Farmer Boy

I was reading my book in my room when I started thinking. Once I started thinking I realized that though I was reading through all the words I wasn't thinking about them anymore, and then I gave up reading and lay down and thought so much that I ended up falling asleep. I didn't plan to fall asleep and I didn't notice that I had slept until Mother woke me up to go eat Father's homemade Indian food. But that's another story. My story is just about all the thinking.

I started thinking about how much I would enjoy having a farm of my own when I grow up. I could have a big solar greenhouse that I would grow food in all through the year. I'd have a chicken coop in the greenhouse and rabbit pens and the body heat of the chickens and rabbits would help heat the greenhouse and I would harvest eggs and meat from the chickens and fur from the rabbits. It would be modeled after the greenhouse of my youth. It's weird to think that the greenhouse of my youth doesn't exist in real life anymore. Our old farm lady friend couldn't manage it anymore and couldn't stand to see it operating in shambles under the control of other people, so she sold the land and now a huge mansion is in its place. I could bring it back, though, if I had some land of my own. I could take all the lessons that I learned growing up with that solar powered super sustainable farm and combine then with everything I learn in farm class and make something that actually works.

I really think I could do it. Our old farm lady friend has so much stuff figured out and I know she would be excited to coach me through making my own farm. All she wants is for somebody young and spirited to make all her ideas happen. I could do that. She has so much information online about how to make a sustainable farm work, and she always says that her farm plans can make $500,000 per year. I don't know if that is true in practice, but I could do that!

I would have a little pond on my farm with ducks and turtles. I could eat the duck eggs and turtles are just cool. I would have a bunch of sheep and a big field for them but instead of letting them graze wherever they want in the field I would make a little collapsible sheep pen and only let them eat in certain areas. That way I would make sure they weren't princesses about the grass. I would help with the lambing in the spring and then there would be lambs in my life. I would milk my dairy cows and learn how to make my own cheese. I could get into beekeeping and have fresh honey and bees to pollinate all my plants. Maybe I'd have an apple orchard and blueberry bushes. And of course there would be all of the vegetables growing in the greenhouse and in the fields in the summertime.

It would be a lot of hard work but it would be my life so I would have all day to do it. I wouldn't have to be shut inside. I would live every day taking care of my plants and my animals and helping them grow. My hands would get rough from all the digging in the soil and it would take a lot of physical effort but I would get strong. I'd have to wake up with the sunrise and go to sleep early, but it wouldn't matter because that would just be me synchronizing to the sleep schedule of a farm, which is the same as the sleep schedule of the sun. I could live like that.

When I had my one farm child I would have to cut back a bunch from all the long working hours, but maybe by then I would have a few farmhands to help and then in a few years when the farm child was old enough I could go back to working as usual. And the kid would get to grow up with so many farm animals as pets and learn about life from the farm perspective and always have dirty feet and fingernails. I think that would be a great way to raise a child.

When Father was falling in love with Mother she was living on the farm lady friend's farm before the farm lady friend was the old farm lady friend. Father called the farm the Goddess's garden. Mother has her garden now, and it's a pretty nice garden, but she very much is not living in a shack just big enough for a bed on an organic farm. I thought about how that was sad, and then I realized that Father is still doing soul healing and traveling the world and trying to make a life from what he is passionate about even though it doesn't really make money or sense from the normal perspective. So I guess I don't mind that he doesn't have a real job, since new clothes and jewelery and objects are all unnecessary, and I just think I want to buy them sometimes since all the industries have so much power that they've wormed their way into my consciousness. And if all my current clothes continue to fall apart until they rip to shreds, I can just sew new ones because who needs fashion anyway. Or I could just be a naked farm girl. Worse things have happened.

So I think in conclusion screw the establishment I want to be a farmer.