History

Being the 8th generation to grow up on the same farm, you are surrounded by the things that belonged to everyone who lived there before you.  Old farmhouses have lots of great hiding spots, too.  Above one of the doorways in the house I grew up in, there is a transom space where these journals were tucked away.  So much of my ancestors' daily lifestyle and language have been replaced by modern convenience and technology.  In only a few generations, we have become detached from our roots.  Children today don't even know how potatoes grow, or that a cow should eat grass and not corn.  One of my most favorite patients is a college professor, and, through no fault of his own, had no concept of what an heirloom tomato was.  (gasp!)  There is a wealth of knowledge in this country that is going to die with its oldest generation if we don't start harvesting it.  There are a couple of paragraphs in the introduction to the Foxfire Book that I think best capture my sentiment for this blog:

     "Daily our grandparents are moving out of our lives, taking with them, irreparably, the kind of information contained in this book.  They are taking it, not because they want to, but because they think we don't care.  And it isn't happening just in Appalachia.  I think, for example, of numerous Indian reservations, Black cultures near the southern coasts, Ozark mountain communities, and a hundred others.
     The big problem, of course, is that since these grandparents were primarily an oral civilization, information being passed through the generations by word of mouth and demonstration, little of it is written down.  When they're gone, the magnificent hunting tales, the ghost stories that kept a thousand children sleepless, the intricate tricks of self-sufficiency acquired through years of trial and error, the eloquent and haunting stories of suffering and sharing and building and healing and planting and harvesting- all these go with them, and what a loss." (Eliot Wigginton)

What a treasure I have found.