Homestead mailing list

[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

Well, with a homestead full of rapidly maturing children, one of them will 
likely live here after we are gone.

These are some observations I have on this excellent question:

* When we age enough to not be able to do the majority of labor on this 
homestead ourselves, we plan to divest ourselves of possessions and live the 
life of the contemplative in very modest digs with very modest surroundings.  
That is, we plan for our personal lives to diminish naturally.  

"Better is the end of a thing than the beginning thereof, and the day of 
death to be longed for than the day of birth."

By this we hope to avoid an abrupt handing over of the reigns of the place.

*Times are changing and, says I, permanently.  For our lifetimes we've 
lived the paradigm that every generation goes off separately to seek its 
fortune 
and pretty damn early in life.  This, I am anticipating, is changing back 
to what it was before the industrial revolution as we know it.  Before "the 
almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be aburden, and desire 
shall fail ....or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be 
broken"   I expect to see the fragmentation of immediate families cease to be 
the norm.

*  We (our immediate family) have entered into a pact that we will all help 
each of the next generation set up on a homestead and/or set up in a 
business.  I mean a real business, a craft, a trade, something not dependent 
on 
someone else's whim.

--------------------------------------------

My grandparent's farmstead, most of it, found its way into the hands of a 
childless cousin who does not want to see the place pass out of the family or 
out of farming.  So she put the property in trust that anyone of the 
immediate family who will occupy the farm and tend it may live there free of 
cost 
forever and in each generation with provisions  for the occupants to pay the 
taxes and such.  This cousin's only siblilng, a sister, cannot occupy the 
farm and none of said sister's children are capable or interested in it.  So 
one of my sisters has moved there.  Such things can be done and can work, I 
am witnessing same even as we speak.


James