I hope you will forgive me. I am going out of town but I wanted to leave you with a few agrarian thoughts.

Since we are getting ready to move I am going through thangs. It takes a very long time to pack photo albums but I am sure y’all will be glad when they are all safely boxed.

While I call myself the philosophical agrarian there was a time when my agrarian bonafides were far from philosophical.

For example, there was a day when Tim and I thought buying this place was a good idea. Nothing at all philosophical about that. A good course in logic would have come in handy.

Perhaps it was the panoramic view:

Or maybe the plumbing…….

Here is the Cheese House (below), possibly one of the oldest standing homes in Cumberland County, NJ. The windows are wood slats to let air in during the cheese making process. We had our first Thanksgiving at the farm in the cheese house with quilts on the walls, a wood cooking stove and herbs from my massive garden hanging from the pegged beams. At one time it had a brick fireplace the size of one wall. The boys made their bedroom in the loft one winter because it was fun to wake up with snow on the blankets.

There is a reason people in the olden days didn’t have plumbing. Can you guess? Well, plumbing freezes without heat and it isn’t too easy to keep a structure like this warm in the winter. You could use up enough electricity to light a small city or you could burn wood in the charming wood stove. If you choose not to pay the electric company $7,000,000,000 then you must commit your life and your future to chopping wood, splitting wood, hauling wood, sweeping up after wood and manning the stove to make sure it doesn’t run out of wood. You better make sure you have a lot of boys. I did.

You must try to be patient with your friend, in the brand new home, who lets her children roller skate on her new wood floors so that they will look like yours.

I always say it is entirely possible that George Washington might have slept there (when he was a baby). Or even Perhaps his great grandmother slept there.

You don’t need to learn Latin when you live in this sort of house. You are too busy ordering your mind on how to get through the day without freezing or meeting a creature of some sort in the hall….bats (my husband met them head on with a tennis racket. It took all night), moles (I caught one on a mouse trap…in the house), snakes ( See Linda’s comment. We caught it when it dropped into the washing machine), rats ( those of whom we don’t speak), mice (let them eat cake) and kittens we didn’t know existed (brand-new in the underwear drawer).

When you live in this sort of house you aren’t a philosophical agrarian, you either become a stoic (somebody shoot me), an epicurean( dreaming of wall-to-wall carpet & central air) or a hyper-Calvinist (me waving madly).

(Next picture: a bona fide picture of me with Charlotte Mason ;) )

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