fresh from the hen house

My life feels as messy as our deteriorating road from all this rain. It’s smooth for a while, then there are all these ruts you’ve got to get through. Then, all of a sudden, it’s slick and sending you in directions you didn’t plan on going. And if you don’t keep going, you’re, well, more stuck than a goat with its head through the fence. Throwing mud routes in with all the other activities of the past couple weeks has been a little more juggling than I want to do, but we’re slowly sludging through it all.

As a mother, the most important job to me is raising my children. I believe it is far more difficult today to raise good, kind human beings because of what they are exposed to and the state of the world. You can’t control it all, but as a parent, I will control what I can and my kids have no choice on certain decisions.

Living out of town, it’s sometimes hard to arrange to have several of the kids’ friends over all at once. Even more challenging these days is working around everyone’s schedules. My oldest doesn’t ask for much for her birthday, or ever, so when she said a handful of her friends could actually come over Friday evening, I stopped, dropped everything else, and baked a whole slew of hamburger buns and a carrot cake. The schedules were free, but of course, the weather was wet, and wet weather makes it even harder to get anyone to our house. My husband got handed the job of picking up and dropping off, as no one’s parents needed to attempt our road, this wet year has done a number on it. He said both times he took our corner he heard the words “Tokyo drift” from one of the girls as the pickup uncontrollably slid its back end around the corner while he crept forward through the slick, deep mud.

We had some of my husband’s family and their children stay this past weekend. They live back where my husband is from, the city (this is where my husband corrects me and says “the suburbs, not city” and then I shake my head, as I think it’s all pretty much “the city”). So, we had two extra kids in our house around our own kids’ age, but from very different lives. We didn’t do anything special really, just shared our life with them.

A family that grows and picks sweet corn together is a family that grows much more than corn. For me, growing up was caring for and maintaining the family farm with my family. A family farm, much like sweet corn or even a garden, took time together, making precious memories, but that time together cultivated so many values. You learned that everything built or planted needed to be cared for, and that took working hard by everyone. Caring for what you have makes you responsible while also making you truly appreciate it all. Growing gratitude makes you appreciate having something to care for and for being able to care for it yourself. Being able to care for something yourself, you grow into a capable and dependable person. Working as a family made everything more achievable. There are always age-appropriate jobs. If you’re little, you’re still going to be sent to retrieve a water jug, if you’re older, you can handle a bucket of corn or sometimes in my case, rocks. Working side by side and, more often than not, sweating together, that builds deep family bonds, bonds that create roots. Those roots, they are a source of tradition. I love carrying on what my parents taught me with my own children.