In my family we have scholars and writers, pastors, entrepreneurs. These are the people who often get remembered in history: they write their own name and mark their own lives, they make a memory or a legacy that can be written and passed down.
What of the farmers? Every family must have farmed at one point. Must have turned to the earth for sustenance for themselves, and likely for others, where the earth of one was better suited to grow one thing that was then traded for another.
How far back will I have to go? I can feel my ancestral heritage coming alive as I watch the fine cornsilk poke its head out to be fertilized, eat greens and munch tomatoes grown under my very eyes.
We will have to do some family storytelling to find out.
How far is it for you?
2 comments:
My uncle told me about his grandfather waiting on the stoop of his house in the Bronx with a dustpan and rake to pick up horse manure from the delivery wagon's horses. The manure was destined for a backyard garden. As my uncle tells the story, there was some competition among the neighbors for the manure.
I don't think my uncle mentioned a date, but it must have been the 1940s.
My great-grandfather wasn't a farmer, per se, but a lot more people were a lot closer to the food they grew.
Dave, I love this story! It's fun that our generation thinks that we are inventing Urban Farming, but folks have been living in high-density areas and needing to eat for a looong time! It resonates more with where I'm at: with the people, and also getting closer and closer to the earth and the plants.
The closest I've come so far is my mom's "Aunt Kate": a cousin of her great-grandfathers who contacted her family when they moved to Kansas City. My mom and her big brothers would go and visit her on her farm. Kate's brother was a commercial farmer, and Aunt Kate lived on her adjacent farm and kept a few plants and animals herself. My mom says that her brothers would jump down from the hay loft, but she wouldn't! She had a cousin her age who would come, and "she wasn't afraid to jump off the hayloft!" My mom remembers going on her own to spend the weekend at Aunt Kate's as a rare special thing she got to do without her big brothers as a little girl.
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