[Artemisia] Uprising--do I need to pack the WeedWhacker?

[Brian Johnson]

S CLEMENGER <sclemenger at msn.com> wrote: 


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Allen Hall" 
To: "Kingdom of Artemisia mailing list" 
Sent: Thursday, June 12, 2008 1:53 PM
Subject: Re: [Artemisia] Uprising--do I need to pack the WeedWhacker?


> Hi Brynki,
>
> Oh yeah!  Those memories come back as well.  Especially when Roland and I
> hauled the 100 hay bales for Marcello's castle.  I hauled hay for summer
> money in high school.....
>
> Dad always said such things "build character"....  I tried passing that 
> line
> on to Roland...he didn't buy it any better than I did back then.
>
> See ya at Uprising!
>
> Alan

It must be a Dad thing...mine said that, as well.  Of course, he also said 
that about tree harvests, pruning, shearing, tending the tree nursery, 
hoeing (always hoeing), and shoveling grain during the barley harvest, which 
has got bucking bales all hollow for miserable, hot, dusty jobs!
(oh, and moving irrigation pipe...oy!)

--Maire "why yes, I AM a farm girl from Montana" NiNuanain 
Not trying to play one-up on ya but I think the WORST job I had for farm work was tobacco.  First came the tipping, cutting off the tops of the plants so that the lower leaves would bush out more.  The plants are so filled with juices that, when you did this, you got covered by a kind of sorghum-like sap/juice.  Since you were cutting up around head height, most of that ended up in your hair... down the front and back of your shirt... and if you decided not to wear a shirt, the juice traveled very well with sweat (Kentucky is about 90% relative humidity all summer long) and end up in your pants, too.  I can't complain TOO much, though, as I would hire out to local farmers to help with their harvests.  First tipping, then bottoming- breaking off the lowest leaves to prepare for... cutting, staking- you got a long kinda of jagged pole with a cone with a spike coming out of it and you smacking the stalk onto the pole and put, usually, 8 plants to a pole, followed a few drying
 days later by gathering and hanging the poles in a tobacco barn.  Tobacco barns are kind of weird in that all it is, pretty much, is a roof, walls, and lots of places to stretch out these heavily-laden poles to dry.  It was this final process, too, when we might take a couple of the driest leaves and make our own twists to chew later.

For most back-breaking, though, was a toss-up between picking peppers and cutting cabbage.  Both had their inherent dangers, peppers for touching them and then touching your eyes and cabbages for the long knives that had to be EXTREMELY sharp and then the little swing to separate cabbage from its roots or just walking around trying to juggle cabbages and carry this sharp-as-hell knife around.  Still, though, I guess it did build character for me.  Something I look around and see missing in today's youth.  Those jobs that kids like I was at that time are now being performed by illegal aliens as kids want to come straight out of high school and either start a "career" or work like that is just too good for them.  I'm hoping to have enough land that, when I have kids, I can allow them to experience the joys of going out to feed the animals at 4am in all weather conditions (and the animals eat before you do), mucking out stalls, putting up hay and straw, growing some of their
 own foods and taking pride in a job well done.  I hope, too, that my kids get a chance to remember those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer of going out and sitting around on a riverbank all day long with a fishing pole, not really as interested in catching anything as much as just being there, running around on the riverbanks with friends without a care in the world, swinging out into the river on a rope swing, swimming the day away when the fish aren't biting, and all the joys of "growing up" at a pace that isn't so demanding of today's society, that will allow them to maintain that child-like passion and wonder for the world around them and knowing that dreams can come true.

Brynki