Market Farming

[Don Bowen <donb AT cts.com>]

At 09:07 PM 2/23/2000 , you wrote:

My mother was raised in a middle class home of the thirties in San Marino, 
California.  She grew up with electricity, indoor plumbing, Red Car rides 
to all that Pasadena had to offer, and a telephone.  My father grew up on a 
mixed dirt farm of the thirties in Kahoka, Missouri.  He grew up with 
kerosene lanterns,  outhouses, an occasional Saturday night trips to a 
town, and rural isolation.

They lived in Pasadena for a while then when my grandfather died, we moved 
to the farm.  It was a complete cultural shock to my mother.  She tried to 
bring a little culture by listening to the Met on Saturday mornings until 
the men came in and turned to the crop reports.  She picked up what books 
she could from the library but had little time to read.  Over the years she 
was the voice that got us electricity and indoor plumbing but she never 
overcame the isolation.

Her only consolation was her huge garden.  She loved to plant and help 
things grow but had to restrict it to food plants.  She hated all the 
preservation and daily hard work required of the farm.  She finally decided 
she had enough and went back to school to get her teaching 
credential.  With help from her father and a job teaching in one of 
Missouri's last one room schools, she divorced my father and went to 
Kirksvlle State Teachers College, then returned to California.

My father continued to pour the farm through a bottle and died in the early 
seventies during a lung cancer operation several years after losing the farm.

My mother is going strong at 81 years old and lives in Sunnyvale CA,  She 
still loves to garden but will not plant food crops, ornamentals only.  Now 
she is passing along the help she got by helping my son complete his 
studies at Berkeley.

Don Bowen                       donb AT cts.com
Valley Center, CA               Senior Software Engineer
Internet development and software engineering

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