RECAPPING SUMMER - wondering what a farmer's life would be like

Since a few months I've been learning more and more about organic and local buying, vegan and self-sustaining lifestyle. And it had became a bigger and bigger part of my life since then. I found that I want it to be one of my goals as a future-mother to teach my children the importance of sustainable living. I want to base the teaching about nature on the principles of environmental education. 

And I figured the best way to get in touch with those principles in actual practice would be to spend a week at my grandparents farm.

As a child I loved building dams in the nearby creek with my sister, playing hide and seek in the garden between and behind those old oaks and willows, riding on my uncles tractor up to a sunfloded open field on a hill and having a huge bonfire.

I was almost addicted to the smell of those juicy tomatoes. 

Other than some cute baby kittens each year my grandparents never got any other animals since they retired. Everytime we would visit my grandma would make us one of her famous apple strudels - seriousely the best - or black elder pudding. 

Everything from scratch.

That week I wanted to learn as much as possible from them. I wanted to spend time with them talking about the old days. And since they are still able to manage to keep a pretty big farm house relatively clean I wanted to help them with their daily chores too.

And what can I say? - it was wonderful.

One time my grandpa and I were sitting in the kitchen and he started to talk about his 2nd world war experiences - out of the blue. I figured he had to get it off of his chest in order to process his memories and feelings. Back then he was just a little kid.

Did you know that all the farmer's in their neighborhood would hurry to get to a jet wreck in time before any other person gets to have that useless junk - to us nowadays anyway - lying around. Did you know that old men would pound the narrow alleys with their horse-drawn carts full of old rusty nails, wood planks and whatnot. People would downright pry that junk out of those mens hands.

This is so important to me. It's part of his story and in a way it's part of my story too. I want to learn from that. I want other people to learn from that. I have to remember this. And this is why I am so grateful that my grandpa really opened up to me and trusted me to tell me his feelings. I don't want to forget any of this. There might be people who just used to roll their eyes at someone telling those stories over and over again. But I won't. It's onto me to tell those stories to my children and my grandchildren.

I'm not sure how to sign off of this post. There are more stories to tell about that week. Stories about cooking and planting and painting. But more about that next week.