Quote:
Originally Posted by Bookworm_Girl
gmw and Victoria, thanks for sharing your personal experiences! My grandparents had a small farm in the Eastern US where they raised pigs and cows which they sold for food purposes. We only visited annually in the summer, and I was mostly scared of the animals so I did not spend much time in the barns or pastures. I stayed inside the farm house with a book and being with my grandma in the kitchen. My brother, on the other hand, liked to follow my grandpa around outside. A missed opportunity that I now wish I had experienced more of the outdoor activities or could even remember more about those days.
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The trouble will be getting me to shut up about it.
(Like James Rebanks, I'm proud of my rural upbringing even if I didn't remain on the farm.)
I think we all have missed opportunities from our childhood. My father used to take us around the places where he grew up and tell us stories of what farming was like in those days, and what it was just being a kid in the country of those times ... and now he is gone and so are most of those stories. But I remember enough of them to recognise how different it was for me - which, perhaps unfairly, has me distrust claims of following too closely in the footsteps of our fathers. Times change and we change with them, even if we don't always see it in ourselves.
I said "perhaps unfairly" because one of the drivers of change where I grew up is in trying to make a living from the farm. But if you're farming in a protected enclave then I suppose it may be possible to retain more of the past in what you do. But even then, change never really stops, and we see that quite clearly revealed in this book.