Dairy Farmers
My family were dairy farmers,
the men up before dawn to do the milking,
the wives collecting eggs from the chicken coop,
firing up the wood stove, boiling water
for tea and for washing kids' faces,
frying eggs, buttering bread, sending
the brood off to walk two miles to school.
My family had little acreage,
were poor, struggled to survive,
but kept their bargain with the local co-op,
always the requisite number of
filled-to-the-brim milk cans,
and no meals missed, no school days forfeited,
no clothes unwashed, no rooms that
didn't see a broom on a daily basis.
My family lived by routine,
even allowing for the good and bad
that interfered: occasional sickness, church picnic,
machinery failure, Saturday night dance.
They stuck it out in the Depression.
And those that could went to war.
So the ones who stayed did double on the home front.
My family were this great block of time and people,
this ancestry, this history, were as persistent
and consistent as days and nights, rain and clear,
hot weather and cool, like the one unvarying
piece of the puzzle as to who I am at this very moment.
But it couldn't hold. It cracked a little when
the soldiers came home. And crumbled when
small farms couldn't pay and city jobs offered more.
My family were dairy farmers until,
little by little, they no longer were.
Some joined the railway. Others kept on in the military.
A few went into teaching. A couple fixed cars.
Many became shorthand-typists and bank clerks.
For every one that truly prospered, there were four
or five for whom their world hadn't changed much.
They worked hard and for modest wages. Only now,
they no longer owned the ground beneath their feet.
My family now spread afar, no longer lived
close to brothers, sisters, cousins, in a series of
small farming towns. They wrote to each other
occasionally. But, soon enough, the letters stopped.
Only for weddings and funerals was the attempt made
to get the various threads together. Some came.
Some didn't. And children were born who had
no inkling of the life their parents led. It was all just
exaggerated stories of hardships. The young ones
laughed more than they sympathized.
Yet, my family has allowed for the child, and even
the child of the child, to be unknowing of the blood
their veins bear, to go about their lives as if they
were born into a world with present, future, but no
worthwhile past. Part of dying is forgiving those
who come after you for their ignorance, their ingratitude.
And part of living is to be ignorant, ungrateful,
and yet to sometimes sit back with a photograph,
a letter, or even a remembered conversation from
an old timer, and say to yourself, my family were dairy farmers.
Know them or not, that's where I got me from.
