i've been thinking about my childhood a lot lately, I think due to two facts:
1. i'm reading this book "Growing A Farmer" which is a memoir about a guy who leaves his life in the city to become a small time farmer.
2. it's that time in my life where Brett and I are trying to "put down roots" (as they say) and think about what we want for our future lit'luns.
so mom & dad i just wanna say thanks for doing so many things right.
i don't know how you did it, with 9 kids and all.
i am especially grateful for growing up in the country side. even though my dad wasn't a commercial farmer, he is the son of a farmer, and he knows how to garden and make things grow. he grew enough food for 11 people to live off for the entire year. we ate tons of vegetables of all varieties and only ate meat once a week, on sundays. my dad always worked stinkin' hard, and he seemed to love it. he also taught us to work hard.
my mom grew up in the suburbs of oregon, and i don't know how she transitioned to the country life, but she did it with grace. she learned to skin/pluck animals and butcher them. she canned so much food she had to get reparative surgery on both of her wrists. she used only cloth diapers with 9 kids. enough said.
my mom is really the best woman i know. she is completely selfless, and gave us so much room to become whoever we wanted to be. she gave up so much of herself in order to raise 9 kids. i can't imagine how she felt much of the time. but i only remember her happy.
this is the valley i grew up in:
the white house & shed with brown roof is the house i grew up in. the barns around it belong to our neighbor, but his farm was my playland as a kid.
This was my neighbor's barn inside. we loved to climb on all the hay and jump from level to level. we knew where all the holes were, and rarely fell through.
my favorite was milking time, when all the cows would come in to the lower level to milk. i loved the energy inside the room, the mooing of the impatient cows walking in, and the smell of their sweat. i loved running down and watching them methodically go through their routine. the cows knew exactly what to do.
here's the swimming hole where we would run to when the weather was finally warm enough to swim! a few too many water snakes here, but all my siblings got in any way, so i did too. i think just 2 bites happened, and neither were me.
my dad taught us to work hard (aka: he required us to work hard or we had no privileges), and now i am grateful for it.
every summer, we had to chop and haul enough firewood to heat our house through the long cold winters. We climbed my grandpa's hill and my dad cut down trees. then we kids had to run the wood splitter and haul all the wood down the hill. my dad rented a u-haul to get the wood to our house. and we would make trip after trip every saturday til we had enough wood.
i know i won't be raising my kids in the country-country like i grew up with, and a big piece of me is really sad about that. i have good memories from that time. but it was a hard life, and my parents had to sacrifice so much. at the time, lack of money made our lifestyle necessary. i guess i'm grateful that i have more options than my parents did, but i think they are stronger people than i am because i have grown into a "cushier" life.
i guess what i want to take away from my childhood and provide for my own children is:
- room to run free and wild. even if it's not the entire countryside. maybe just an adequate yard.
- opportunities to sacrifice and work hard
- learn to grow a garden and eat what we grow
- love being outside, and seeing the beauty in nature
ok... maybe I was all of those things. but I bet when they weren't running away from me, they were loving it as much as I was.
left to right: lil sis Esther, her husband Brian, my oldest niece Anna, and sis-in-law Heather. Just talkin' story under the big tree. love the country.
