me as a good call for pickups of armoires and sofa beds providing they are on the third floor and heavy enough. This woman knows I will not tell her no and she is sweet and kind in that elderly, professional volunteer way that makes even her most difficult requests hard to deny. In exchange we always get first dibs on old tools that are donated but rarely sold and my son and I get to work on our moving skills.

If you have never navigated a large dresser around tight corners and down a flight of steps with another person it is hard to imagine just how much is going on in what seems like a simple task. There is the lifting aspect, sure. I am nowhere near as strong as I once was, but I have learned a few tricks over the years on how to use my body as effectively as possible in order to avoid injury. I can size up a piece fairly well and tell if a door needs to come of the hinges, if it needs to be inverted, which room it must be backed into before we negotiate the descent to the ground floor or if it must be taken apart before we begin. In most cases the home owners are of no use at all. Gray and frail now they were raising families when the piece was last moved, in some instance we discover that whole additions to the house were added since the breakfront went in through a french door that hasn’t been there since Lawrence Welk was still in first run.

The thing I enjoy about doing this is that my son and I get to work on our unspoken communications, our understanding of each other by the shift in piece as we descend stairs, how we can both look at a piece and sense how to angle it before we approach the door frames or how to best load the pieces into the bed of the truck without pinching a finger between the crown mold and the tailgate. Moving large objects with another person demands mutual effort and understanding and at the same time complete submission to the immediate needs of another person when the load shifts. One man can’t do it all and if any task ever proved it, moving furniture is the closest I have ever encountered.

We are always grateful for the donations, always patient with the donors. We often compliment their home, for its tasteful furnishings or its lovely view. We make sure to let them know about the farm and if they need fresh eggs or firewood this Fall that we are available. 9 times our of 10 they are glad to share some tip, compliment us on our youth, our strength or our enthusiasm or even offer something to eat. We make sure to say thank you again and then we return to the shop to unload and go about the rest of our day.

Several years ago when my mother was dying, she asked if we could take her home so she could die in her own bed. Hospice was arranged and we set her up in the downstairs overlooking the pond out back and I slept on the couch nearby. During the day a visiting nurse would come and tend to her most personal needs. They alternated- I can’t remember a single one specifically- but they all had a similar calm about them. These nurses were end of life specialists and they obviously had been trained in how to prepare not only the patient, but the family for the inevitable. On the last day that my mother was conscious she awoke just after dawn. The sun was pouring into the room at a slant, bouncing off the surface of the water outside and throwing flickering gold light across the bed and the wall. I was up already reading something by her bedside when she spoke to me.

“I thought I was in heaven.” she said.

“You are, Mom.” I said. “You are.”

When we do things for other people without being paid it doesn’t mean there is no reward. Some things you do because you can’t pay back a debt in any other way. Other things are paid out in efforts that others cannot give, but there is an ebb and flow in everything we do, good and bad.

Driving back from the drop off my son and I looked out at the landscape and we both remarked on the soft maples in the low spots, already showing bright red leaves. Fall is coming and Winter will be hard on its heels even though it ought to be the hottest part of Summer. It doesn’t matter what ought to be and it does no use to worry about it or be sad that it is rapidly disappearing from view, what matters is that we need to get ready for what’s next, to prepare for the inevitable even as we spend a few more moments enjoying the warmth of the sun.

When we got back to the farm we headed out to the garden and harvested haircot vert, carrots, cukes and sweet corn. We’d defrosted a filet mignon as a reward for the day and we decided to grill the meat and the corn, roast the carrots and make a cucumber and onion salad to go along with the green beans. My wife and our younger children are visiting family this week so it is just the two us in the house, often without lights except where we read, and a great deal more silence than we normally experience. We talked the whole time that we prepared our meal and when we ate we did it standing up at the cutting block as the last light of evening died outdoors.

We do indeed tend our garden and we enjoy the bounty that we receive and are grateful for it, but we’d be foolish to believe that it is the result of our work alone. Some one saved the seeds for hundreds of years so that we could enjoy the flavor of the beans and another someone cleared this land originally under far more primitive conditions than anything we’ve ever dealt with. I look at my son and remember how careful my wife was when she carried him, how many untold hours went into forming the character of this young man who is so helpful to us, so gracious towards strangers and think that at least some of that is a credit to the woman who raised me who will never see how he turned out. The people in those homes who dispossess themselves of their holdings to make way for what is coming do so with sadness, I’m sure, but they also do it with a sense of joy. They are often proud of each piece that they give away as if they had built it themselves and the woman who sells those pieces to other people for their use helps a lot of other people besides- people spending their last hours at home before moving on to somewhere else.

People should tend their gardens, but they should remember to share their harvest as well.

Hardscrabble Farmer’s transformation. We can become whoever we choose to be.

 

When I joined the Army in the last years of the Carter administration I didn’t even have my own pair of shoes. True story. i don’t remember the exact dollar figure, but the monthly take home pay was about $400. I became a paratrooper because that meant an extra $80 per month.

By the time I got out in my early 20′s I already owned my first house and a small truck I paid for cash. I started doing HUD house remodels in the worst parts of town for the worst kinds of people working longer hours than I did as an infantryman, but I kept at it. By the time I was in my late 20′s I was building multi-million dollar bus washes for SEPTA, Wawa markets in under 90 days, Ford dealerships and that kind of thing. There was no nepotism, no bankrolling rich uncle, just hard work, long hours and determination. I was also alone- no wife, no kids, no dog, no fancy car, no wild parties. Then, by accident I drifted into stand up comedy as a hobby- open mic nights, that kind of thing. Before long I was doing road gigs and after a year I was full time at clubs and colleges all over the country as they say. I lived an even more spartan existence then, living out of the trunk of my car. Every night I wasn’t given a hotel room by the venue, I camped in State parks, in empty fields, wherever I found myself. Somewhere along the way I picked up a dog, then a girlfriend who I later married and at the peak of my career our first child came along and I quit and started all over again.

Not long after 9/11 I had become a typical pillar of the community type in my hometown. I was active in my church, spent my free time with my family, participated in local politics and had a seemingly perfect life except for one thing- I knew that something was wrong.

I saw what the military did first hand in places like Granada, El Salvador and Panama, but I kept my mouth shut.

I saw what the big government agencies like HUD did with taxpayers money and who they funneled it to, but I kept my mouth shut.

I watched my country transform itself from thousands of small towns and dozens of unique regions into one size fits all corporatized McBox stores from one end of this country to the other, but I kept my mouth shut unless I was on stage and then only for the laughs.

I watched my hometown church, the one my great-great grandfather built being turned into a nanny-nanny feel good social hall where nothing that was said ever really sounded like it meant anything. No one was to be judged, nothing was sacred, everything was forgiven.

I knew my way around the Internet since I had won a Compaq laptop and a lifetime subscription to Prodigy in the first Colorado Comedy Competition in ’94 and so I started to write a series of essays about what I had kept shut up about for so long. I was honest, I wrote what I had seen and what I saw and I used my own name. The articles got around, and soon the media got wind of them and the gates of hell opened beneath me.

If you’ve never been doxed, never had your face on the front page of the newspaper, never been called a nazi and a racist, a homophobe and a misogynist by the NYT let me tell you it’s an experience. People I had known my entire life, folks who sat next to me in the pews at church, other town councilmen, neighbors, but mostly people who didn’t have the first clue about me or my life, how I lived or what I experienced couldn’t STFU about me. There were threats- of course- but worse than those were the shunnings- just like something from the 17th century. I understand the term witch hunt more than you can imagine and believe me it changed my frame.

The shock wears off. New stories come along, we were a little too sympathetic to demonize for long- I was a deacon in the church who spent most of my free time working with a group home of mentally challenged men. I was a decorated combat vet with no criminal record. I had a beautiful wife and family, had made my way in the world on my own for my entire adult life, wrote pieces that for all their politically incorrect observations about the decline of America were at their core not much different from the pieces you call fiction on this website. My great faults were that didn’t walk in lockstep on issues of race and immigration. I thought our foreign entanglements, particularly in the middle east, were a mistake- just like Washington (the man) had warned us. That Iraq was based on a lie, that 9/11 probably was too. That families can’t be “redefined”, that degeneracy was a bad thing for the long term prospects of a stable society, that corruption at the highest levels was endemic to political elites, not certain parties and that our entire economic structure was a sham.

So I left politics on the local level and quit believing it on any level. The press left me alone- since I was a private citizen and since they couldn’t find a single human being I had ever wronged regardless of race or gender orientation- and I returned to obscurity.

But I wanted out.

So we kept working, kept saving, had more children, remained loyal to each other and to those friends and neighbors who had stood beside us and we planned to make our exit from the rat race. I never wanted to be put in the position of depending upon anything else but our own hard work, good relations and basic human decency. I sure as hell wasn’t angry any longer- a good lot that had done for me- and I owed it to my wife and my family to start looking at the world that was a little less Matrix and a lot more Waltons. I researched aquaculture, permaculture, soil studies and water quality tables. I read the entire section on farming and agriculture at our local library and started composting. Our garden expanded and so did our base of knowledge. I began to accumulate old hand tools and seeds, and just as it looked like our plan to exit the rat race was at hand my mother died of cancer. It took only 11 days from diagnosis to deathbed and I watched every single minute. I have always been close to my family and they raised me in a way I hope I have raised my own children, to be honest, to do what is right, to be true to yourself and to rely on your own skills and resources rather than to beg or to live in debt. My mother loved me, no question, but she loved my children even more and when she died she left us everything she had and after we mourned we took that plus everything we had saved through a lifetime of our own efforts and bought the farm, free and clear.

So that’s the story.

It isn’t fiction and neither is anything I have written thus far. It’s my story, my hours, my days, my life in my words. I have no regrets about anything I wrote in the past, make no apologies for any friendships or associations, I owe no explanations for my choices, make no boasts of my accomplishments. I have made as many mistakes as I have wise choices, but I have learned from every single one. What we do now, every day of our lives is to make this world better for our passing through. The old gripes are gone because I know better than to rage against the dying of the light. I’ve read Spengler and I think he was optimistic. People live and die and so do civilizations and if I have learned anything as a farmer its how to spot terminal conditions in living organisms.

When we came here we left a lot behind- the town my family founded over three hundred years ago, the friendships we had built over a lifetime, the home we built ourselves. But other people give up more than that and start over with less. I have become a competent farmer because this is what I want to do with the time I have remaining even if it ends tomorrow, which it could. I have been loyal as a husband because I have a wife who has proven her loyalty to me and it has been a blessing. I am dedicated to the raising of honorable children because they will be here after I am gone and I want people to depend on them the way they depend on me. I am open to discuss anything anyone wants to talk about and to say nothing about anything they want to avoid because I know what it feels like to be made to feel unwelcome and unwanted and I wouldn’t want that for anyone. I can’t keep people who don’t know me from calling me names I don’t call myself, but that doesn’t mean I have to do the same in return. Turning the other cheek isn’t a form of self-punishment, it’s a cure.

So I will continue to comment about the few things I know when I think I can add a perspective about how I live my life. I don’t expect to inspire anyone to do anything they wouldn’t do on their own, but I do mean to encourage them to do what they want because they can. This world may be in collapse, but that doesn’t mean we can’t continue to build something while we’re here. Everyone can make a commitment to produce more than they consume, love more than they hate, live more than they work towards death.

My life is not a work of fiction.

A day in the life of Hardscrabble Farmer – poetic, inspiring, loving:

I had a great day today. I woke up early, had my coffee- my wife always leaves the french press and a bag of nice coffee beans on the counter next to the grinder, the one my great-great grandmother allegedly bought for herself while her husband, my great-great grandfather, was laying siege to Fredricksburg. So every morning I think about my wife while she sleeps, knowing that she was thinking about me while I slept. And I get to use a tool someone in my family has used continuously for 150 years.

Sweet.

I did chores with my daughter this morning. She was going to a friends house on the lake to swim for the day and she knew she would probably camp out in the yard later so she spent some time following me around for an hour. She says “I love you daddy” apropos of nothing and I reply “I love you more”. She is getting to the age where such outbursts of paternal affection will likely become less frequent so I savor them when they occur. I watch her ride down the hill on her bicycle and just like that, she is gone.

After breakfast- fresh sweet corn pancakes with our maple syrup- we headed back out, this time our youngest son and I, to rebuild a back stoop to the milk house. We took the boards and the tools in a two-wheeled wood barrow and I let him push it so he could get the feel for it loaded up. We measured and cut using a folding rule, a cross cut saw and a framing square. We screwed the boards in rather than nail them- at seven nailing more than a dozen nails leads to fatigue- and he set every one by himself. It took longer than if I had done it myself, but we both had such a great time doing it I wouldn’t have cared if it had taken all day.

The neighbor kid came up and started put up sap wood for the sugaring season. After a while he got tired of that so he cut some hay in the orchard with a scythe, stopping every so often to sharpen it with a whetstone like I showed him. He comes and goes without asking, always works hard when he’s here and on occasion will ask me if he can ride the dirt bike, pick blackberries, have a chicken for the family dinner, etc and I always make sure he is thanked for his efforts. I never give him advice, but I did today when I showed him how to do something more efficiently.

“Time is the only thing you’ve got. You should spend it like gold.”

He nodded at me and went back to cutting grass the way I showed him. He didn’t say anything when he left, but he finished the orchard completely.

We completed the stoop, put things away and had lunch- there was some leftover chicken and sweet corn, sun tea and blackberries with quartered cukes and sea salt. We talked about things, I couldn’t say what exactly, just light happy stuff and we enjoyed a few minutes in the cool of the house doing nothing.

After lunch we headed out to a friends place to finish staining his deck and replacing some railing. It was myself and my sons, every one pitching in and doing their share. That lasted about 4 hours and then we came back home and did firewood for another hour. I took the 7 year old on the tractor and had him steer the whole time as we brought a couple half ton sugar maple butts to the landing where we cut and split as the Sun edged west through the tops of the big trees.

After that we did evening chores, topped off the chickens towers, checked on the goat with the bum leg ( a dog got after him, but he’s healing up fine) and mowed some grass until my wife called us in for supper about a half hour ago. Grilled London broil, fresh made sweet pickles, sweet corn (it never gets old), five kinds of tomatoes and basil mixed with olive oil and a nice glass of a Chianti I made about six years ago. It may have been the last bottle, but we opened it on date night (Saturday, no kids, full moon) and I wasn’t going to let the last glass go bad.

I read stories about how bad things are and I get it in an intellectual way. They are. In the big world, macro cosmic, multicultural ether that permeates the densely populated cities of late Western Civilization, things are falling apart. Economies, families, human bodies, and the beliefs of a thousand years. It must be painful to live so close to the core, rotten as it is, fed on a diet of heavily processed slop, isolated, alone. The eternal absence of love and the never ending sound of anger and snark are fatal in lesser organisms, they are soul crushing in ours.

Get out of the city. Do not eat another bite unless you know where it came from and how it was raised. Stop worrying about the rest of the world when you’re not even living in your own. Help a kid learn a new skill. Love somebody more than they love you and chances are they’ll love you more than you love them. Then double down.

I’m all alone right now finishing my glass of wine at the table in the dark. I got a few things done today, touched base with an old friend, did something for someone, let someone do something for me. Kissed my wife, told each kid I loved them at least a few times. Didn’t do anything that required a band-aid or a visit to the ER. Ate like it was my last meal three times. Upstairs you can here the sound of people winding down, water running, laughter. My heart is full to the point of breaking, but not in a bad way.

Outside the sky is the clearest shade of pearl with a smattering of cumulus clouds just far away enough to still be visible. There are so many things that were on my list to do today that I didn’t get around to, but soon its going to get really dark and I will lay my body down on a very comfortable mattress and with my head on a pillow and I will fall into sleep like I’ve earned it.

Like the man said, tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…

Hardscrabble Farmer’s awareness started with Waco. A national conflagration is coming and the existing social order will be burned to the ground. What happens next is up to us.

 

Over the last week or so my son and I have been spending some time helping a friend get a house ready for sale- repairing deteriorated trim, power washing the exterior, repainting the interior, that kind of thing. We are both very meticulous and thorough and enjoy working together and it’s nice to be able to give some assistance to someone who hasn’t got the ability to do it themselves.

Yesterday afternoon they stopped by to check the progress- we’re almost done and about a week ahead of the schedule and after a walk through we wound up on the back side of the house looking out into the edge of the forest that stands a couple of hundred feet away. I’m not sure how we got onto the topic but I was describing the age of the forest and the progression it had made from it’s last clearing as a meadow around the time of my birth. The owner asked how I was able to know that since I had never been to the property before and I went over the growth pattern of North Eastern mixed forests- first the forbs come in along with the poplars and white pine. They would leech the soil of the nutrients that fed the forbs, which would die out as the first of the second order trees emerged; hemlocks, white oak, ash and rock maple. You could see by the diameter of the trees of various species, their orientation on the slope in regards to sun, the water course to the west in the form of a steady running stream, etc. I pointed out a large fifty year old poplar that had reached its maximum growth and due to the crowding of the pines had maintained an almost branch free butt end making it perfect for boards. I told him that the white pines were past prime and had begun to bull from a much earlier brush hogging likely in their first couple of years of growth and how dangerous that made them for cutting and almost worthless except as pulp for the local steam plant. I was trying to help him make a few bucks off the land before he sold and in turn improve the view and wood potential for the next owner in terms of 15-50 years down the pike.

He stood there looking out at the forest, then at me and asked how I could tell all that from just looking at a piece of land I had no previous knowledge of and I had to think about it for a second. I haven’t always had this kind of insight, in fact I had only recently “woken up” to the world around me in terms of my own lifetime. I’ve been other things at other times that had nothing to do with the land or growth, Nature or decay, but I knew exactly what I was looking at now because it seemed so obvious. I could envision a time lapse of the entire growth cycle in the same way I could look back on my own life and there was no secret to it, no magical sensory gift, no intuitive edge I had over anyone else, it was simply a matter of looking at things, as they are and being able to see not only where they had come from, but where they were going.

Our own society, culture, civilization, whatever you want to call it is no different from a forest or a coral reef. It is a result of time, life, the natural inclinations and limitations of a specific species in a specific location. It has a lifespan just like the individual members that make it up and it demonstrates it strengths and its weaknesses in the same way, through the observable features of its shared environment.

When I watched agents of my own government burn down a home filled with men, women and children who had never been convicted of any crime on live television with commentary explaining why what I was seeing was not what I thought I was seeing but something entirely different, I knew what was coming as clearly as looking at a stand of bull pine on a high southern flank at the tail end of a drought season when the thunderheads are building to the east. Maybe not today, but one day and soon, without question, as sure as the sun rises there will be a conflagration that will close the chapter on that particular forest until the shes neutralize the soil again and the first of the forbs creep back in and start the process over again.

Waking up is a good metaphor for being aware of our surroundings, It is sad that for most of us such an awakening never takes place until the flames are out of control and we are caught inside of them. For others we come to it sooner and it pains us to see what is clear to any thoughtful person with an eye for the nature of things. There is a conflagration of our own making in the future waiting for the lightning strike that sparks it all- or it might be something as small as a drifting ash or as careless as tossed butt from a car window by some careless individual who cannot see the forest through the trees, but who nonetheless lives right up against it.

Years ago as I was walking through our sugar bush with an extension agent from the State University he pointed out a huge mound that was tapered at both ends and casually told me it was the root ball of a huge tree dropped by the hurricane of ’38, and judging by the forest, likely a sugar maple that had predated the birth of the Republic. Every so often we’d come upon a massive red oak I had made note of with a trunk so big two men couldn’t wrap their arms around and he would show me the dark marks some twenty feet up where it had been scorched, but not burned by the wildfires that swept through 150 years ago cleaning off most everything else that had covered our slopes. I took all this in and made it part of my skill set when looking at the world in the same way I look at the vacant strip malls and faces of the people driving back and forth on the roads and note with some degree of certainty that nothing lasts.

Until something new comes along to replace it.

Hardscrabble Farmer’s son has returned, wiser and prepared for an uncertain future.

 

The other day I got up before dawn and headed back down to the NYC Metro area to meet my son’s flight back from Geneva. As I waited for him to emerge from the International Arrivals gate I noticed that at least 75% if not more of those who came around the corner were immersed in their I-gadgets, neither looking up to meet the eyes of their friends and families who awaited them, nor engaging with their fellow travelers. Each one was focused on six square inches of glowing screen and two dozen buttons, furiously thumbing in whatever it was that mattered more than the world they moved through.

When my son finally came around the corner he struck me as being something apart from the others- he was smiling broadly, engaged in a conversation with another backpack toting young man, both of them tall, physically fit and aware of their surroundings. His eyes met mine almost instantly despite the large crowd and we quickly found our way out of the airport and headed away from the dying city of Newark towards home.

I listened to his stories about his travel through the mountains of Europe and his observations about the differences between the people he met there and the ones he knew in America. Certain things stood out to him- the difference in body size (he rarely saw a fat European) the squalor and decay evident in the urban areas of Barcelona and the accompanying discord and anxiety among the population versus the easy going and harmonious relations he experienced in the alpine villages. He said that the one thing that had struck him was the absence of entitlement- his words, not mine- of the people he met. How working for a living was woven into the warp and woof of their lives, the communal water tap in the center of each village, the gardens and window boxes full of vegetables and flowers while the snow was still on the slopes, the well tended flocks of sheep and goats, the quietly grazing herds of cattle, each with a wide leather collar and ancient bronze bell and all of it watched over by smiling people tied to the land.

We gave him a couple of days to rest and catch up with his friends, but on Monday he was back at it with me, working in a comfortable harmony on the various tasks at hand, joking and exchanging comments on occasion, but most often silently immersed in our own thoughts. He has shared with me how much he enjoyed his adventure, but how it only convinced him further how much he belonged here, how much he had missed the smell of the air, the particular green of our forest, the soft roll of our ancient mountain as opposed to the violent glacial crags of the Pyrenees. We sent our oldest son off right at the end of his childhood and he came back fully a man, capable of feats most people will only dream about, ready to do the kind of work that virtually no one is capable of in this day and age. Most of his friends are headed off to college, to begin a life with some hope of future happiness, but who will in short order find themselves indebted, disengaged from the world outside of their laptop or flatscreen, suffering from one disorder or another, alienated, frustrated, anxious in a world that is ever more unnatural and headed in the wrong direction.

Today we will work together again and eat the food that came off of our land and hopefully learn something new from each other. I know that’s there’s nothing much any of us can do as individuals to change the course of history or alter the path that we as a nation are collectively making our way along. Sometimes it’s frustrating to see the wanton disregard for everything we hold dear becoming the defacto policies of our elites, but that is the curse of being borne to a time and a place. Certain things are inescapable, but in so many other ways we have far more freedom than we imagine. We can be effective providers for ourselves and our families, we can choose to be producers rather than consumers, to look out into the faces of the crowd rather than gaze into the abyss of cell phone screen and to make each day something worthy of the hours we have spent on it.

I wake up in the morning stiff enough to have to limp into the bathroom, but then I brush my teeth, wash my face and find that somewhere deep inside I am more limber than I thought I was. I still check out the world through a feeble Internet connection much in the same way I look out of the window to check the weather each day, but neither deter me from going out and doing whatever needs to be done no matter how poor the outlook might be. And now, thanks to the hard work and dedication of years spent raising the young man I am proud to call my son, he provides a renewed energy and excitement, new ways of looking at the world and solutions for old problems that have been out of my reach. I don’t know if he will change the world, but I know he will improve a part of it and that keeps me going no matter how bad things might seem.

Nothing like some Hardscrabble Farmer wisdom (comment made on I Am a Killer thread) on a Monday morning :

On Saturday afternoon a family came up to the farm to buy a goat. They are originally from Kenya and who have been buying products from our farm for years now. They chose the animal they wanted and we led it to a spot not far from then sugarhouse and I slaughtered it for them. My animals know me and are comfortable around me. I slaughter the smaller ones like lambs and goat by severing their carotid artery and holding them while they bleed out. A friend of mine was at the farm that day and he had never witnessed a slaughter and wanted to watch the process so he stood nearby while it took place. I was mindful of his experience as well and when it was over- something that lasts a minute or two at most I looked over at him to see if he was alright.

Death is something humans understand in a way that no animal fully comprehends. We dwell on it, memorialize our own, think about our own demise, craft legal documents, build tombs and tell stories. It fascinates us because we understand that life is finite in a way that animals do not and because we are human we project our concerns and fears onto animals and make them their own.

No living thing desires death, but all life comes to an end. With animals meant for consumption by humans, their lives are- when raised on family farms- well lived. They are fed, looked after, treated with kindness and compassion. The word husbandry came from this relationship rather than the one used in marriage and it reflects the responsibility one feels for his livestock.

After we slaughtered the goat the family went to work on it, skinning, eviscerating, cleaning and butchering the animal together. They use every piece, every organ, every scrap to feed themselves and the way that they worked together was a wonderful thing to be a part of and something I have enjoyed every time that they visit us. Afterwards I took them out to the back forty to pick raspberries and before they left I brought out some syrup for the younger ones to taste and they paid me for the goat and for my time. They left me with the skin which I will tan and later sell to a guy I know who makes drums and the horns that will go to a knife maker for pommels in skinning knives like the one I used on the goat. The dogs and the barn cats got to clean up where the blood puddled and with the exception of the waste we removed from the entrails which will compost back into the soil under the maples where we slaughtered, the only thing left will be the memory of that afternoon.

My children are far more familiar with the concept of life and death than I was when I was their age and I am grateful for it and think it is a healthier way to go through life. They understand that every living thing on Earth requires the death of some other living thing to go on, that all flesh is grass and that the soil itself made up of the residue of all things dead is filled with more life in a single handful than the human populations of all our cities combined. They know that when I die I wish to be cremated and to have my ashes spread on the fields so that in some small way I might be able to return something of myself to the nourishment of others. If that is any stranger than to be pumped full of chemicals and placed in a concrete box too deep to ever rot, I’ll have to live with that;-)

I try to live my life in the most efficient, responsible and thoughtful way possible and to raise my children to be better than I am. What I eat, I produce, I harvest, I prepare. I do not pass on my responsibilities to other people nor do I accept their judgments as my own. Those who claim the moral high ground when it comes to issues as fundamental as the food we put in our bodies are rarely the ones who do the same. It is often with the best intentions that they posture and intone, but the road to hell, as they say is paved…

This morning before I begin to work again on our fields and with our animals I will feed myself and my family with the harvest of this piece of land and it will nourish us in many more ways than to simply fill our bellies. And as long as I am able I will do my best to make the lives of every living thing around me a little bit better than it was before I passed through.

Hardscrabble Farmer stepping up while I work on my Irish tan in Wildwood.

Triage is the medical term for assigning degrees of urgency when evaluating a patient. It used to be the societal method for assigning priorities in civic life- what things are more important than other things in order to promote the health and welfare of our particular societal arrangement. Clearly those who control the levers of power, our institutions and agencies, our economic and political structures, our religious and academic institutions have chosen to triage in a way that places more value on things that in the past were either marginal or unimportant to the health of our State and to retard or eliminate those that are crucial for the long term health and success of the body politic.

We can question motives until we are blue in the face and never adequately address the real issue- should we comply with the destruction of our own communities, families and lives in order to facilitate their further expansion and political control, or simply cease to participate.

Going Galt is a difficult decision to make for most people who are even willing to confront the issue. No one wants to give up the multitude of benefits we receive as members of an advanced civilization, such as indoor plumbing, dentistry, automobiles, readily available entertainment, etc. These perks are the carrot on a stick that has been used to get us to accept most of the current outrages that now make up public life in the 21st century and the thought of giving them up either completely or to a degree is more than most people are willing to consider and so they grit their teeth and fume as each brand new miserable outrage is foisted upon our collective consciences.

The fact is that most of those things will not disappear if we choose to walk away. Knowledge of chemistry, structural engineering, electrical production on a small scale, independent economies, food production, etc are readily available if somewhat more time consuming than by purchasing them from specialists. In many cases- such as providing your own nourishment- is much more efficient, better for you and more rewarding in terms of flavor and satisfaction when done outside of the system. My wife may not be able to set my broken arm as satisfactorily as an orthopedic surgeon, but she prepares a better meal than Thomas Keller. And I know because she has done both.

One of the first things we have sacrificed is the right to make choices. We’re told we have more than ever, but clearly that’s a lie. I have a collection of old rakes for use on the farm, none under a hundred years old, no two alike and each in perfect working order. I can travel anywhere in this country and look for a rake at any box store and my choice will be limited to a plastic, Chinese made POS that will not last a season even if handled with extreme delicacy. We have choices we can make, we can quit this sick and bloated corpse of a world and head down the path to a different and far better one if we stop fearing the things we may have to sacrifice. If we make the right kinds of decisions, if we learn to triage our own lives so that we may ultimately save them, we may find that things we thought we couldn’t live without were the very things that were killing us in the first place.

It would have been easy for me to have mocked the poor creatures in the photos on the Hell, Motherf*#@*ing Yea thread, but that wouldn’t change a thing in their lives or mine. They are lost to history, their value to our society no more than a sandbag in a trench war. Those who can impact the future know better than to abdicate their lives to sloth and gluttony, want and desires, to be nothing more than a living, breathing appetite instead of a productive and inspirational figure that lights the way into the future wherever it may lead.

The people who are reading this are, for the most part, informed enough to understand that nothing lasts forever, they are also cynical enough to think that nothing they do will alter or change the outcome in any way. Such a belief would be a critical error to make. If ever there were a time when doing the right thing, making the correct choice, deciding which attribute had more value than another were critical to the life of the patient, now would be the time.

Sometimes the only way to win is not to play the game.

Hardscrabble Farmer prefers not to eat wood pulp. When will we all revolt and escape from our corporate prison camp lives? Support your local farmers. Develop personal relationships with like minded people. Starve the corporate/banking oligarchs.

Yesterday I saw a sign by the side of the road for a barn sale so I pulled down the driveway for a quick look. I asked if they had any hay forks, windrow rakes or log dogs and the guy was all smiles. I found what I was looking for plus a few extras and then brought up trade for meat. Both he and his wife lit up, we came to a mutually beneficial agreement and I took the tools I had found and returned later that afternoon with my youngest son in tow and a big box of meats- ground beef, chorizo, maple cured ham, skirt steak, ribeyes, sweet Italian sausage and a couple of pints of dark maple syrup.

I don’t expect that most people would want to do their own slaughter and frankly I don’t blame them. You have to be committed to your food and your animals on a pretty serious level to do something like that and you need a lot more than a good rifle and a sharp knife. What I don’t understand is why so many people who have the knowledge of our current food systems still avoid finding a local or even not that distant farmer to purchase from directly. Knowing how someone cares for his livestock, what kind of feeds they eat, how its processed is no different than researching your physician or mechanic and is in most cases far more important. Not everyone needs a heart bypass surgery or a new transmission, but every one of us eats food daily. Is there anything we do that is more personal, more tied to the overall physical health of our body than the nourishment we take from our daily meals?

I get the price conscious decision, but the fact is that as an excuse it isn’t only weak, it’s not even true. A pound of filet mignon I sell for $25 is going to provide the protein requirement for 3 adults. It would cost $50 in ground chuck from WalMart to equal the same protein because of filler and fat. The added costs associated with soil depletion, petrochemical usage, and future medical costs are part of the price no one factors in- never mind that when the last family farm is gone and the multinational food corps take over all production they will no longer have to keep prices lower and will charge whatever they like.

I get folks who come up to the farm and purchase a live animal and wait while I slaughter it for them. Some will even take a hand in butchering it and packing it up. Their cost is on average about $4 a pound for an entire animal from chickens and goats all the way to hogs and beeves. People with a decent freezer can feed their family well for months if not a whole year for a thousand dollars. How many hours of their life would they spend on grocery runs, how many gallons of gas, how many blah tasting meals or stomach upsets?

Wood pulp.

Really?

There are times in your life when you are so powerless that people who are bigger and stronger will hold you down and make you hit yourself in the face with your own hands and say “why are you hitting yourself?” Most of us grow out of that and learn to stand up for for ourselves and refuse to be bullied and pushed around. A lot of us decide to keep taking it and some of us even continue to abuse themselves without being forced to. Eating meat filled with wood pulp or worse yet, feeding it to your loved ones is the kind of self abnegation and masochism I just cannot fathom. And the worst part is that the ones who continue to do so make it so that sooner or later, no one will be able to opt out.

Hardscrabble Farmer’s response to the zillionaire douchebag Nick Hanauer and his fellow oligarchs. Here is a message for Nick. Yes there will be blood. No a $15 minimum wage will not save you.

“I bought a few shirts, a few pair of pants and the rest of my money I socked away into savings…”

My wife and I had a rather long discussion about this article last night over wine. We like to spend at least one night a week where we both dress nicely for each other, prepare some of our favorite things to eat and discuss our life, the world, and whatever else comes up like we did when we first met.

My take on this was that Nick Hanauer was whistling past the graveyard. Clearly- to me at least- he demonstrates an understanding of the simmering boil out there below his Gulfstream. His arrogance and hubris was an artifact of his environment, rather than the opposite. Why he was unable, in an open letter that he must have known would receive wide reception, to tell the truth was not because he was seeking to deceive others, but rather himself. His appeal for a $15 per hour minimum wage when the pay rates for his own company top out at $14 per hour demonstrates that he doesn’t actually believe in anything he has to say, but rather that he feels it is what he must say- to protect himself should things go bad, to make himself appear to be what he is not, for whatever reason that truly motivates him, but not for any of the ones he gives. If he actually believed his own rhetoric, what would prevent him from offering his entry level employees the $15 per hour he promotes rather than the $9 he actually offers? His deception isn’t one of commission as much as it is one of omission.

When he tells us about his modest purchases of slacks and shirts, what he leaves out is his gargantuan purchases of political influence. He leads us to believe that he doesn’t really even have a plan for his massive wealth- a savings account? Really? For what exactly, future purchases of Dockers? If easing the financial situation of workers is his raison d’etre, what prevents him from giving 1/10 of his savings account to his 2,400 employees, a sum that would be life changing for them, barely noticed by a guy who only has 3 cars for all his billions? He doesn’t for the same reason he lies about the “savings account”- because he doesn’t believe it himself.

I think he is afraid, deeply, rightly so, that the future built as it has been on such fragile foundations as a feather pillow story line, might not be as secure as it once seemed. He thinks that maybe he can get out in front of the massive social unrest that he sees coming and perhaps buy him a future out in the same way his billions have bought him his shirts and pants in the past.

Surely he knows that the reason $15 per hour is the new $5 per hour is that endless rounds of quantitative easing and Fed policies of monetization of debt have devalued the dollar. Compounding the problem by throwing more FR’s at it doesn’t solve anything, in fact it only exacerbates the problem. Two years from now we’ll be talking about a $25 per hour minimum wage- that is if there are any jobs left.

I thought his parting shot to the zillionaires that higher wages for low end workers would be more millions for them was especially telling in light of the original thrust of income equality being a threat from the pitchfork wielding “crazies” as he refers to everyone not a feather pillow plutocrat. The fact that his good buddy and the source of his billions, Jeff Bezos, is building spacecraft and funding his own private NASA is telling in it’s own right. Perhaps he has gleaned some crucial tidbits of information at his annual Bilderberg retreat. I doubt it has anything with making sure the common folk get to ride to the stars, but who knows with these folks.

My wife doesn’t buy any of it. She believes that this isn’t a personal reflection, but rather a collaboration- a policy piece, so to speak- of a group of ultra wealthy, hyper influential oligarchs that simply tapped Mr Hanauer to deliver the message. Written to “my fellow zillionaires” it reads as if it were directed to an entirely different audience, somewhere far below the rarified atmosphere that “99.9% couldn’t possibly conceive”.

After the reflection of the past night, I think she may be right.

In the 4th century, just before the sack of Rome, the reigning oligarchs of that time negotiated payoffs with the Visigoths hoping to forestall the inevitable. Something tells me that in today’s exchange rate it would have translated to roughly $15 per hour.

I personally met the second TBP member that I hadn’t already known before the website existed. Admin and Hardscrabble Farmer met on campus yesterday and shared a pitcher of Yueng Ling beer while depressing my son about his bleak future.

Hardscrabble was in the area on business and we had the opportunity to get together. His story is fascinating and inspirational, as you all know from reading his posts. Him and his family are proof that you can just walk away from this materialistic, debt saturated, egotistical, banker controlled society and essentially live off the grid and sustain yourself.

It takes courage, an unbelievable amount of hard work, a supportive family and some luck to pull it off. Everyone has to ask themselves at some point whether they are really happy trapped in their existing lives. Is there a better path than the one set for us by society, our schools, the government, mega-corporations and the corporate media?

I believe him when he says he is happier than he has ever been in his life. How many of us can say the same thing. If enough productive, intelligent, critical thinking people went Galt, how long would this teetering edifice of debt, consumption, entitlements, and lies last?

I feel privileged to have created a place where Hardscrabble Farmer and all the other highly intelligent TBP contributors feel comfortable sharing their life stories and wisdom. I look forward to many more poetic Hardscrabble Farmer short stories about life in the slow lane.

The American farmer has been and will always be the backbone of this country.

 

As usual, some perspective from Hardscrabble Farmer on what a mess we made of his poetic post about his son.

Yesterday was our youngest son’s 7th birthday. He is an early riser like myself, and from 5:30 am until the rest of the family got up we spent time together talking about his life. I told him stories about things he couldn’t remember, like his baptism at the family church and the time he decided to run away from home in the rain wearing only one shoe, things like that. He likes to hear about his life- I suppose we all do- and so after every story he would ask me to tell him one more.

I love telling stories, always have and I used to write quite a bit but I have given it up except for comments on a blog or two when I have a few minutes. Over the years I have discovered that no matter how measured, how inoffensive one tries to be, there is always someone out there that will find a reason to be upset at what you’ve said. Your pride in family is a rebuke of their choice to remain single. Your observation about the failure of some societal norm is an attack on their lifestyle choice. A funny line or a play on words is an attack on someone’s personhood or orientation. After a while you just give up and keep your stories to yourself, when someone says something you disagree with or that they clearly know nothing about you clench your jaw and grin but you don’t say anything for fear of having them take it the wrong way.

The reason I speak about my own limited experience on a small piece of land in a remote location is because like any other human being I want some form of communion with other like minded souls. I want to tell them stories, like the ones my son wanted me to tell because I know how much I love hearing the things other people have to say when they speak from experience, or the heart, or with love. I have admired the things that Jim has written here because even though his frustration with the bullshit and falsehoods drive him to put these essays down in words, underneath it there is love and truth in what he says. If he didn’t care he’d be like every other money grubbing dick out there and look out for number one, but he doesn’t. He writes things that he knows about and he puts them together in a way that anyone with an IQ on the right hand side of the bell curve can grok at first read. His righteous anger is justified and it turns into something worthwhile and meaningful and I respect that.

I was up early this morning and when I saw what this thread had become I was disappointed- not because it was originally about some comment I wrote, because clearly I am no Steinbeck nor could I ever be- but because it revealed something else that I have tried to avoid for years now. We live in a time where so much is false, so much has been perverted and maligned that its hard to know what the truth is anymore, so people assume nothing is. I enjoy the comments here because I know that every one of the people who have something to say, have a story to tell. They aren’t the labels we give them- racist, drunken Indian, disabled veteran, whatever- they are just like everyone else, just trying to tell their own particular story from their own remote location in their own voice so they can know that they aren’t alone.

After my wife and the rest of the kids woke up and we opened presents and ate breakfast, my oldest son and I headed out to do chores and then to help a neighbor load hay onto the wagons and then into the barn. It was one of those perfect Summer days, cerulean skies with fluffy clouds racing each other to the horizon. There was a breeze that kept the bugs off and even though the hay scratched and chafed with every bale we pitched, it was fun work- old men and young boys in concert, chasing up and down the field behind the baler trying to keep up. At the end of the day we headed back home for the party, my wife having made plates full of homemade french fries, cheeseburger sliders on toasted buns, pesto and wild field greens. There were balloons and one of the neighbors brought fireworks for the kids who spent their time checking out the new litter of kittens under the barn and bouncing on the trampoline. One of the fathers asked me to show him how to use the scythe in the orchard and he picked it up in no time. The phone kept ringing with birthday wishes from family and friends and we all had a few drinks to celebrate while the kids ate cake. The whole day was built around what we all had in common, what we all liked about each other, or enjoyed doing together and by the time we said our farewells and put the kids to bed and stood together in the kitchen holding each other up as much as hugging one another, my wife and I realized what a wonderful world it really was and how lucky we were to be in it.

I don’t write a lot about the things I don’t have, or the way I wish it could be if the world were different because that’s just the way things are. My life isn’t close to perfect, I ache sometimes so bad I can hardly move, but moving is what I have to do and so I get on with it and count the blessings to dull the pain and it works for me. I don’t imagine that things are going to get much better or that the world I grew up in will ever come back, but that’s just the way things are and you can only do so much, but what you can, you do.

After reading the thread this morning I thought that if we could have had all of you here for the day, everyone would have got along just fine. There would have been joking and teasing, but it would have been tempered by what we had in common, not what makes us different and I bet that as the light fell at the latest hour of the year, we all would have enjoyed hearing each others stories.