Family Matters

One of the things we will do on occasion while working around the property is to scout out homesites for the children. Each of them has a favorite place and their reasoning for why it should be situated there. We discuss things like water, leech fields, views, construction of roads, etc.

I do not assume that each one of them will remain here on the farm, but we have made it clear that there would be nothing that would please us more than to have them pitch in with us to make the land more productive and expand our capacity in order to support the families that they will one day build for themselves. We have also made it clear that the first child to marry and have children will be given the farmhouse and that my wife and I will move into the cottage where we will continue to assist in every way possible as they become the primary stewards of the land.

When I came of age I was prepared to leave the nest, to make my own way and support myself at each level that my capacities could sustain while I decided to choose my path. I always had the support of my family, but never was I treated as a minor child again. I earned my own income, made my own decisions, selected my own path. Had my family not been careerists working for companies and government I would likely have thrown in with them as we always worked well together, but they were from the generation that “got jobs” rather than continued in the family tradition of farming that had been the staple of past generations. To this day my father is proud to say that it only took one generation for us to get back to the farm, something I know he would have loved to have done had he not followed the mid century tail chasing of a career. The photos on our walls of my children’s great-great-great grandfather and his son and his children clustered around in the dooryard smiling into the camera reflect a family living a life not much different than the one we live today.

Multiple generations working together, living together, sharing resources, supporting each other in times of difficulty, extolling one another to do their best, passing on traditions and skill sets are force multipliers that cannot be quantified by government statisticians. On Friday of this past week we slaughtered and processed 100 chickens in a day, working under the light of the full moon at the end and filled our freezer with enough meat to carry us through another year. Last night the children cut up herbs from the garden while I parted the birds and my wife prepared vegetables from the garden for our supper. When we ate together the joy we shared at that table was palpable- there was pride, delight in each other’s company and an epicurean delight in the aromas and flavors of something we were responsible for jointly- from the incubation of the eggs in May until the final feathering under the orange super moon of July.

I can see where things are heading because we are lucky enough to have perspective. In the not too distant future children will become as disposable as spouses are today. The very idea of family will become as quaint and passe as hoop skirts and horse drawn buggies. The Brave New World future that the elites have planned for us will become the norm and most of humanity still playing along with their idea of society will become as isolated and atomized as a current resident of Super Max. But out here in the cracks and crevices of the world there will still be remnants clinging to the world of tradition like a weed in a rock, waiting for inevitable return to a world that functions as it was designed. Our society is on a path to its own destruction because it is built like that proverbial house on a foundation of sand.

Our oldest son is circumnavigating Mont Blanc somewhere in the Chamonix Valley and he is hopefully getting his fill of life without our support, learning to be his own man. His siblings who were at first grateful for his departure- he acts every inch of the eldest child- speak of him daily now in glowing terms, wondering how he is doing, what he is seeing and when he will be home. Last night the youngest boy went missing for a few hours after dark and when we found him he was sleeping in his brother’s room, his face pressed against a thread bare stuffed animal that his brother keeps on his bed. We let him stay there and smiled at the thought that as small as he is now, soon he will be grown like his brother. As for the eldest this may be the first of his separations from us leading to a life somewhere else, or it may be a simple break to refocus on what he has left behind, only time will tell, but for our family he will always be welcome at 18, 26 or 85 to a life in the shelter of our shared history.