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market-farming - Re: [Market-farming] Child Farmers

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  • From: "Del Williams" <delannw AT dlogue.net>
  • To: "Market Farming" <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Market-farming] Child Farmers
  • Date: Fri, 7 Mar 2003 13:25:52 -0600

mm I forget the ages of your kids.

Worry not, they will find found a passion for their own lives.

What if your sons wanted to be photographers, journalists, artists,
musicians? Politicians? We hope we have brought them up well.

Would you pull them in from putting their youth into pursuing where their
yearnings let them find promise?

If it's fun to them now, if it is what makes their hearts wake up in the
morning and get out of bed to do... then encourage them on to it. Get your
ass out of bed.... which you surely do.... and work along side them... and
let them do what they do without your adult and perhaps, paternal help
without the asking.... thank you very much! Nah, let's thank THEM very
much. for having a dream.

Let's hope they never view it as drudgery or simple obligation to do what
might throw their souls into the garbage bin of dreams.

I guess this comes from a night at the local rural and very small high
school my daughter attends. A night where the musicians whose parents paid
for those instruments encouraged their children to be musicians. And the
singers whose voices were inherited from the voices of their good parents
who don't sing with that clarity anymore but still know and love the tune.

Oh and us parents who did what we could do with our presence and support.
Who made banners, who participated in fundraisers, who bought those
instruments and arranged those lessons. Who said, your dream is my dream.

Oh and from farmers who hope that their children... some of them... love the
soil and the levity of watching those crops rise in the spring... those
lambs born... those chickens laying... those calves breathing.. those nasty
little trouble finding goats seeking.. those plants producing good food for
good people. They love that challenge and that promise for a good life to
their own specifications.

We have spoiled them into a rural paradise. A paradise not so many know to
aspire to.

My daughter won't touch a tomato hormworm but she plays the clarinet like
Benny Goodman. She loves our heirloom tomato and lettuce salads as much as
she loves to take pictures of my gardens. She loves to capture our flowers
and animals in a way I never see them until I see her photos.

She told me last weekend, when I took her to the Chicago Institute of Art...
all that downtown stuff and all of that variety... I would like to live in a
city once to know what it is like... but I think I will want to go back to
the country because that is where life is. How am I ever going to find
that?

I told her, in the same way I did. Follow your instincts and follow your
dreams. But comprehend the world first and figure out where you want to fit
into it.

She is a magnificent person. I'd wish anyone to have a child like that. Or
any of her counterparts who wish to stay on the farm and work their lives
that way. Or write for the local paper and be smart about it... and true to
their profession. Or to go to the ag college and discover horticulture,
prose, history, computers, advertising, music, rhetoric... isn't that rich?

Our children know where they have been and having been brought up where they
are... they see an entire range of possibilities because we might have made
it so.

Even if we weren't the point of it.

Del Williams
Farmer in the Del
Clifton, IL







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