Wednesday, January 26, 2011

For Seth: The Future Farmer (?)

Almost as far back as I can remember Seth being able to talk that he told us he wanted to be a farmer when he grew up.

Today Seth would tell you that when he grows up he would like to be a photographer, paleontologists, an artist, and book illustrator these would all help Seth work with dinosaurs and make a dinosaur book. Seth still also wants to be a missionary, a detective, and a farmer.

Here is a quote that made me think that it would be great if he did one day become a farmer at least like the kind quoted.

“Not so long ago the farmer and his wife were the most diverse and inventive people that walked the planet. They had to ‘know more about more things than anyone in another profession.’ The farmer had to be a botanist, biologist, carpenter, mechanic, veterinarian and mid-wife, weather-forecaster, and tireless digger of the soil. The farm wife was, as often as not, a horticulturist, animal handler, culinary wizard, food-preserving expert, accountant, and confessor, who say with endless patience and heard her husband’s woes. And they both had to have the calm of a philosopher and the patience of a saint to survive all the adversities man and God heaped on them. Almost as important, they had to be first class human beings and even better friends, for on farms of old everyone needed the help of his neighbor to survive. And most farmers were all that and more. As Louis Bromfeld wrote in the late 1930s, ‘For companionship, good conversation, intelligence and the power of stimulating one’s mind, there are none I would place above a good farmer.’ “
A Reasonable Life by Ferenc Mate