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A quote: “As a farm girl, even when I was quite young, I had my ‘farm chores’ – but I had time also to be alone, to explore the fields, woods and creek side. And to read.” ~~ Joyce Carol Oates
I’ll start with a story …
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It was life stripped to essentials. You did, or it didn’t get done. And out of the simplicity …
… let’s start with the basics. We need to eat. So the ritual around a basic survival function becomes something more than just the simple act of preparing food … cleaning, chopping, seasoning, all manner of cooking … can be calming alone or reassuring when shared.
In the hurry to do Important Things or experience The New we lost that somewhere.
I know our daughter had a tough time when we chose to leave The City. I knew she wouldn’t understand what we saw and how much we feared for her.
There was a lot of silent resentment as I pushed her into chores. Things I used to have the luxury to ignore in The City and not realizing the harm it was creating.
Now we may start talking about what seasoning to use on the eggs she has gathered from the coop but it evolves into sharing what we liked doing or planning what we might do differently next spring.
Washing dishes becomes a ritual of sharing dreams or goals over sudsy water. It might not be sexy or modern, but the laughter and love over making things right will continue with her own children.
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Now, it’s your turn.
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.featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license
Cameron says: My daughter is a classic tomboy; short hair, rarely wears dresses, all the usual signs. Honestly, it never bothered my wife or myself. Just as long as she was healthy. She was a bit annoyed that we moved out to the farm and put her in a homeschool group but she got over it.
She’s helping my wife clean the dishes and they’re having the kind of conversation that a husband and father doesn’t need to listen in on. And she’s actually laughing at something my wife is saying.
Let her grow up a happy woman. That was our approach. The school board in our last town disagreed. She was “born in the wrong body” and they demanded that she change her name and worse. We fought and they threatened to take her from me.
The school board had no idea about the kind of evidence I had on them. I released it all without warning and it had been so horrid that the cops didn’t bother investigating the “mob justice” inflicted on them.
You can question the morality of my actions. My only answer is that she’s safe from the monsters because her father is an even worse one.
When my folks first heard about the Kitties’ settlement program, they immediately signed right on. This was right after Grandma introduced me to the Little House books, and while they were interesting from a historical perspective, I wasn’t exactly excited about a hard-scrabble life on a frontier planet, living in a log cabin and doing everything with animal power. I like warm houses, running water, and modern medicine, thank you very much.
I guess I shouldn’t have worried too much. The Kitties don’t want worlds full of peasant farmers with wooden plows, but strong worlds that can hold their own in the light-years-long picket line against an enemy who believes that intelligent species of individuals are an abomination to be exterminated. So of course the Kitties made sure we’d have the basics of powered machinery to grow both food and fodder crops, as well as livestock to eat the fodder, and decent houses, barns and machine sheds to protect ourselves, our livestock, and our machinery.
Over the next several years, I discovered another reason why the Kitties were so generous with their technology. These worlds out here may have shirtsleeve environments where we don’t need spacesuits and pressurized habitats, but none of them are nearly so well adapted to our thriving as the Earth we left behind. If the Kitties had left us to regress to pre-Industrial farming technologies, our settlements would probably die out in a few generations.
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