Return To The Farm

In retrospect, it all seems so silly. It was what we were used to and all that, and I had other feelings about it even then that I should have acted on, and I'm sorry now that I didn't. In fact I did, up to a point. Further than most others, I'd say. But Simon was in a class of his own, and now it seems weird, and silly, but weird as well.

The whole thing seemed unreal. Sort of as though it wasn't happening. Couldn't really be happening. This is not the way things happened. Yet one just got carried along, by the circumstances. The farm was still there. three hundred and more miles away, but still ours. Still as it was. Not really at all as it was, of course.

But the house, the cattle, the windmill by the old house, up by the fowl runs, that creaked at night when the wind changed and the wheel swung slowly to face it. But somehow, everything was different. Circumstances so changed. Everything different. It was the difference that loomed like a poisonous fog in our lives.

We had moved. Can't recall the stay properly any more, but we had taken jobs in a city three hundred miles away. Sally was a teacher, a good one, a teacher who got things done, got results, even when it caused a ripple or three among some of the other members of staff. But we seem to have drifted from one place to another, from what might have seemed fortuitous circumstances to fortuitous circumstance. Being a praying family, we called it being led by the Lord. Nor have I changed my mind about that. Little driblets of memory and anecdote come through now and then in casual conversation, from the older four of our six children, the ones who were left behind when we came overseas, that through new light on unexpected angles that I was not aware of at the time - or didn't attach as much importance to as I should have. We just reacted to circumstances as they arose, made the decisions that seemed best.

Even with the rationality of hindsight, one wonders how it could have been done differently. So at this particular juncture I tendered my resignation, and we set ourselves to go back to the farm.

Mini Farming: Self-Sufficiency on 1/4 Acre