FIL leaves home

My father in law gets teary eyed talking about his older brother (he had one brother and six sisters) and how wonderful it would have been if they had been able to work on the family farm together.

But I find out from his sisters that FIL was the family's black sheep. The father was sick and died young, but ornery until then. The mother depended on her sons to keep a high altitude, short-season farm going. FIL didn't finish high school until he got back from the war. Then he went on to get a college education on the GI bill.

What discipline he got was from spending time in the military during WWII. Even then, his stories of those years are of a willful young man who took risks without worrying about the consequences. He does tend to live in the present, and he still takes risks.

When the war ended, he discovered he liked living in warmer places, and to his credit, left home so he could grow warm-season crops. He never looked back. From what his sisters say, they didn't think he'd make much of himself, and were later surprised when he and his wife managed to raise a family of decent hard working children and hang on to the farm long enough to see it prosper under their son's management. I must add here that in talking to an old-timer friend of ours, who worked in a local retail shop and knew most everyone in town for decades, referred to my husband's family as poor. "Everyone was poor then," my sister-in-law said. "No," this sweet little lady protested. "Your family was poor."


Poor as in, the farm, all 320 acres and a 50-cow dairy, was never enough to even pay the bills, until my husband came back and took over the work and management.

Sometimes risks do pay off, in this case buying land as it came available without a single thought of how it would be paid for or who would do the work. My FIL has been a lucky man.