Farm Wife Quotes

Are you afraid?" Volker questioned while sitting at the table and getting comfortable. "No. But I have incredible luck with dice and I am ruthless. You will lose, gentlemen. I will destroy your lands, take your women, ravish your men, and make your children my slave labor. I will own every castle, house, and farm that is within my reach. I won't be satisfied until I own all of it and you. I will destroy you all, gentlemen, and, to be quite blunt, I don't think you can handle it." Van covered his mouth to keep from laughing out loud and he didn't dare look at his sister. Verner stepped back, motioning to the table. "Now I must insist." "As you wish." Irene sighed and stood. She glanced at Van and gave him a quick wink before turning back to his uncle. "I do hope you're a 'sobber,' Mr. Van Holtz. Nothing I love more than the lamenting of the men I annihilate." "I can't believe you made him cry." "I did not. He just teared up a little." "Yeah. I think it was when you told him, 'I now control your ports and own your manhood.'" "His wife laughed.

I am not alone in this. I only let him do to me what men have ever done to women: march off to empty glory and hollow acclaim and leave us behind to pick up the pieces. The broken cities, the burned barns, the innocent injured beasts, the ruined bodies of the boys we bore and the men we lay with. The waste of it. I sit here, and I look at him, and it is as if a hundred women sit beside me: the revolutionary farm wife, the English peasant woman, the Spartan mother-'Come back with your shield or on it,' she cried, because that was what she was expected to cry. And then she leaned across the broken body of her son and the words turned to dust in her throat.

A farm is an irregular patch of nettles bounded by short-term notes, containing a fool and his wife who didn’t know enough to stay in the city.

You failed me. His brother’s voice, louder than ever in his head. You let him dupe you all over again. Kaz had called Jesper by his brother’s name. A bad slip. But maybe he’d wanted to punish them both. Kaz was older now than Jordie had been when he’d succumbed to the Queen’s Lady Plague. Now he could look back and see his brother’s pride, his hunger for fast success. You failed me, Jordie. You were older. You were supposed to be the smart one. He thought of Inej asking, Was there no one to protect you? He remembered Jordie seated beside him on a bridge, smiling and alive, the reflection of their feet in the water beneath them, the warmth of a cup of hot chocolate cradled in his mittened hands. We were supposed to look out for each other. They’d been two farm boys, missing their father, lost in this city. That was how Pekka got them. It wasn’t just the enticement of money. He’d given them a new home. A fake wife who made them hutspot, a fake daughter for Kaz to play with. Pekka Rollins had lured them with a warm fire and the promise of the life they’d lost. And that was what destroyed you in the end: the longing for something you could never have.

On the three pigs he and his wife own: "We acquired the pigs last year. My wife was born on a pig farm and has always been very fond of pigs. Of course, they are for eating, which is why they are named Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner. You wouldn’t want to eat Rufus, Marcus and Esmeralda.

There were so many things Rosanna could have been besides a farm wife, she thought. But it was not a source of regret—it was a source of pride.

But farm workers kill animals because they can support their families by doing so, whereas we order the killing for reasons that have never been more frivolous, now that meat is no longer considered necessary for one's health, and soy products can replicate to an uncanny degree the experience of eating it. I know, "It's just not the same" — but as with the child molester, who probably thinks those very words when he rolls off his wife, the nonviolent pleasure is surely close enough to the violent one to make an insistence on the latter even more monstrous. Has any generation in history ever been so ready to cause so much suffering for such a trivial advantage? We deaden our consciences to enjoy—for a few minutes a day—the taste of blood, the feel of our teeth meeting through muscle. It's enough, as Balzac would say, to disgust a sow.

Hannibal. I’m looking for the Graham farm.” “The breeder?” he asked. “What do you mean?” “Graham’s a breeder. He breeds slaves and sells them.” “My wife and daughter were taken there.” The man was silent.

Now I would solicit the particular attention of those numerous people who imagine that money is everything in this world, and that rank and ability are inseparable from wealth: let them observe that Cincinnatus, the one man in whom Rome reposed all her hope of survival, was at that moment working a little three-acre farm (now known as Quinctian meadows) west of the Tiber, just opposite the spot where the shipyards are today. A mission from the city found him at work on his land - digging a ditch, maybe, or ploughing. Greetings were exchanged, and he was asked - with a prayer for God's blessing on himself and his country - to put on his toga and hear the Senate's instructions. This naturally surprised him, and, asking if all were well, he told his wife Racilia to run to their cottage and fetch his toga. The toga was brought, and wiping the grimy sweat from his hands and face he put it on; at once the envoys from the city saluted him, with congratulations, as Dictator, invited him to enter Rome, and informed him of the terrible danger of Minucius's army.

Why Brownlee left, and where he went, Is a mystery even now. For if a man should have been content It was him; two acres of barley, One of potatoes, four bullocks, A milker, a slated farmhouse. He was last seen going out to plough On a March morning, bright and early. By noon Brownlee was famous; They had found all abandoned, with The last rig unbroken, his pair of black Horses, like man and wife, Shifting their weight from foot to Foot, and gazing into the future.

I can't explain the birds to you even if I tried. In the early morning, when the sun's rays peek over the mountain and subtly light up the landscape in a glow that, if audible, would sound like a hum, the birds sing. They sing in a layered symphony, hundreds deep. You really can't believe how beautiful it is. You hear bass notes from across the farm and soprano notes from the tree in front of you all at once, at varying volumes, like a massive choir that stretches across fifty acres of land. I love birds. But not as much as my wife loves them. My wife thinks about them, whereas I only notice them once they call for attention. But she looks for them, builds fountains for them, and saves them after they crash into windows. I've seen her save many birds. She holds them gently in the palm of her hand, and she takes them to one of the fountains she's built especially for them and holds their beaks up to the gentle trickle of water to let them drink, to wake them up from their dazed stupor. No matter how much time it takes, she doesn't leave them until they recover. And they mostly always do.

Everyone knew that Jim's creative coup d'etat came from a suggestion from his great-uncle Max, who lived on a farm in Iowa. According to Jim [Jackers], his uncle had Mexicans running the farm while his days were spent in the farmhouse basement reconstructing a real train car from scratch, which was the only thing he had shown any interest in since the passing of his wife. He traveled to old train yards collecting the parts. When someone asked him at a family function why we was doing it, his answer was so that no one could remove the train car from the basement after he died. When it was pointed out to him that the boxcar could be removed by dismantling it, reversing the process by which he had constructed it, Jim's great uncle replied that no Jackers alive was willing to work that hard at anything.

I see a time when the farmer will not need to live in a lonely cabin on a lonely farm. I see the farmers coming together in groups. I see them with time to read, and time to visit with their fellows. I see them enjoying lectures in beautiful halls, erected in every village. I see them gather like the Saxons of old upon the green at evening to sing and dance. I see cities rising near them with schools, and churches, and concert halls, and theaters. I see a day when the farmer will no longer be a drudge and his wife a bond slave, but happy men and women who will go singing to their pleasant tasks upon their fruitful farms. When the boys and girls will not go west nor to the city; when life will be worth living. In that day the moon will be brighter and the stars more glad, and pleasure and poetry and love of life come back to the man who tills the soil.

In the agricultural age, women conceived younger and had many more children because children were economic assets as workers on the farm. In the postindustrial age, children are emotional assets but economic liabilities, costing both a middle-class husband and wife or a single parent over $10,000 a year.

We're so lucky to have family like we do." "We are. And maybe we can even add to it." Leaning back, I looked at him in surprise. "Did I hear that right?" He shrugged. "I figure I'm not that old. Might be fun to give the girls a little brother." "Or sister." He paused. "Um ... a house with four girls in it?" Giggling, I kissed his lips. "Five. Don't forget your wife." He sighed. "We're going to need more space. And I'm going to need a bigger swear jar.

My plans for the future are to serve more and better, to worry less about the things that are unimportant, to let my wife and children know how much I love them, to openly support whatever I can see is good, to appreciate and to encourage everyone in the best way possible, and, in short, to do more of what makes life meaningful.

There is nothing like a knowledge of farming and an acquaintance with the habits of domestic animals to teach a man how to manage his wife.

Gin supposed, considering how umptious his first wife Chantel was, anything short of a farm animal would be an improvement.

There is nothing like a knowledge of farming, and an acquaintance with the habits of domestic animals, to teach a man how to manage his wife.

Let the glory of the empire goes to the crow. Just want to retire after twenty-five years of brawl. Give me a small farm in the wilderness to live. Keep me alive. I return to a lovely wife-to-be.

There was a fellow I stayed with once in Warwickshire who farmed his own land, but was otherwise quite steady.  Should never have suspected him of having a soul, yet not very long afterwards he eloped with a lion-tamer's widow and set up as a golf-instructor somewhere on the Persian Gulf; dreadfully immoral, of course, because he was only an indifferent player, but still, it showed imagination.  His wife was really to be pitied, because he had been the only person in the house who understood how to manage the cook's temper, and now she has to put "D.V." on her dinner invitations. 

Eragon—a fifteen-year-old farmboy—is shocked when a polished blue stone appears before him in the range of mountains known as the Spine. Eragon takes the stone to the farm where he lives with his uncle, Garrow, and his cousin, Roran. Garrow and his late wife, Marian, have raised Eragon. Nothing is known of his father; his mother, Selena, was Garrow’s sister and has not been seen since Eragon’s birth.

He had told Flora all about his slim, expensive mistress, Lily, who made boring scenes and took up the time and energy which he would much sooner have spent with his wife, but he had to have Lily, because in Beverly Hills, if you did not have a mistress, people thought you were rather queer, and if, on the other hand, you spent all your time with your wife, and were quite firm about it, and said that you liked your wife, and, anyway, why the hell shouldn’t you, the papers came out with repulsive articles headed ‘Hollywood Czar’s Domestic Bliss’, and you had to supply them with pictures of your wife pouring your morning chocolate and watering the ferns. So there was no way out of it, Mr Neck said. Anyway, his wife quite understood, and they played a game called ‘Dodging Lily’, which gave them yet another interest in common.

Beyond that was a small orchard, its trees appearing to hold the first signs of apples. Cherry blossoms bloomed in the May warmth, forming neat columns of shady pathways. The manicured grass, so unlike the wild fields of the farm, was intersected by meandering pebbled walkways, where her ladies must tread when receiving finely dressed visitors. Birdsong pierced the blue sky, as did the aroma of fresh-petaled flowers.

Merton. Gethsemani required a vow of silence, and at dinner if you wanted salt, you had to stare hard at the shaker until another brother noticed. One day, cutting down a tree, Jack couldn’t contain himself. He held his head back and roared, “Timber.” After that, his days at the monastery were numbered. Within a couple of years, he had married, and he and his young wife, Fran, who herself had just spent a year in a nunnery, opened a Catholic Worker farm in eastern Missouri for recovering alcoholics.

The inn was an old stone-built rambling comfortable sort of place. There was a terrace above the river, where peacocks (one called Norman and the other called Barry) stalked among the drinkers, helping themselves to snacks without the slightest hesitation and occasionally lifting their heads to utter ferocious and meaningless screams. There was a saloon bar where the gentry, if college scholars count as gentry, took their ale and smoked their pipes; there was a public bar where watermen and farm labourers sat by the fire or played darts, or stood at the bar gossiping, or arguing, or simply getting quietly drunk; there was a kitchen where the landlord’s wife cooked a great joint every day, with a complicated arrangement of wheels and chains turning a spit over an open fire; and there was a potboy called Malcolm Polstead.

Close behind us were our friends: Tjaden, a skinny locksmith of our own age, the biggest eater of the company. He sits down to eat as thin as a grasshopper and gets up as big as a bug in the family way; Haie Westhus, of the same age, a peat-digger, who can easily hold a ration-loaf in his hand and say: Guess what I've got in my fist; then Detering, a peasant, who thinks of nothing but his farm-yard and his wife; and finally Stanislaus Katczinsky, the leader of our group, shrewd, cunning, and hard-bitten, forty years of age, with a face of the soil, blue eyes, bent shoulders, and a remarkable nose for dirty weather, good food, and soft jobs.

Hungry?” he asks. “The wager?” I remind him. “I’m getting there—it’s related to my question.” He lifts his chin to the meat locker. “They have good steaks here.” And just like that, I’m interested in whatever he’s suggesting. “They do. What’re you thinking?” “They have a porterhouse for two, three, or four.” I haven’t eaten in nearly twenty-four hours, and the idea of a big juicy steak has me salivating. “Yeah?” “So, I say we split the one for three, and whoever eats more wins.” “I’m going to guess their porterhouse for three could feed us both for a week.” “I’m betting you’re right.” His adorable grin should be accompanied by the sound of a silvery ding. “And your dinner is on me.” For not the first time, it occurs to me to ask him how he makes ends meet, but I can’t—not here, and maybe not when we’re alone, either. “You don’t have to do that.” “I think I can handle treating my wife to dinner on our wedding night.” Our wedding night. My heart thuds heavily. “That’s a lot of meat. No pun intended.” He grins enthusiastically. “I’d sure like to see how you handle it.” “You’re betting Holland can’t finish a steak?” Lulu chimes in from behind me. “Oh, you sweet summer child.” *** As we get up, I groan, clutching my stomach. “Is this what pregnancy feels like? Not interested.” “I could carry you,” Calvin offers sweetly, helping me with my coat. Lulu pushes between us, giddy from wine as she throws her arms around our shoulders. “You’re supposed to carry the bride across the threshold to be romantic, not because she’s broken from eating her weight in beef.” I stifle a belch. “The way to impress a man is to show him how much meat you can handle, don’t you know this, Lu?” Calvin laughs. “It was a close battle.” “Not that close,” Mark says, beside him. We went so far as to have the waiter split the cooked steak into two equal portions, much to the amused fascination of our tablemates. I ate roughly three-quarters of mine. Calvin was two ounces short. “Calvin Bakker has a pretty solid ring to it,” I say. He laugh-groans. “What did I get myself into?” “A marriage to a farm girl,” I say. “It’s best you learn on day one that I take my eating very seriously.

His wife, Electra, was a capable helpmeet, although—like himself— a dreamer of dreams and a private dabbler in romance. The first thing she did, after her marriage—child as she was, aged only nineteen— was to buy an acre of ground on the edge of the town, and pay down the cash for it—twenty-five dollars, all her fortune. Saladin had less, by fifteen. She instituted a vegetable garden there, got it farmed on shares by the nearest neighbor, and made it pay her a hundred per cent. a year. Out of Saladin's first year's wage she put thirty dollars in the savings-bank, sixty out of his second, a hundred out of his third, a hundred and fifty out of his fourth. His wage went to eight hundred a year, then, and meantime two children had arrived and increased the expenses, but she banked two hundred a year from the salary, nevertheless, thenceforth. When she had been married seven years she built and furnished a pretty and comfortable two-thousand-dollar house in the midst of her garden-acre, paid half of the money down and moved her family in. Seven years later she was out of debt and had several hundred dollars out earning its living.

Odysseus’s travels involve such a terrific set of adventures that I tend to forget how much of the book is actually about his wife and son—what goes on at home while he’s traveling, how his son goes looking for him, and all the complications of his homecoming. One of the things I love about The Lord of the Rings is Tolkien’s understanding of the importance of what goes on back on the farm while the Hero is taking his Thousand Faces all round the world. But till you get back there with Frodo and the others, Tolkien never takes you back home. Homer does. All through the ten-year voyage, the reader is alternately Odysseus trying desperately to get to Penelope and Penelope desperately waiting for Odysseus—both the voyager and the goal—a tremendous piece of narrative time-and-place interweaving.

I see a time when the farmer will not need to live in a cabin on a lonely farm. I see the farmers coming together in groups. I see them with the time to read, and time to visit with their fellows. I see them enjoying lectures in beautiful halls, erected in every village. I see them gather like Saxons of old upon the green at evening to sing and dance. I see cities rising near them with schools, and churches, and concert halls and theaters. I see a day when the farmer will no longer be a drudge and his wife a bond slave, but happy men and women who will go singing to their pleasant tasks upon their fruitful farms. When the boys and girls will not go west nor to the city; when life will be worth living. In that day the moon will be brighter and the stars more glad, and pleasure and poetry and love of life come back to the man who tills the soil.

This, I found myself thinking in the years that followed, on nights when my wife and I played the violin together, when we cooked together, when we walked in our fields watching the movements of the farm robots, when we sat on the porch watching the airships rise up like fireflies on the horizon over Oklahoma City, this is what the Time Institute never understood: if definitive proof emerges that we're living in a simulation, the correct response to that news will be

In the campaign of 1876, Robert G. Ingersoll came to Madison to speak. I had heard of him for years; when I was a boy on the farm a relative of ours had testified in a case in which Ingersoll had appeared as an attorney and he had told the glowing stories of the plea that Ingersoll had made. Then, in the spring of 1876, Ingersoll delivered the Memorial Day address at Indianapolis. It was widely published shortly after it was delivered and it startled and enthralled the whole country. I remember that it was printed on a poster as large as a door and hung in the post-office at Madison. I can scarcely convey now, or even understand, the emotional effect the reading of it produced upon me. Oblivious of my surroundings, I read it with tears streaming down my face. It began, I remember: "The past rises before me like a dream. Again we are in the great struggle for national life.We hear the sounds of preparation--the music of boisterous drums--the silver voices of heroic bugles. We see the pale cheeks of women and the flushed faces of men; and in those assemblages we see all the dead whose dust we have covered with flowers..." I was fairly entranced. he pictured the recruiting of the troops, the husbands and fathers with their families on the last evening, the lover under the trees and the stars; then the beat of drums, the waving flags, the marching away; the wife at the turn of the lane holds her baby aloft in her arms--a wave of the hand and he has gone; then you see him again in the heat of the charge. It was wonderful how it seized upon my youthful imagination. When he came to Madison I crowded myself into the assembly chamber to hear him: I would not have missed it for every worldly thing I possessed. And he did not disappoint me. A large handsome man of perfect build, with a face as round as a child's and a compelling smile--all the arts of the old-time oratory were his in high degree. He was witty, he was droll, he was eloquent: he was as full of sentiment as an old violin. Often, while speaking, he would pause, break into a smile, and the audience, in anticipation of what was to come, would follow him in irresistible peals of laughter. I cannot remember much that he said, but the impression he made upon me was indelible. After that I got Ingersoll's books and never afterward lost an opportunity to hear him speak. He was the greatest orater, I think, that I have ever heard; and the greatest of his lectures, I have always thought, was the one on Shakespeare. Ingersoll had a tremendous influence upon me, as indeed he had upon many young men of that time. It was not that he changed my beliefs, but that he liberated my mind. Freedom was what he preached: he wanted the shackles off everywhere. He wanted men to think boldly about all things: he demanded intellectual and moral courage. He wanted men to follow wherever truth might lead them. He was a rare, bold, heroic figure.

Sura 2:223 says that ‘your wife is as your farm to you, so treat her as you would your farm.’ The ulema have quoted this as if it meant you could treat women like the dirt under your feet, but these clerics, who stand as unneeded intercessors between us and God, are never farmers, and farmers read the Quran right, and see their wives are their food, their drink, their work, the bed they lie on at night, the very ground under their feet! Yes, of course you treat your wife as the ground under your feet!

Torrens kicked at the door until it was finally opened. The farm couple and three youngsters had been eating breakfast in the common room. The yard dog would have bounded in had not Torrens kicked the door shut. 'I want a bed. Quilts. A hot drink. I am a doctor. This woman is my patient.' The farm couple was terrified. The look on the face of Torrens cut short any questions. They did as he ordered. One of the children ran to fetch his medical kit from the cart. The woman motioned for Torrens to set Caroline on a straw pallet. The farmer kept his distance, but his wife, shyly, fearffully, ventured closer. She glanced at Torrens, as if requesting his permission to help. Between them, they made Caroline as comfortable as they could. Torrens knelt by the pallet. Caroline reached for his hand. 'Leave while you can. Do not burden yourself with me.' 'A light burden.' 'I wish you to find Augusta.' 'You have my promise.' 'Take this.' Caroline had slipped off a gold ring set with diamonds. 'It was a wedding gift from the king. It has not left my finger since then. I give it to you now - ' Torrens protested, but Caroline went on - 'not as a keepsake. You and I have better keepsakes in our hearts. I wish you to sell it. You will need money, perhaps even more than this will bring. But you must stary alive and find my child. Help her as you have always helped me.' 'We shall talk of this later, when you are better. We shall find her together.' 'You have never lied to me.' Caroline's smile was suddenly flirtacious. 'Sir, if you begin now, I shall take you to task for it.' Her face seemed to grow youthful and earnest for an instant. Torrens realized she held life only by strength of will. 'I am thinking of the Juliana gardens,' Caroline said. 'How lovely they were. The orangerie. And you, my loving friend. Tell me, could we have been happy?' 'Yes.' Torrens raised her hand to his lips. 'Yes. I am certain of it.' Caroline did not speak again. Torrens stayed at her side. She died later that morning. Torrens buried her in the shelter of a hedgerow at the far edge of the field. The farmer offered to help, but Torrens refused and dug the grave himself. Later, in the farmhouse, he slept heavily for the first time since his escape. Mercifully, he did not dream. Next day, he gave the farmer his clothing in trade for peasant garb. He hitched up the cart and drove back to the road. He could have pressed on, lost himself beyond search in the provinces. He was free. Except for his promise. He turned the cart toward Marianstat.

Finnish women are dominant,' Roman Schatz enthused. 'Traditionally, on Finnish farms the woman was chief of everything under the roof, including the males, and the men were there to take care of everything outside. No Finnish man would ever decide anything without consulting his wife. Men do the dishes. We don't have housewives in Finland - no one can afford to live from one salary. Women don't stay at home and breast-feed, they have their own careers and bank accounts. It's great - my divorce only cost me a hundred euro.

Sprout looked through the wide-open door, focusing on the world outside. It had been a while since she’d had an appetite. She had no desire to lay another egg. Her heart emptied of feeling every time the farmer’s wife took her eggs. The pride she felt when she laid one was replaced by sadness. She was exhausted after a full year of this. She couldn’t so much as touch her own eggs, not even with the tip of her foot. And she didn’t know what happened to them after the farmer’s wife carried them in her basket out of the coop.

Ade had often been invited to consider her father’s life—an abandoned wife, an orphaned daughter, all for the sake of his restlessness—but it proved a toothless warning to Ade. Her father had abandoned them, certainly, but he’d also seen love and war and perhaps some of the intoxicating world beyond the farm, and such adventure seemed worth any price. (It seems to me that Lee Larson’s life was more defined by impulsivity and cowardice than an adventurous spirit, but a daughter must find what value she can in her father. Especially if he is absent.)

Then why am I supposed to be giving you money I work my damn tail off for, huh?” Runner said, his voice bitter. “That’s what I never understand, this idea of handouts: alimony and child support and the government with its hands in my pockets. I barely can support myself, I don’t know why people think I need to take three extra jobs to give money to my wife, who has her own farm. Her own house on the farm. And four kids to help her out with it. I mean, I sure as hell didn’t grow up thinking my daddy owed me a living, my daddy oughta give me money for Nikes and college and dress shirts and …

Meanwhile Don Quixote worked upon a farm labourer, a neighbour of his, an honest man (if indeed that title can be given to him who is poor), but with very little wit in his pate. In a word, he so talked him over, and with such persuasions and promises, that the poor clown made up his mind to sally forth with him and serve him as esquire. Don Quixote, among other things, told him he ought to be ready to go with him gladly, because any moment an adventure might occur that might win an island in the twinkling of an eye and leave him governor of it. On these and the like promises Sancho Panza (for so the labourer was called) left wife and children, and engaged himself as esquire to his neighbour.

Burns, however, found an inexpressible charm in sitting down beside his wife, at his own fireside; in wandering over his own grounds; in once more putting his hand to the spade and the plough; in farming his enclosures, and managing his cattle. For some months he felt almost all that felicity which fancy had taught him to expect in his new situation. He had been for a time idle; but his muscles were not yet unbraced for rural toil. He now seemed to find a joy in being the husband of the mistress of his affections, and in seeing himself the father of children such as promised to attach him for ever to that modest, humble, and domestic life, in which alone he could hope to be permanently happy.

remember I said that ignorance is not bliss, and can be very costly. Did you know that 98 percent of the children who drown in the summertime are black? Why? Because historically we weren’t allowed in swimming pools because of Jim Crow. That law put a bad taste in black folks’ mouths, and to this day I don’t know how to swim. On my family’s farm, there was a lake a thousand feet deep. I told my wife, if one of our kids starts to drown, you go get him. I’m not going in the water. I can’t swim. I’m not going to play like I’m swimming. And when I was home, and the kids were out in the water playing, I would leave the house. I didn’t even want to hear them call my name when they were near the water.

Early on, he tried to get the government help and all they gave him was some sleeping pills, so fuck the government [..] There are these things going over his head. Still he tries: eventually gets the wife, the home, the kids, the farm. He wants to be alone, but she wants to settle down and farmi with him, so he tries to want to settle down too. Stuff he remembers easygoing Les wanting ten, fifteen years back, before Vietnam, he tries to want again. The trouble is, he can't really feel for these folks. He's sitting in the kitchen and he's eating with them and there's nothing. No way he can go from that to this. Yet still he tries. A couple times in the middle of the night he wakes up chocking her, but it isn't his fault - it's the government fault.

I grieve for your grandparents,” continued Michael. “But after all, that was in another land, and in a different time. I need not point out to you the advantages of the Church to this country in which you operate. It is the Church which saves the home, by confronting with a determined mien the practices of immorality. The home, following the Church, conforms to design, and consists of the father, the mother, and the child. That home, Mr. Cohen, furnishes the basis for your credit in the markets of the world. The father produces, the mother buys, the child consumes. I ask you: can you do without it? Do you wish to see this country sunk in wickedness, the father drunk, the mother divorced, the child debauched? Would you like to see the mills idle, the mines closed, the farms overgrown with weeds?

Sumptuary laws were passed by the Senate limiting expenditure on banquets and clothing, but as the senators ignored these regulations, no one bothered to observe them. “The citizens,” Cato mourned, “no longer listen to good advice, for the belly has no ears.”9 The individual became rebelliously conscious of himself as against the state, the son as against the father, the woman as against the man. Usually the power of woman rises with the wealth of a society, for when the stomach is satisfied hunger leaves the field to love. Prostitution flourished. Homosexualism was stimulated by contact with Greece and Asia; many rich men paid a talent ($3600) for a male favorite; Cato complained that a pretty boy cost more than a farm.10 But women did not yield the field to these Greek and Syrian invaders. They took eagerly to all those supports of beauty that wealth now put within their reach. Cosmetics became a necessity, and caustic soap imported from Gaul tinged graying hair into auburn locks.11 The rich bourgeois took pride in adorning his wife and daughter with costly clothing or jewelry and made them the town criers of his prosperity. Even in government the role of women grew. Cato cried out that “all other men rule over women; but we Romans, who rule all men, are ruled by our women.”12 In 195 B.C.. the free women of Rome swept into the Forum and demanded the repeal of the Oppian Law of 215, which had forbidden women to use gold ornaments, varicolored dresses, or chariots. Cato predicted the ruin of Rome if the law should be repealed. Livy puts into his mouth a speech that every generation has heard:

Or when you keep a sex-addiction meeting under surveillance because they’re the best places to pick up chicks.” Serge looked around the room at suspicious eyes. “Okay, maybe that last one’s just me. But you should try it. They keep the men’s and women’s meetings separate for obvious reasons. And there are so many more opportunities today because the whole country’s wallowing in this whiny new sex-rehab craze after some golfer diddled every pancake waitress on the seaboard. That’s not a disease; that’s cheating. He should have been sent to confession or marriage counseling after his wife finished chasing him around Orlando with a pitching wedge. But today, the nation is into humiliation, tearing down a lifetime of achievement by labeling some guy a damaged little dick weasel. The upside is the meetings. So what you do is wait on the sidewalk for the women to get out, pretending like you’re loitering. And because of the nature of the sessions they just left, there’s no need for idle chatter or lame pickup lines. You get right to business: ‘What’s your hang-up?’ And she answers, and you say, ‘What a coincidence. Me, too.’ Then, hang on to your hat! It’s like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get. Most people are aware of the obvious, like foot fetish or leather. But there are more than five hundred lesser-known but clinically documented paraphilia that make no sexual sense. Those are my favorites . . .” Serge began counting off on his fingers. “This one woman had Ursusagalmatophilia, which meant she got off on teddy bears—that was easily my weirdest three-way. And nasophilia, which meant she was completely into my nose, and she phoned a friend with mucophilia, which is mucus. The details on that one are a little disgusting. And formicophilia, which is being crawled on by insects, so the babe bought an ant farm. And symphorophilia—that’s staging car accidents, which means you have to time the air bags perfectly

Dear Mr. Jacob Witting,’” read Grandfather haltingly, slowly. “‘I am Sarah Wheaton from Maine…’” He looked at me. “That was her first letter to Jacob?” he asked. I nodded. “The answer to Papa’s advertisement for a wife and mother,” I said. “And then she wrote to us. See, there.” I pointed, and Grandfather began to read. “‘My favorite colors are the colors of the sea, blue and gray and green, depending on the weather.’” Grandfather sat back. “She came a long way.” “We were excited,” I said. “Sarah wrote that she was coming. And then she added something for Anna and me that made us even more excited.” “What?” asked Grandfather. “What did she write?” I turned the pages of the journal. “There,” I said. I couldn’t help smiling. “‘Tell them I sing,’” read Grandfather. He couldn’t help smiling either. “We were afraid she wouldn’t stay,” I said. “She loved Maine.” Grandfather nodded. He closed the book that Anna had written so long ago. I could tell our lesson was over for today. Grandfather walked to the window and looked out over the farm. “You always love what you know first,” he said. “Always,” he repeated softly.

Et supper?" Foote asked. "No, sir," Stoner answered. Mrs. Foote crooked an index finger at him and padded away, Stoner followed her through several rooms into a kitchen, where she motioned him to sit at a table. She put a pitcher of milk and several squares of cold cornbread before him. He sipped the milk, but his mouth, dry from excitement, would not take the bread. Foote came into the room and stood beside his wife. He was a small man, not more than five feet three inches, with a lean face and a sharp nose. His wife was four inches taller, and heavy; rimless spectacles hid her eyes, and her thin lips were tight. The two of them watched hungrily as he sipped his milk. "Feed and water the livestock, slop the pigs in the morning," Foote said rapidly. Stoner looked at him blankly. "What?" "That's what you do in the morning," Foote said, "before you leave for your school. Then in the evening you feed and slop again, gather the eggs, milk the cows. Chop firewood when you find time. Weekends, you help me with whatever I'm doing." "Yes, sir," Stoner said. Foote studied him for a moment. "College," he said and shook his head.

Among the fraudulent farmworker amnesties approved by the INS was one from Egyptian Mahmud Abouhalima,7 or—as he was known in the terrorist community—“Mahmud the Red.” Mahmud had come to the United States as a “tourist” from Germany—where he had been denied political asylum, but got around that by marrying an emotionally disturbed alcoholic, and then married another German woman after divorcing the first when she objected to his taking a second wife.8 At the end of 1985, Mahmud and his second wife took a “three-week” trip to the United States on tourist visas and promptly settled into an apartment in Brooklyn.9 Luckily for Mahmud, just as his tourist visa was expiring six months later, Schumer’s farmworker amnesty became law. So Mahmud submitted an application, claiming to have worked on a farm in South Carolina, despite having never left New York, except one short visit to the Michigan Islamic community.10 Mahmud was approved. Otherwise, crops would rot in the fields! And what a wonderful agricultural worker Mahmud was. He became a limo driver in New York, where he repeatedly had his license suspended for ripping off customers and speeding through red lights because he was busy reading the Koran.

Will you be there waiting for me every night, in our cottage?" he murmured. She nodded, leaning against him. McKenna's bristly black lashes lowered until they cast shadows on his cheeks. "And you'll scrub my back when I'm tired and dusty from the field?" Aline pictured his large, powerful body lowering into a wooden tub... his pleasured sigh at the heat of the water... his bronzed back shining in the firelight. "Yes," she breathed. "And then you can soak while I hang the stew pot over the fire, and I'll tell you about the argument I had with the miller, who didn't give me enough flour because his scale was weighted." McKenna laughed softly while his fingertip skimmed lightly along her throat. "The cheat," he murmured, his eyes sparkling. "I'll speak with him tomorrow- no one tries to fleece my wife and gets away with it. In the meantime, let's go to bed. I want to hold you all night long." The thought of being tucked in a cozy bed with him, their naked bodies entwined, made Aline tremble with longing. "You'll probably fall asleep as soon as your head touches the pillow," she said. "Farming is hard work- you're exhausted." "Never too tired to love you." His arms slid around her, and he hunched over to nuzzle the curve of her cheek. His lips were like hot velvet as he whispered against her skin. "I'm going to kiss you from your head to your toes. And I won't stop until you're crying for me, and then I'll pleasure you until you're weak from my loving.

When I was first called as a General Authority, we lived on a very small plot of ground in Utah Valley that we called our farm. We had a cow and a horse and chickens and lots of children. One Saturday, I was to drive to the airport for a flight to a stake conference in California. But the cow was expecting a calf and in trouble. The calf was born, but the cow could not get up. We called the veterinarian, who soon came. He said the cow had swallowed a wire and would not live through the day. I copied the telephone number of the animal by-products company so my wife could call them to come and get the cow as soon as she died. Before I left, we had our family prayer. Our little boy said our prayer. After he had asked Heavenly Father to “bless Daddy in his travels and bless us all,” he then started an earnest plea. He said, “Heavenly Father, please bless Bossy cow so that she will get to be all right.” In California, I told of the incident and said, “He must learn that we do not get everything we pray for just that easily.” There was a lesson to be learned, but it was I who learned it, not my son. When I returned Sunday night, Bossy had “got to be all right.” This process is not reserved for the prophets alone. The gift of the Holy Ghost operates equally with men, women, and even little children. It is within this wondrous gift and power that the spiritual remedy to any problem can be found. “And now, he imparteth his word by angels unto men, yea, not only men but women also. Now this is not all; little children do have words given unto them many times, which confound the wise and the learned” (Alma 32:23).

A man might go to an office and run a computer that would correlate great masses of figures that came from sales reports on how well, let’s say, buttons—or something equally archaic—were selling over certain areas of the country. This man’s job was vital to the button industry: they had to have this information to decide how many buttons to make next year. But though this man held an essential job in the button industry, was hired, paid, or fired by the button industry, week in and week out he might not see a button. He was given a certain amount of money for running his computer; with that money his wife bought food and clothes for him and his family. But there was no direct connection between where he worked and how he ate and lived the rest of his time. He wasn’t paid with buttons. As farming, hunting, and fishing became occupations of a small­er and smaller per cent of the population, this separation between man’s work and the way he lived—what he ate, what he wore, where he slept—became greater and greater for more people. Ashton Clark pointed out how psychologi­cally damaging this was to humanity. The entire sense of self-control and self-responsibility that man acquired during the Neolithic Revolution when he first learned to plant grain and domesticate animals and live in one spot of his own choosing was seriously threatened. The threat had been com­ing since the Industrial Revolution and many people had pointed it out, before Ashton Clark. But Ashton Clark went one step further. If the situation of a technological society was such that there could be no direct relation between a man’s work and his modus vivendi, other than money, at least he must feel that he is directly changing things by his work, shaping things, making things that weren’t there before, moving things from one place to another. He must exert energy in his work and see these changes occur with his own eyes. Otherwise he would feel his life was futile.

HE DO THE POLICE IN DIFFERENT VOICES: Part I THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD First we had a couple of feelers down at Tom's place, There was old Tom, boiled to the eyes, blind, (Don't you remember that time after a dance, Top hats and all, we and Silk Hat Harry, And old Tom took us behind, brought out a bottle of fizz, With old Jane, Tom's wife; and we got Joe to sing 'I'm proud of all the Irish blood that's in me, 'There's not a man can say a word agin me'). Then we had dinner in good form, and a couple of Bengal lights. When we got into the show, up in Row A, I tried to put my foot in the drum, and didn't the girl squeal, She never did take to me, a nice guy - but rough; The next thing we were out in the street, Oh it was cold! When will you be good? Blew in to the Opera Exchange, Sopped up some gin, sat in to the cork game, Mr. Fay was there, singing 'The Maid of the Mill'; Then we thought we'd breeze along and take a walk. Then we lost Steve. ('I turned up an hour later down at Myrtle's place. What d'y' mean, she says, at two o'clock in the morning, I'm not in business here for guys like you; We've only had a raid last week, I've been warned twice. Sergeant, I said, I've kept a decent house for twenty years, she says, There's three gents from the Buckingham Club upstairs now, I'm going to retire and live on a farm, she says, There's no money in it now, what with the damage don, And the reputation the place gets, on account off of a few bar-flies, I've kept a clean house for twenty years, she says, And the gents from the Buckingham Club know they're safe here; You was well introduced, but this is the last of you. Get me a woman, I said; you're too drunk, she said, But she gave me a bed, and a bath, and ham and eggs, And now you go get a shave, she said; I had a good laugh, couple of laughs (?) Myrtle was always a good sport'). treated me white. We'd just gone up the alley, a fly cop came along, Looking for trouble; committing a nuisance, he said, You come on to the station. I'm sorry, I said, It's no use being sorry, he said; let me get my hat, I said. Well by a stroke of luck who came by but Mr. Donovan. What's this, officer. You're new on this beat, aint you? I thought so. You know who I am? Yes, I do, Said the fresh cop, very peevish. Then let it alone, These gents are particular friends of mine. - Wasn't it luck? Then we went to the German Club, Us We and Mr. Donovan and his friend Joe Leahy, Heinie Gus Krutzsch Found it shut. I want to get home, said the cabman, We all go the same way home, said Mr. Donovan, Cheer up, Trixie and Stella; and put his foot through the window. The next I know the old cab was hauled up on the avenue, And the cabman and little Ben Levin the tailor, The one who read George Meredith, Were running a hundred yards on a bet, And Mr. Donovan holding the watch. So I got out to see the sunrise, and walked home. * * * * April is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land....

The process of receiving teaching depends upon the student giving something in return; some kind of psychological surrender is necessary, a gift of some sort. This is why we must discuss surrendering, opening, giving up expectations, before we can speak of the relationship between teacher and student. It is essential to surrender, to open yourself, to present whatever you are to the guru, rather than trying to present yourself as a worthwhile student. It does not matter how much you are willing to pay, how correctly you behave, how clever you are at saying the right thing to your teacher. It is not like having an interview for a job or buying a new car. Whether or not you will get the job depends upon your credentials, how well you are dressed, how beautifully your shoes are polished, how well you speak, how good your manners are. If you are buying a car, it is a matter of how much money you have and how good your credit is. But when it comes to spirituality, something more is required. It is not a matter of applying for a job, of dressing up to impress our potential employer. Such deception does not apply to an interview with a guru, because he sees right through us. He is amused if we dress up especially for the interview. Making ingratiating gestures is not applicable in this situation; in fact it is futile. We must make a real commitment to being open with our teacher; we must be willing to give up all our preconceptions. Milarepa expected Marpa to be a great scholar and a saintly person, dressed in yogic costume with beads, reciting mantras, meditating. Instead he found Marpa working on his farm, directing the laborers and plowing his land. I am afraid the word guru is overused in the West. It would be better to speak of one’s “spiritual friend,” because the teachings emphasize a mutual meeting of two minds. It is a matter of mutual communication, rather than a master-servant relationship between a highly evolved being and a miserable, confused one. In the master-servant relationship the highly evolved being may appear not even to be sitting on his seat but may seem to be floating, levitating, looking down at us. His voice is penetrating, pervading space. Every word, every cough, every movement that he makes is a gesture of wisdom. But this is a dream. A guru should be a spiritual friend who communicates and presents his qualities to us, as Marpa did with Milarepa and Naropa with Marpa. Marpa presented his quality of being a farmer-yogi. He happened to have seven children and a wife, and he looked after his farm, cultivating the land and supporting himself and his family. But these activities were just an ordinary part of his life. He cared for his students as he cared for his crops and family. He was so thorough, paying attention to every detail of his life, that he was able to be a competent teacher as well as a competent father and farmer. There was no physical or spiritual materialism in Marpa’s lifestyle at all. He did not emphasize spirituality and ignore his family or his physical relationship to the earth. If you are not involved with materialism, either spiritually or physically, then there is no emphasis made on any extreme. Nor is it helpful to choose someone for your guru simply because he is famous, someone who is renowned for having published stacks of books and converted thousands or millions of people. Instead the guideline is whether or not you are able actually to communicate with the person, directly and thoroughly. How much self-deception are you involved in? If you really open yourself to your spiritual friend, then you are bound to work together. Are you able to talk to him thoroughly and properly? Does he know anything about you? Does he know anything about himself, for that matter? Is the guru really able to see through your masks, communicate with you properly, directly? In searching for a teacher, this seems to be the guideline rather than fame or wisdom.

They addressed the crowd, exhorting them to repentance and bearing testimony to the truth. When their sentence was read out they reproached the magistrates and the jury for shedding innocent blood, and these excused themselves by saying that they acted under compulsion of the Emperor…. “O blind world” exclaimed Mändl “each man should act according to his own heart and conscience, but you condemn us according to the Emperor’s order!” They preached further to the people, Mändl continuing until he was hoarse. “Do stop, my Hans!” cried the magistrate, but Mändl continued, and said: “What I have taught and testified is the Divine truth.” They spoke up to the moment of their death, for no one would hinder them. One of them was so ill that it was feared he might die before he could be executed, so he was beheaded first. Then the other turned to the executioner and cried with triumphant courage: “Here I forsake wife and child, house and farm, body and life for the sake of the faith and the truth”, then kneeled down and offered his head to the fatal blow. Hans Mändl was bound to a ladder and cast alive into the flames where the bodies of his fellow-martyrs had already been thrown. There was one witness, Paul Lenz, who so took all this to heart that he shortly after joined the despised disciples, to share with them in the sufferings of Christ.

I knew you forever and you were always old, soft white lady of my heart. Surely you would scold me for sitting up late, reading your letters, as if these foreign postmarks were meant for me. You posted them first in London, wearing furs and a new dress in the winter of eighteen-ninety. I read how London is dull on Lord Mayor's Day, where you guided past groups of robbers, the sad holes of Whitechapel, clutching your pocketbook, on the way to Jack the Ripper dissecting his famous bones. This Wednesday in Berlin, you say, you will go to a bazaar at Bismarck's house. And I see you as a young girl in a good world still, writing three generations before mine. I try to reach into your page and breathe it back… but life is a trick, life is a kitten in a sack. This is the sack of time your death vacates. How distant your are on your nickel-plated skates in the skating park in Berlin, gliding past me with your Count, while a military band plays a Strauss waltz. I loved you last, a pleated old lady with a crooked hand. Once you read Lohengrin and every goose hung high while you practiced castle life in Hanover. Tonight your letters reduce history to a guess. The count had a wife. You were the old maid aunt who lived with us. Tonight I read how the winter howled around the towers of Schloss Schwobber, how the tedious language grew in your jaw, how you loved the sound of the music of the rats tapping on the stone floors. When you were mine you wore an earphone. This is Wednesday, May 9th, near Lucerne, Switzerland, sixty-nine years ago. I learn your first climb up Mount San Salvatore; this is the rocky path, the hole in your shoes, the yankee girl, the iron interior of her sweet body. You let the Count choose your next climb. You went together, armed with alpine stocks, with ham sandwiches and seltzer wasser. You were not alarmed by the thick woods of briars and bushes, nor the rugged cliff, nor the first vertigo up over Lake Lucerne. The Count sweated with his coat off as you waded through top snow. He held your hand and kissed you. You rattled down on the train to catch a steam boat for home; or other postmarks: Paris, verona, Rome. This is Italy. You learn its mother tongue. I read how you walked on the Palatine among the ruins of the palace of the Caesars; alone in the Roman autumn, alone since July. When you were mine they wrapped you out of here with your best hat over your face. I cried because I was seventeen. I am older now. I read how your student ticket admitted you into the private chapel of the Vatican and how you cheered with the others, as we used to do on the fourth of July. One Wednesday in November you watched a balloon, painted like a silver abll, float up over the Forum, up over the lost emperors, to shiver its little modern cage in an occasional breeze. You worked your New England conscience out beside artisans, chestnut vendors and the devout. Tonight I will learn to love you twice; learn your first days, your mid-Victorian face. Tonight I will speak up and interrupt your letters, warning you that wars are coming, that the Count will die, that you will accept your America back to live like a prim thing on the farm in Maine. I tell you, you will come here, to the suburbs of Boston, to see the blue-nose world go drunk each night, to see the handsome children jitterbug, to feel your left ear close one Friday at Symphony. And I tell you, you will tip your boot feet out of that hall, rocking from its sour sound, out onto the crowded street, letting your spectacles fall and your hair net tangle as you stop passers-by to mumble your guilty love while your ears die.

She married Luther in 1525 and became actively involved in his ministry and helped to provide for them financially by managing their household, farm, brewery and other properties. As the wife of such a prominent theologian, she helped promote a positive view of Protestant family life. Together they had six children, four of whom survived to adulthood.

I had become a shell of a person--no more human than the stainless steel milk machines in dairy farms in Wisconsin, and half as interesting. Any identity I’d previously had as a wife, daughter, friend, or productive member of the human race had melted away the second my ducts filled with milk.

At the age of ninety-two, James spent months hunched over the kitchen table, learning the alphabet, practicing his signature, and slowly progressing to reading simple children’s books. Then his wife died, sending him into a tailspin and robbing him of his motivation to learn to read. But his story doesn’t end there. At the age of ninety-six, Henry became determined to try to learn to read again. This time he not only dove back into reading, but, with the help of a retired English teacher, he began to write, longhand, about his life, his time at sea, a man he lost overboard on one voyage, and what his grandfather’s farm was like in the Azores. He finished his memoir, and when he was ninety-eight it was published and became a bestselling book called In a Fisherman’s Language. It was optioned to become a film, and his success triggered a congratulatory letter from President Obama. Henry was working on his second book when he died at age ninety-nine in 2013. Henry’s story is remarkable on many levels. First, it took a tremendous amount of grit just to get by in today’s world as an illiterate adult. Even more remarkable was his determination to overcome it later in life.

My milk had burst onto the scene with a vengeance, and eating became the baby’s new vocation. The next two weeks of her life marked the end of my life as I knew it; I was up all night, a hag all day, and Marlboro Man was completely on his own. I wanted nothing to do with anyone on earth, my husband included. “How are you doing today?” he’d ask. I’d resent that I had to expand the energy to answer. “Want me to hold the baby while you get up and get dressed?” he’d offer. I’d crumble that he didn’t like my robe. “Hey, Mama--wanna take the baby for a drive?” Not no, but hell no. We’ll die if we leave our cocoon. The rays from the sun will fry us and turn us to ashes. And I’d have to put on normal clothes. Forget it. I’d kicked into survival mode in the most literal sense of the word--not only was laundry out of the question, but so was dinner, casual conversation, or any social interaction at all. I had become a shell of a person--no more human than the stainless steel milk machines in dairy farms in Wisconsin, and half as interesting. Any identity I’d previously had as a wife, daughter, friend, or productive member of the human race had melted away the second my ducts filled with milk. My mom dropped by to help once or twice, but I couldn’t emotionally process her presence. I hid in my room with the door shut as she did the dishes and washed laundry without help or input from me. Marlboro Man’s mom came to help, too, but I couldn’t be myself around her and holed up in my room. I didn’t even care enough to pray for help. Not that it would have helped; stainless steel milk machines have no soul.

He was a weedy-looking young man with straw-coloured hair and rather long legs, who had failed twice for the Foreign Office. He sometimes wore tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles to correct a slight squint, and through influence he had recently got a job in a museum. His father was a retired civil servant who lived in Essex, where he and his wife kept a chicken farm.

Hunter slipped from the bed and grabbed his breeches to pull them on. Bathed in moonlight, the planes of his body were gilded with silver, its contours cast into delineative shadow. Clutching a fur to her chest, Loretta sat up, pretending not to notice. She did, though, and what she saw set her pulse to skittering. Perhaps beautiful wasn’t an appropriate adjective for a man, but it was the only word that came to her. Watching him, she was, for the first time in her life, appreciative of the male form, the smooth play of muscle in motion, the subtle grace in strength. Lean tendons roped his buttocks and thighs. When he turned slightly she glimpsed his manhood, jutting forth, hard and proud from a mahogany nest of short curly hair. Her throat tightened, and deep within her there welled feelings she could scarcely credit, longing, tenderness, delicious excitement--and fierce pride. That such a man loved her and wanted her was nothing short of incredible. He could have had any girl in the village, someone supple and dark with liquid brown eyes, a dozen such someones if he chose, but instead he had picked her, a skinny, pallid farm girl. Cinching the drawstring of his pants, he tied a quick bowknot and extended a hand to her. For an instant Loretta was swept back in time to that first afternoon, when he had commanded she place her palm across his. She had been so terrified then, but no longer. His arm was her shield, just as he had promised. “Come, wife. My cousin brings a gift, eh?” “Hunter, I’m not dressed!” Chuckling, he grabbed a buffalo robe and draped it around her shoulders. After enveloping her in the fur, he drew her from the bed and to the door, untying the flap to sweep it aside.

Ini and Aevi were entranced by his description of a curriculum that included farming, cparnetry, sewage reclamation, printing, plumbing, road mending, playwriting, and al the other occupations of the adult community, and by his admission that nobody was ever punished for anything. “Though sometimes,” he said, “they make you go away by yourself for a while.” “But what,” Oiie said abruptly, as if the question, long kept back, burst from him under pressure, “what keeps people in order? Why don’t they rob and murder each other?” “Nobody owns anything to rob. If you want things you take them from the depository,. As for violence, well, I don’t know, Oiie; would you mruder me, ordinarily? And if you felt like it, would a law against it stop you? Coercsion is the least efficient means of obtaining order.” “All right, but how do you et peopled to do the dirty work?” “What dirty work?” asked Oiie’s wife, not following. “Garbage collecting, grave digging,” Oiie said. Sheik added, “Mercury mining,” and nearly said, “Shit processing,” but recollected the Ioti taboo on scatological words. He had reflected, quite early in his stay on Urras, that the Urasti lived among mountains of excrement, but never mentioned shit. “Well, we all do them. But nobody has to do them for very long, unless he likes the work. One day in each decade the community management committee or the block committee or whoever needs you can ask you to join in such work; they make rotating lists. Then the disagreeable work postings, or ‘dangerous ones like the mercury mines and mills, normally they’re for one half year only.” “But then the whole personal must consist of people just learning the job.” “Yes. It’s not efficient, but what else is to be done? You can’t tell a man to work on a job that will cripple him or kill him in a few years. Why should he do that?” “He can refuse the order?” “It’s not an order, Oiie. He goes to Divlab- the Division of Labor office- and says, I want to do such and such, what have you got? And they tell him where there are jobs.

The elders, being met at Boston about this matter, sent some of their company to acquaint the old governor with their desire, and the reasons moving them, clearing themselves of all dislike of his government, and seriously professing their sincere affections and respect towards him, which he kindly and thankfully accepted, concurring with them in their motion, and expressing his unfeigned desire of more freedom, that he might a little intend his private occasions, wherein (they well knew) how much he had lately suffered (for his bailiff, whom he trusted with managing his farm, had engaged him £2500 without his privity) in his outward estate. This they had heard of, and were much affected therewith, and all the country in general, and took course, (the elders agreeing upon it at that meeting,) that supply should be sent in from the several towns, by a voluntary contribution, for freeing of those engagements; and the court (having no money to bestow, and being yet much indebted) gave his wife three thousand acres of land, and some of the towns sent in liberally, and some others promised, but could perform but little, and the most nothing at all. The whole came not to £500 whereof near half came from Boston, and one gentleman of Newbury, Mr. Richard Dummer, propounded for a supply by a more private way, and for example, himself disbursed £100.

To an outsider the birthday dinner would probably have seemed very dull. A working landowner and his wife; a female cousin with a mop of fair hair and a tanned skin who was practically never seen out of breeches and knew bulls inside out; a young man out of the army learning to farm, and an old estate agent; and splitting one bottle of champagne to drink the old agent’s health. But to anyone who knew Barsetshire it was the county in miniature with its tradition of work, its acceptance of the immutable law that practically all those who depended on one were in their different way lazy, incompetent, untruthful, grasping; but none the less their children to be helped while young and allowed when old to go on living at a very low rent or none at all in cottages that could have been let for enormous sums to outsiders. And their lives were devoted to Rushwater, which would use them, as it had used Mr. Macpherson, till their eyes were dim and their clothes hung loosely on the skeletons that lurked in them.

I came back to Rome, so I could send the book off and finish the sixteen drawings. I read the thing over before I took a bath, and darned if I didn't like it pretty well, even though it may be full of bad grammar. Now I've had the bath and the sixteen drawings are almost finished, and somehow I miss the aid station. It was pretty safe under the cliff, and it was warm and we were able to make coffee. It was full of homesick, tired men who were doing the job they were put there to do, and who had the guts and humanness to kid around and try to make life easier for the other guy. They are big men and honest men, with the inner warmth that comes from the generosity and simplicity you learn up there. Until the doc can go back to his chrome office and gallstones and the dogface can go back to his farm and I can go back to my wife and son, that is the closest to home we can ever get.

His half brother’s passion was farming, and Kevin had tried again and again to capture Gage’s look of pride, a look that said he was proud to be an American farmer, proud of who he was and what he did. To love this man was to love the sweeping land of the prairie.

When Shi Qingluo, an agriculture expert, opened her eyes again after dying, she realised she had transmigrated as a farm girl in an ancient era. Her story started from when she was sold by her family, and was currently being forcibly taken away. She subdued evil with greater evil, and violence with greater violence, forcing the troublemakers to cry in defeat and ended up giving in to her. Then, she married off to another village. She became the wife of Scholar Xiao Hanzheng who was in a coma, and had just been abandoned by his extended family. Qingluo looked at Scholar Xiao’s frail mother, delicate younger sister, and obedient younger brother, and rubbed her chin out of satisfaction. From now on, they were all hers to protect. Since then, she took on the crucial role as the family’s breadwinner, led the family towards prosperity and accidentally became the nation’s wealthiest individual. Xiao Hanzheng woke up to find that his brother, who supposedly died from drowning, was alive and kicking. His sister was still at home. And their mother, who was supposedly eaten by wild beasts when she entered the forest in hopes of earning money to buy medicine, was still alive. More importantly, he even gained a capable wife after waking up. All of his immediate family members loved and relied on her. He looked at her and asked, “If you’re the breadwinner, what should I do?” His wife said, “You just have to look pretty, and earn a position in the government so that you can support me.” Xiao Hanzheng’s frozen heart suddenly came alive. “Sure!” Since then, he has worked hard in his career. He went from being an elementary scholar to a distinguished minister with great influence. He knew that from the moment he woke up, his wife was his saviour.

Gasping Stars Look Down Upon My Tired Soul When I need to again find my own way late midnight walks are my mainstay There is this place I walk and roam comfort away from worries of my home The sidewalk ends and fields begin I imagine they stretch and never end Cool night air soothes my tired brain far away, whistle of an old night train My pace slows to soak so much more in I am not alone, night is my friend Gasping stars look down upon my soul Seeking calm, I then reach my goal Dog barks sadly as I slowly trod by moans so blue, almost seems to cry Past the farmhouse my favorite tree massive black oak, does so comfort me Gazing at its massive majestic form I see damage from a terrible storm Ahh yes, none are immune from harm not even this great titan on the farm Very slowly I turn to find my way back retracing this walk along this track A calm has now found my lonely spirit happiness approaches I can even hear it My pace increases as I seek to return to the place where my love does burn Family , the gift of my very long life my children, my love , my sweet wife When I need to again find my own way late midnight walks are my mainstay

Meeting the Marches *Hector March, the Earl March (b.1817) His beloved wife, Charlotte, is deceased. He divides his time between his Sussex estate, Bellmont Abbey, and his London home where he is active in Parliamentary debate, particularly over the question of Irish Home Rule. His hobbies are Shakespearean studies and quarrelling with his hermit. His children are: Frederick, Viscount Bellmont “Monty” (b. 1846) Married to Adelaide Walsingham. Resides in London. Represents Blessingstoke as a Member of Parliament. Lady Olivia Peverell (b.1847) Married to Sir Hastings Peverell. Resides in London where she is a prominent political hostess. Hon. Benedick March (b.1848) Married to Elizabeth Pritchett. Manages the Home Farm at Bellmont Abbey and is acknowledged to be Julia’s favourite brother. His two eldest children, Tarquin and Perdita, make an appearance in two of Lady Julia’s adventures. Lady Beatrice “Bee” Baddesley (b. 1850) Married to Sir Arthur Baddesley, noted Arthurian scholar. Resides in Cornwall. Lady Rupert “Nerissa” Haverford (b.1851) Married to Lord Rupert Haverford, third son of the Duke of Lincoln. Divides her time between London and her father-in-law’s estate near Nottingham. Lady Bettiscombe “Portia” (b.1853) Widow. Mother to Jane the Younger. Resides in London. Hon. Eglamour March (b.1854) Known as Plum to the family. Unmarried. A gifted artist, he resides in London where he engages in a bit of private enquiry work for Nicholas Brisbane. Hon. Lysander March (b.1855) Married to Violanthe, his turbulent Neapolitan bride. He is a composer. Lady Julia Brisbane (b.1856) Widow of Sir Edward Grey. Married to Nicholas Brisbane. Her husband permits her to join him in his work as a private enquiry agent against his better judgment. Hon. Valerius March (b.1862) Unmarried. His desire to qualify as a physician has led to numerous arguments with his father. He pursues his studies in London. *Note regarding titles: as the daughters of an earl, the March sisters are styled “Lady”. This title is retained when one of them marries a baronet, knight, or plain gentleman, as is the case with Olivia, Beatrice, and Julia. As Portia wed a peer, she takes her husband’s title, and as Nerissa married into a ducal family, she takes the style of her husband and is addressed as Lady Rupert. Their eldest brother, Frederick, takes his father’s subsidiary title of Viscount Bellmont as a courtesy title until he succeeds to the earldom. (It should be noted his presence in Parliament is not a perk of this title. Unlike his father who sits in the House of Lords, Bellmont sits in the House of Commons as an elected member.) The younger brothers are given the honorific “The Honourable”, a courtesy which is written but not spoken aloud.

There’s a story about President Calvin Coolidge and a chicken farm every evolutionary psychologist knows by heart. It goes like this: The president and his wife were visiting a commercial chicken farm in the 1920s. During the tour, the first lady asked the farmer how he managed to produce so many fertile eggs with only a few roosters. The farmer proudly explained that his roosters happily performed their duty dozens of times each day. “Perhaps you could mention that to the president,” replied the first lady. Overhearing the remark, President Coolidge asked the farmer, “Does each cock service the same hen each time?” “Oh no,” replied the farmer, “he always changes from one hen to another.” “I see,” replied the president. “Perhaps you could point that out to Mrs. Coolidge.

and I would love to see them. She’s really the one you should be discussing farming with.” She looked up at him—finally—and the blue of her eyes

suited to be a farm wife.” “Miss Moreno? You think she should be my wife?” His mouth wouldn’t close properly

He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul…. —Psalm 23:2–3 (KJV) I grew up on a farm, doing chores after school and helping with garden or livestock during the summer. I worked hard as a farm wife and mother, and later held a demanding job with a church social service agency. Although I’m now retired, I’m still most comfortable with a never-ending to-do list. That’s why I said no when my husband, Don, asked me to attend a business conference with him. “There wouldn’t be anything for me to do,” I explained. “The resort brochure lists golf as the main draw, and I don’t play.” Don didn’t give up, so I reluctantly packed my suitcase and off we went. The hotel was surrounded by the golf course. There were four swimming pools, but the daytime temperatures were in the low sixties. For the first time in years I had nothing to do. No schedule, no phone calls, no meetings. To my great surprise, I enjoyed it! I read the entire newspaper and worked both crossword puzzles. I ate lunch outdoors amid an improbable but stunning landscape of palm trees and pines, grape hyacinths, honeysuckle, and a dozen types of cacti. Afternoons, I walked the easier trails, sat in the sunshine, and watched ducks paddle around a pond. Since there was nothing productive I could do, I didn’t feel guilty about not doing it. The best part, though, was the lesson I took home: God speaks most clearly when I don’t do; I simply be. Heavenly Father, thank You for teaching me to still my soul. —Penney Schwab Digging Deeper: Ps 46:10

Remember now your Creator in the days of your youth, before the difficult days come, and the years draw near when you say, “I have no pleasure in them.” —Ecclesiastes 12:1 (NKJV) I was making rounds at the veterans hospital where I work, when an elderly gentleman in a wheelchair pointed his cane to a sign on a bulletin board. “Look, hon,” he said to his wife, “they’re having an old-fashioned Easter egg hunt on Saturday. It says here that the kids can compete in a bunny-hop sack race for prizes.” He barely came up for air. “Remember when we used to have those Easter egg hunts on our farm? The kids would color eggs at our kitchen table and get dye all over everything.” Just then, his wife noticed the smell of popcorn in the air. Volunteers sell it for a bargain price—fifty cents a sack. The veteran didn’t miss a beat. “Remember when we used to have movie night and you would pop corn? We’ve got to start doing that again, hon. I love popcorn. Movies too.” As I took in this amazingly joyful man, I thought of things I used to be able to do before neurofibromatosis took over my body. It was nothing to run a couple of miles; I walked everywhere. Instead of rejoicing in the past, I too often complain about my restrictions. Rather than marvel how I always used to walk downtown, shopping, I complain about having to use a handicap placard on my car so I can park close to the mall, which I complain about as well. But today, with all my heart, I want to be like that veteran and remember my yesterdays with joy. Help me, dear Lord, to recall the past with pleasure. —Roberta Messner Digging Deeper: Eph 4:29; Phil 2:14

Susan Clarke, who either was a daughter from the mixed-race marriage of James F. Clarke and Mary Dulcet, or a child of the biracial couple John D. Clarke and Elizabeth Fish, entered into a permanent relationship with a white lumber merchant from Georgia, L. H. Rossignol, around 1847. In the 1850s, she acquired property in Palatka, as well as an eighty-seven-acre farm outside of town. Her neighbors included her young uncles Philip and Alex Clarke, her grandfather's sons by the slave Hannah Benet, and Amelia Anderson Clarke, her absent cousin's (or brother's) wife. In 1860, she shared a household with Rossignol, seven biracial children, and her young uncle Alex Clarke. Through her efforts, the latter acquired Palatka real estate. Thirty free blacks resided at the river port in 1860, including Amelia Anderson Clarke, Hannah Benet, and Ramona Fernández, another mixed-race woman linked to the Clarkes. Susan Clarke functioned as the matriarch of this small free black community, which had tripled in size since 1850.43 Her pedigree, ancestral ties to the Palatka locale, property ownership, and business skills helped to make her a leader.

the 1770s hundreds of thousands of slaves were working cotton, tobacco and rice plantations in the southern colonies of America—there were 60,000 black slaves in South Carolina and 140,000 in Virginia alone—as well as in the West Indies. Many of the most prominent Americans lobbying for independence were slave owners. George Washington inherited ten slaves when he was eleven years old and cultivated his farm on the labor of 100 slaves; Thomas Jefferson inherited fifty-two slaves when he turned twenty-one and had a “slave family” numbering more than 170 on his plantation. But even in London, it was hard to ignore the issue of double standards

In the history of American fatherhood, there have been roughly three stages, each a response to economic change. In the first, agrarian stage, a father trained and disciplined his son for employment, and often offered him work on the farm, while his wife brought up the girls. (For blacks, this stage began after slavery ended.) As economic life and vocational training moved out of the family in the early nineteenth century, fathers left more of the child-rearing to their wives. According to the historian John Nash, in both these stages, fathers were often distant and stern. Not until the early twentieth century, when increasing numbers of women developed identities, beyond brief jobs before marriage, in the schoolhouse, factory, and office, did the culture discover the idea that "father was friendly". In the early 1950s, popular magazines began to offer articles with titles such as "Fathers Are Parents Too" and "It's Time Father Got Back into the Family". Today, we are in the third stage of economic development but the second stage of fatherhood.

OBIT FOR THE CREATOR OF MAD LIBS On Tuesday, in Canton, Connecticut, a town famous for the stickiness of its boogers, a stinky old man died of a good disease at his home at 345 Rotten Lane. Mr. Preston Wirtz, whose parents, Ida and Goober, ran a small jelly farm, died in his yellowish toilet. Mr. Wirtz was hated in Uzbekistan for the series of wordplay books he created for slippery children, books known far and wide as “Mad Libs,” beloved by hairy grumps and farty grampas alike. These books were never appreciated by tall elves, selling over two per year for one decade. When asked to describe Mr. Wirtz, his jealous wife, wearing nothing but an egg carton and flip-flops, called him “in a nutshell, the most sour-smelling, bacon-licking, pimple-footed crab-apple I have ever known. I will never always miss him and his broken underwear.” Then she cried herself to sleep in her fart-house.

I’ve got a broken milking machine I can’t afford to fix, and I’ve already had to fire my farm hand! My wife had to quit the farm and take a job in town! I won’t let you do this to me, Hooper! It would be an insult to all my farming ancestors if I sold my goods to you at these rotten prices! I swear I’ll sell this farm before I do it! Farmer Ben’s outburst had been so loud that some of the cubs were left holding their hands over their ears. But Ed Hooper hadn’t so much as flinched. “Well, what you do with your farm is none of my business,” said Hooper. “It darn sure isn’t!” yelled Ben. “Because your business is robbery! You’re nothin’ but an old-fashioned highway robber! You put a supermarket out on the highway and use it to rob folks!” Hooper’s smug little smile got bigger. “I’m sorry you feel that way, Ben,” he said. “But I can get my farm goods elsewhere. I’ll be on my way now. Have a nice day, Ben.” Hooper turned to leave, but happened to glance back and see Farmer Ben reaching for a pitchfork stuck in the ground. “Have a nice day?” Ben cried. “Don’t you dare tell me to have a nice day!” And with that, Farmer Ben raised his pitchfork and chased Ed Hooper into the cow pasture. Hooper dashed across the pasture toward his shiny new car. He reached the car safely, but not before stepping in three cow pies.

the Williams farm, now felt soft and thin. “I don’t think Gott is going to give me a choice, though, my dear wife.” “Don’t speak in such ways,” she told him, brushing his hair across his forehead soothingly. “The Englisch doctors will make you better, and you and I will go home and work in the barn together.” “No, Emma,” he said, reaching up to touch her cheek lightly. “I’m sorry. It is not in Gott’s Will that I should stay with you.” Emma felt the heat of anger rise from her chest into her head. How could Gott take away Eli from her? Where would she go, after he was gone? Did he truly hear Gott in his head, or was that the medication they

The “Sons of the Pioneers” are amongst America’s earliest Country/Western singing groups. One weekend we’d drive south of the border to Tijuana, Mexico and the next weekend it would be to Knott’s Berry Farm, where I heard the “Sons of the Pioneers” singing Tumbling Tumble Weeds, Cool Clear Water and other Western songs that made the group famous. On many occasions, they performed with Roy Rogers, who was a movie cowboy and Dale Evans his cowgirl wife, from Victorville, California. The “Sons of the Pioneers” were popular at that time and were inaugurated into the Country Music Hall of Fame later in 1976. It was a summer that I will never forget! Knott’s Berry Farm is a 160-acre amusement park in Buena Park, California and the singing group has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Hollywood Blvd.

The president and his wife were visiting a commercial chicken farm in the 1920s. During the tour, the first lady asked the farmer how he managed to produce so many fertile eggs with only a few roosters. The farmer proudly explained that his roosters happily performed their duty dozens of times each day. “Perhaps you could mention that to the president,” replied the first lady. Overhearing the remark, President Coolidge asked the farmer, “Does each cock service the same hen each time?” “Oh no,” replied the farmer, “he always changes from one hen to another.” “I see,” replied the president. “Perhaps you could point that out to Mrs. Coolidge.” Whether

Then in June Linda got sick. Word went around town that Roger was looking real serious 'cause his wife was 'took ill bad'. So my mother cooked up a big casserole to take up there; they could eat off it for says, she said. 'The poor young couple, with her sick I guess they must have to make do with canned pork and beans. Take this on over there,' she told me. 'She can't cook anyways,' I said. 'I told you that.' 'Nonsense. Every woman can cook, now go on.' I went on up there, carrying the heavy casserole. Even cold it smelled good and if it hand't been for Roger I would have sat down and eaten it on the ways. Waste of good food to take it to 'her', I thought; she'd probably preferred canned beans. I got up to the farm and found the door locked. That was strange, let me tell you. Around here nobody locks the door, even at night or when they're out. You just never know, a farmer or a kid like me might have to come in and use the phone in a hurry, or the bathroom, and everybody knows everybody anyway. But the door was locked. I put the casserole dish down on the front step and sat there on the steps awhile, to see if Roger or Linda came along. Nobody came and the June sun was hot. Roger doesn't have a brook up there, like we do, so I couldn't get wading. I looked around for a hose or something. I walked to the back of the house and decided to climb the apple tree there; that was something to do at least. Up in the apple tree I could see into the windows of the house; they were too high for me to see in from the ground. I was looking into the bedroom. There was Linda, sleeping. In the day! But she was supposed to be sick, so it was all right. Except that then I saw that she wasn't lying in that bed alone. There was another head there, on the pillow beside her. Roger has dark hair and this person didn't. This person was a man with blond hair. I didn't get a good look at his face. I was seeing the side of his head, then the head went over LInda's face and she was covered up by him.

I like my beard.” “Your wife doesn’t.” “Good thing I don’t have a wife,” I say and stick my tongue out at her.  She does the same thing then says, “It might just be the reason you don’t.

To see two human beings merge seamlessly into one distinct shape left her breathless. From then on, she has tried to discover how love affects the shape of things. She watched how the faces of the workers on the farm changed when they talked about their loved ones; how a divorced uncle of hers talked about his ex-wife; listens to how her father whistles when he remembers her mother. She sees that the signs of love exist in small and quiet ways, from how people look at each other (or don’t), from the way they speak to each other (or don’t), how they touch each other’s shoulders carelessly or search for someone in a crowded room. She scribbles notes, trying to capture it all.

After the miscarriage I was surrounded by dead-baby flowers, dead-baby books, and lots of boxes of dead-baby tea. I felt like I was drowning in a dead-baby sea. My mother didn’t know how to help but knew that I needed her. She sent me a soft bathrobe and a teapot, and I wept for hours on the phone with her. Mostly, she listened as I sorted through all my thoughts and feelings. If I’m angry or upset about something, or even if I’m happy about something, it isn’t real until I articulate it. I need a narrative. I guess that’s something Jeff and I share. We both need a story to fit into. The Burton ability to turn misfortune into narrative is something I’m grateful I was taught. It helps me think, Well, okay, that’s just a funny story. You should hear my father talking about his mother and those damn forsythia bushes. My sisters-in-law sent me lovely, heartfelt packages. Christina sent me teas and a journal and a letter I cherish. She included Cheryl Strayed’s book Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar. Christina is a mother. I felt like she understood the toll this sadness was taking on me, and she encouraged me to practice self-care. Jess gave me the book Reveal: A Secret Manual for Getting Spiritually Naked by Meggan Watterson and some other books about the divine feminine. She knew that there was nothing she could say, but everything she wanted to articulate was in those books. Jess has always had an almost psychic ability to understand my inner voice. She is quiet and attuned to what people are really saying rather than what they present to the world. I knew her book choices were deliberate, but I couldn’t read them for a while because they were dead-baby books. If people weren’t giving me dead baby gifts, they wanted to tell me dead-baby stories. There’s nothing more frustrating than someone saying, “Well, welcome to the club. I’ve had twelve miscarriages." It seemed like there was an unspoken competition between members of this fucked up sorority. I quickly realized this is a much bigger club than I knew and that everyone had stories and advice. And as much as I appreciated it, I had to find my own way. Tara gave me a book called Vessels: A Love Story, by Daniel Raeburn, about his and his wife’s experience of a number of miscarriages. His book helped because I couldn’t wrap my head around Jeff’s side of the story, and he certainly wasn’t telling it to me. He was out in the garage until dinnertime every day. He would come in, eat, help Gus shower, and then disappear for the rest of the night. I often read social media posts from couples announcing, “Hey we miscarried but it brought us closer together." I think it’s fair to say that miscarriage did not bring Jeffrey and me closer together. We were living in the same space but leading parallel lives. To be honest, most of the time we weren’t even living in the same space. That spring The Good Wife was canceled. We had banked on that being a job Jeff would do for a couple of years, one that would keep him in New York City. Then he landed Negan on The Walking Dead, and suddenly he would be all the way down in Georgia for the next three to five years. We were never going to have another child. It had been so hard to get pregnant. I felt like I was pulling teeth trying to coordinate dates when Jeff would be around and I’d be ovulating. It felt like every conversation was about having a baby. He’d ask, “What do you want for dinner?" I’d say, “A baby." “Hey, what do you want to do this weekend?" I’d say, “Have a baby.

we have a file on your wife almost an inch thick,

There’s another level at which attention operates, this has to do with leadership, I argue that leaders need three kinds of focus, to be really effective, the first is an inner focus, let me tell you about a case that’s actually from the annals of neurology, there was a corporate lawyer, who unfortunately had a small prefrontal brain tumour, it was discovered early, operated successfully, after the surgery though it was a very puzzling picture, because he was absolutely as smart as he had been before, a very high IQ, no problem with attention or memory, but he couldn’t do his job anymore, he couldn’t do any job, in fact he ended up out of work, his wife left him, he lost his home, he’s living in his brother spare bedroom and in despair he went to see a famous neurologist named Antonio Damasio. Damasio specialized in the circuitry between the prefrontal area which is where we consciously pay attention to what matters now, where we make decisions, where we learn and the emotional centers in the midbrain, particularly the amygdala, which is our radar for danger, it triggers our strong emotions. They had cut the connection between the prefrontal area and emotional centers and Damasio at first was puzzled, he realized that this fellow on every neurological test was perfectly fine but something was wrong, then he got a clue, he asked the lawyer when should we have our next appointment and he realized the lawyer could give him the rational pros and cons of every hour for the next two weeks, but he didn’t know which is best. And Damasio says when we’re making a decision any decision, when to have the next appointment, should I leave my job for another one, what strategy should we follow, going into the future, should I marry this fellow compared to all the other fellows, those are decisions that require we draw on our entire life experience and the circuitry that collects that life experience is very base brain, it’s very ancient in the brain, and it has no direct connection to the part of the brain that thinks in words, it has very rich connectivity to the gastro- intestinal tract, to the gut, so we get a gut feeling, feels right, doesn’t feel right. Damasio calls them somatic markers, it’s a language of the body and the ability to tune into this is extremely important because this is valuable data too - they did a study of Californian entrepreneurs and asked them “how do you make your decisions?”, these are people who built a business from nothing to hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, and they more or less said the same strategy “I am a voracious gatherer of information, I want to see the numbers, but if it doesn’t feel right, I won’t go ahead with the deal”. They’re tuning into the gut feeling. I know someone, I grew up in farm region of California, the Central Valley and my high school had a rival high school in the next town and I met someone who went to the other high school, he was not a good student, he almost failed, came close to not graduating high school, he went to a two-year college, a community college, found his way into film, which he loved and got into a film school, in film school his student project caught the eye of a director, who asked him to become an assistant and he did so well at that the director arranged for him to direct his own film, someone else’s script, he did so well at that they let him direct a script that he had written and that film did surprisingly well, so the studio that financed that film said if you want to do another one, we will back you. And he, however, hated the way the studio edited the film, he felt he was a creative artist and they had butchered his art. He said I am gonna do the film on my own, I’m gonna finance it myself, everyone in the film business that he knew said this is a huge mistake, you shouldn’t do this, but he went ahead, then he ran out of money, had to go to eleven banks before he could get a loan, he managed to finish the film, you may have seen

Perhaps she could do something nice for Mama instead of buying her things. She might see if she could keep the house tidied for her or find out one of the farm tasks that Mama didn’t love and do it for her. One thing was for sure: Elizabeth had all she wanted just being there with Mama. Maybe being with each other was gift enough. Later that day, when Elizabeth and Mama arrived at Beatrice’s house for her party, the door opened, and instead of the warm, arm-stretched hello Elizabeth had gotten as a child, a middle-aged woman stood in front of them. The woman had mousy hair swept into an updo, eyes that almost disappeared when she smiled, and a hunter-green corduroy dress with Christmas trees printed all over it. Her gaze fluttering over to Elizabeth, she beckoned them inside. “I’m Ella, Ray’s wife,” she told Elizabeth. “Nice to meet you,” Elizabeth said as Ella beamed at her over her shoulder, while her mother swung the gift bag with the kitchen dish and towel set she’d gotten for Beatrice by her side. Ella ushered them down the narrow hallway of the house to the kitchen that smelled of sugar and butter. The long rectangular farmhouse table was covered in Christmas cupcakes on pedestals, all of them decorated with different green and red icing shapes, assortments of holiday cookies, and platters of food. Ray was perusing the fare, pinching a few crackers with cheese, a paper plate in his weathered hand.

Giovanni, in love with her unabashed feminine strength and her reconciliation of love and revolution. I spent nearly every waking moment around Nikki, and I loved her dearly. But sibling relationships are often fraught with petty tortures. I hadn’t wanted to hurt her. But I had. At the time, I couldn’t understand my mother’s anger. I mean this wasn’t really a woman I was punching. This was Nikki. She could take it. Years would pass before I understood how that blow connected to my mom’s past. My mother came to the United States at the age of three. She was born in Lowe River in the tiny parish of Trelawny, Jamaica, hours away from the tourist traps that line the coast. Its swaths of deep brush and arable land made it great for farming but less appealing for honeymoons and hedonism. Lowe River was quiet, and remote, and it was home for my mother, her older brother Ralph, and my grandparents. My maternal great-grandfather Mas Fred, as he was known, would plant a coconut tree at his home in Mount Horeb, a neighboring area, for each of his kids and grandkids when they were born. My mom always bragged that hers was the tallest and strongest of the bunch. The land that Mas Fred and his wife, Miss Ros, tended had been cared for by our ancestors for generations. And it was home for my mom until her parents earned enough money to bring the family to the States to fulfill my grandfather’s dream of a theology degree from an American university. When my mom first landed in the Bronx, she was just a small child, but she was a survivor and learned quickly. She studied the other kids at school like an anthropologist, trying desperately to fit in. She started with the way she spoke. She diligently listened to the radio from the time she was old enough to turn it on and mimicked what she heard. She’d always pull back enough in her interactions with her classmates to give herself room to quietly observe them, so that when she got home she could practice imitating their accents, their idiosyncrasies, their style. Words like irie became cool. Constable became policeman. Easy-nuh became chill out. The melodic, swooping movement of her Jamaican patois was quickly replaced by the more stable cadences of American English. She jumped into the melting pot with both feet. Joy Thomas entered American University in Washington, D.C., in 1968, a year when she and her adopted homeland were both experiencing

It seemed to her in that precise moment, the moment the man and woman's eyes met in some understanding, two separate people suddenly transformed into one person with one shape and all their ends and trailing edges joined to form a single perfect outline. The woman was the man and the man was the woman and there were no halves, only wholes with no beginnings or endings. To see two human beings merge seamlessly into one distinct shape left her breathless. From then on, she has tried to discover how love affects the shape of things. She watched how the faces of the workers on the farm changed when they talked about their loved ones; how a divorced uncle of hers talked about his ex-wife; listens to how her father whistles when he remembers her mother. She sees that the signs of love exist in small and quiet ways, from how people look at each other (or don't), from the way they speak to each other (or don't), how they touch each other in a crowded room. She scribbles notes, trying to capture it all. In history class she learns about the Grecian myth of half humans, how human beings originally had four arms, four legs and a single head made of two faces. With such great strength, her teacher had told them, these beings threatened to conquer the gods, To punish humanity for their pride, Zeus split them in half into separate beings. These halves are said to be in constant search for each other in the world, Sana writes. And that when the two find each other, there is an unspoken understanding between them, they will feel unified and lie with each other in unity for eternity.

Actually, I always pictured myself in Tennessee—managing the distillery, handling sales, and raising my kids in a large house on a farm. Riding horses on a Saturday, little league games, too many tiny bodies in bed to make love on a Saturday morning but Saturday nights would be solely for my wife. Red wine by the fire and hours in bed.

The current scene hasn't arisen by chance. Rather, there's "a definite strategy to it," according to John Altman, who began reviving the old farm David's Folly with his wife. Like Semler and Moffet, Altman knows making a resilient alternative to the mainstream requires knowing how "to cultivate the community" as well as the land. These efforts are succeeding; this remote peninsula supports three weekly farmers' markets during the summer and one in the winter.

Being in my late 60s, what my wife calls the cocktail hour of life, some of these walks were much more tiring than I anticipated, even though my farm work keeps me reasonably fit. But that is the nature of research.

Even when the farm went bankrupt and my wife left me, I kept on training chickens to do kung-fu.

than she was deep. Her shallow draft let her go up rivers or right onto beaches without damage, but her passage over deeper water left a lot to be desired. She sidled along, with here a dip and there a curtsy, like a bundle-laden farm wife making her way through a crowded market. We seemed to be the sole cargo. A deckhand gave me a couple of apples to share with the horses, but little talk. So after I had parceled out the fruit, I settled myself near them on their straw and took Chade’s advice about resting. The winds were kind to us, and the captain took us in closer to the looming cliffs than I’d have thought possible, but unloading the horses from the vessel was still an unpleasant task. All of Chade’s lecturing and warnings had not prepared me for the blackness of night on the water. The lanterns on the deck seemed pathetic efforts, confusing me more with the shadows they threw than aiding me with their feeble light. In the end, a deckhand rowed Chade to shore in the ship’s dory. I went overboard with the reluctant horses, for I knew Sooty would fight a lead rope and probably swamp the dory. I clung to Sooty and encouraged her, trusting her common sense to take us toward the dim lantern on shore. I had a long line on Chade’s horse, for I didn’t want his thrashing too close to us in the water. The sea was cold, the night was black, and if I’d had any sense, I’d have wished myself elsewhere, but there is something in a boy that takes the mundanely difficult and unpleasant and turns it into a personal challenge and an adventure. I came out of the water dripping, chilled, and completely exhilarated. I kept Sooty’s reins and coaxed Chade’s horse in. By the time I had them both under control, Chade was beside me, lantern in hand, laughing exultantly. The dory man was already away and pulling for the ship. Chade gave me my dry things, but they did little good pulled on over my dripping clothes. “Where’s the path?” I asked, my voice shaking with my shivering. Chade gave a derisive snort. “Path? I had a quick look while you were pulling in my horse. It’s no path, it’s no more than the course the water takes when it runs off down the cliffs. But it will have to do.” It was a little better than he had reported, but not much. It was narrow and steep and the gravel on it was loose underfoot. Chade went before with the lantern. I followed, with the horses in tandem.

The planter himself was of a type then common in the South. He was a large, coarse looking man, with an immense paunch, wore a broad-brimmed, home-made straw hat and butter nut jeans clothes. His trousers were of the old-fashioned, "broad-fall" pattern. His hair was long, he had a scraggy, sandy beard, and chewed "long green" tobacco continually and viciously. But he was shrewd enough to know that ugly talk on his part wouldn't mend matters, but only make them worse, so he stood around in silence while we took his corn, but he looked as malignant as a rattlesnake. His wife was directly his opposite in appearance and demeanor. She was tall, thin, and bony, with reddish hair and a sharp nose and chin. And goodness, but she had a temper! She stood in the door of the dwelling house, and just tongue-lashed us "Yankees," as she called us, to the full extent of her ability. The boys took it all good naturedly, and didn't jaw back. We couldn't afford to quarrel with a woman. A year later, the result of her abuse would have been the stripping of the farm of every hog and head of poultry on it,

Roys sold the family farm and all of the possessions that they could not take with them for fifteen hundred dollars. Finally, in May of 1849, Roys Oatman, full of religious fervor, loaded up his wife and seven children into wagons and started southeast, to the Brewsterite rendezvous point; Independence, Missouri.

Etymologically, paroikia (a compound word from para and oikos) literally means “next to” or “alongside of the house” and, in a technical sense, meant a group of resident aliens. This sense of “parish” carried a theological context into the life of the Early Church and meant a “Christian society of strangers or aliens whose true state or citizenship is in heaven.” So whether one’s flock consists of fifty people in a church which can financially sustain a priest or if it is merely a few people in a living room whose priest must find secular employment, it is a parish. This original meaning of parish also implies the kind of evangelism that accompanies the call of a true parish priest. A parish is a geographical distinction rather than a member-oriented distinction. A priest’s duties do not pertain only to the people who fill the pews of his church on a Sunday morning. He is a priest to everyone who fills the houses in the “cure” where God as placed him. This ministry might not look like choir rehearsals, rector’s meetings, midweek “extreme” youth nights, or Saturday weddings. Instead, it looks like helping a battered wife find shelter from her abusive husband, discretely paying a poor neighbor’s heating oil bill when their tank runs empty in the middle of a bitter snow storm, providing an extra set of hands to a farmer who needs to get all of his freshly-baled hay in the barn before it rains that night, taking food from his own pantry or freezer to help feed a neighbor’s family, or offering his home for emergency foster care. This kind of “parochial” ministry was best modeled by the old Russian staretzi (holy men) who found every opportunity to incarnate the hands and feet of Christ to the communities where they lived. Perhaps Geoffrey Chaucer caught a glimpse of the true nature of parish life through his introduction of the “Parson” in the Prologue of The Canterbury Tales. Note how the issues of sacrifice, humility, and community mentioned above characterize this Parson’s cure even when opportunities were available for “greater” things: "There was a good man of religion, a poor Parson, but rich in holy thought and deed. He was also a learned man, a clerk, and would faithfully preach Christ’s gospel and devoutly instruct his parishioners. He was benign, wonderfully diligent, and patient in adversity, as he was often tested. He was loath to excommunicate for unpaid tithes, but rather would give to his poor parishioners out of the church alms and also of his own substance; in little he found sufficiency. His parish was wide and the houses far apart, but not even for thunder or rain did he neglect to visit the farthest, great or small, in sickness or misfortune, going on foot, a staff in his hand… He would not farm out his benefice, nor leave his sheep stuck fast in the mire, while he ran to London to St. Paul’s, to get an easy appointment as a chantry-priest, or to be retained by some guild, but dwelled at home and guarded his fold well, so that the wolf would not make it miscarry… There was nowhere a better priest than he. He looked for no pomp and reverence, nor yet was his conscience too particular; but the teaching of Christ and his apostles he taught, and first he followed it himself." As we can see, the distinction between the work of worship and the work of ministry becomes clear. We worship God via the Eucharist. We serve God via our ministry to others. Large congregations make it possible for clergy and congregation to worship anonymously (even with strangers) while often omitting ministry altogether. No wonder Satan wants to discredit house churches and make them “odd things”! Thus, while the actual house church may only boast a membership in the single digits, the house church parish is much larger—perhaps into the hundreds as is the case with my own—and the overall ministry is more like that of Christ’s own—feeding, healing, forgiving, engaging in all the cycles of community life, whether the people attend