Drivin' Wheel

I began working for people outside my family at six, in a minor way then, but significant because the so-called work process was to be important my whole life; and still is. How work functions is of critical importance to all societies and cultures, and yet much of what it is is largely assumed.

My feeling is that I was attractive as an employee because I was taught to work and liked it. It helped that I grew up in the great depression and I never had difficulty finding work to do. And I was able to observe workers in my neighborhood, talk to others about it, and generally be intrigued by the way people made a living and provided for their families.

In the last several decades I have been able to be a supervisor of other people's work, an employer, as I have continued to work along side of them; even after "retirement." Lately I have had the pleasure of working with young people who have kindly volunteered on our farm.

Because we have very little money we are dependent upon people to help us with our scaled down vegetable growing operation.

Drivin wheel came up recently because my son is working as a carpenter for a local builder and I heard him mentioned as a driving force on the crew. He sets a pace, as does, I'm sure, his twin brother, Alexander, as a chef in the kitchen. My drivin wheel days are over, of course: 80, arthritic and a little guarded. Who wants to spend his last years in rehab or worse? It took me 78 years to get my first hernia .... cuidado is now the motto.

Coal Train

One of my favorite sounds are train whistles, which we can hear from the Soo Line when the winds are right. Unfortunately the trains are hauling coal to power plants to the East, and these trains will soon be hauling fracking sand, if they are not already doing so. What price a sound that comes out of your childhood, associated with so many positive things, when it is now connected to energy systems which are no longer acceptable?

Fracking sand is now radically changing communities, especially one close by where we have friends and neighbors, some of whom will lose their homes, have to be displaced to who knows where (?). And this doesn't even mention what is happening to the communities themselves. This relatively new industry points to jobs, of course, and has even had a jobs fair in the community referred to above which as this is written is being destroyed as it is being radicalized by a technology which is largely suspect for environmental reasons.

Tragedy attends us in many ways, we have to , somehow, make our way through. I have not heard the acronym NIMBY* once within all the dialogs here, either by those who would not live and needn't live near where all the disruption and pollution will occur (corporate investors, etc.) nor by those who are potential employees within this (out of work people of all kinds, from all walks of life). Meanwhile, the XL pipeline from Canada is on hold and the Canadians are threatening to sell their "dirty oil" to China (and does that mean the pipeline will run to Vancouver? May be some trouble ahead there).

* Not In My Back Yard