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A quote: “The law of harvest is to reap more than you sow. Sow an act, and you reap a habit. Sow a habit and you reap a character. Sow a character and you reap a destiny.” ~~ James Allen
I’ll start with a story …
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Spring planting is sure enough busy, but nothing compares to harvest. Could be the anticipation of a good winter rest as payoff for months of work. Or, more likely, because it is the most dangerous time of the year.
We let the kids have their own plot for pumpkins and stuff. Back in a woodland clearing far from our main fields. Hadn’t had to do that save the last couple of seasons.
The City has raised its bounties and released more Trapper Grays to steal what they won’t pay for in trade.
And it’s not just crops they come for.
Fergusons lost their 14 year old twin boys two years ago. We lost sweet Maryanne, all of eight, last year. She just had to slip out at dawn to check on her broody hen Miss Scarlet. Mama caught sight of her through the kitchen window slipping out of the coop when dark shadow popped up, grabbing her and sprinting away. Mama was already on the porch shouldering her rifle, the dogs flying across the field when they disappeared into a hover and were gone.
She still mourns, dreams of revenge.
Last of the crops in, packed tight in wagons, as are essentials from the house. Let the Grays come looking, this old house is packin’ a surprise for them.
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Now, it’s your turn.
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. featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license
Susan O says: Well, that didn’t go in a direction I expected.
Cameron says: The farm looks worn on the outside but it’s actually well-maintained. Eight hundred acres and the crops are still being harvested. I worked it in the summer as I grew up and while I hated it at first, I came to appreciate the skills I learned.
The first year was tough but I pushed on. Little by little, I became as skilled as my grandfather and soon, the old-timers treated me like one of their own. When they felt like they knew me enough to ask questions, they wondered why I came here.
And honestly, it’s not anything terrible. I simply saw co-workers burning themselves out to pursue happiness. I saw people selling their dignity and sense of self for the adoration of an online crowd that would forget them when the next new shiny came along.
So I snapped and one day, I left a high-level Zoom meeting that was going nowhere, told the boss to send me my last check in two days, broke my lease, donated everything to Goodwill and took over the farm. It’s not as much as I used to have but it’s easier to keep track of.
Now to rebuild the scarecrow out front…
It’s getting time to harvest our first crop.
How wonderful that sounds: our crop, our fields, our farm. You see, I grew up in a big old farmhouse that had been in the family for ages. My grandparents and great-grandparents had successfully navigated the shakeouts of the last quarter of the Twentieth, where you either got big or got out. They’d acquired additional land when they could, and when they couldn’t, they found specialty crops that allowed them to make more money on less acreage. By the time I was in school, Dad was doing most of the farming, although Grandpa still did a little here and there, to keep his hand in.
And then Great-grandma passed on to her reward at the ripe old age of 101, and everything came apart. Seems the old family lawyer she and Great-grandpa had always relied upon for wills and suchlike hadn’t kept up with a changing world. The instruments that were supposed to protect the family farm didn’t, and suddenly everything had to be sold. Dad tried to arrange to buy everyone else out, but the bank wouldn’t clear him for a mortgage, even with Grandpa cosigning.
Grandpa always swore that the bank was in cahoots with the investment company that bought the farm and put their hired men on it. I still think that’s what killed him, even if the doctor wrote “heart attack” on his death certificate. We had to move and Dad had to take a town job, but he never really did well at it. Working to a clock was a struggle for him, and he never seemed to be able to laugh at the boss’s dumb jokes, so he’d start off good and then get let go after a year or two, and the cycle would start over again.
I’d pretty much resigned myself to spending my life working for someone else, jumping when told to jump and smiling like I enjoyed it. And then the Chongu showed up, with the news that this whole part of the galaxy was enmeshed in an existential war — and they wanted settlers for planets they needed to protect from an enemy that wants to annihilate our kind of sophonts, where everyone is an individual, not part of a hive.
I took one look at the packages they were offering for farmers and ranchers, and knew where I was going to sign up. I’ve spent the last year learning that, while it looks easy when you’re a kid watching from the sidelines, farming is really hard work — and farming on a brand-new world is doubly so, even with Chongu technology, including down-to-the-minute weather reports. We made some dumb mistakes because of the terrestrial assumptions we brought with us, and we lost some stuff as a result, but what we have is looking good.
Good enough to get us through to next year’s planting at least.
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