Cows & Cooking & Crafts. . . B J O'S Way

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Before anyone thinks of the Trimble family as struggling around some farm, or even having a deep desire to get back to one, I'd better own up to the facts. We live in Los Angeles and it would be even if we wanted to somewhat difficult to return to a farm. We have a nine-year-old, mentally retarded daughter who's now in a fabulous school, and we just couldn't move far away from it. My husband, John, is a rope and twine salesman (which always gives rise to an image of him measuring off yards of string on street corners!) for a company that represents some of the largest cordage mills in the world. I'm into arts and crafts and people and Miscellaneous. Kathryn Arwen (Katwen) is our Elf Child . . . dealing with her is somewhat like handling orchids. Lora JoAnne is 6-going-on-35, very intelligent. Nature gave us two opposites. We also have at last count two large cats and three small ones, a set of goldfish and an assortment of southern California birds that frequent the feeder just outside our breakfast window.

We're buying a large old 1920's house and currently having fun repairing it. The built-ins are all mahogany and the dining room has bas-relief grapes and vines all around the top of each wall (now, that's class!). I'll soon have a sewing room in the basement (anybody need a custom made Renaissance costume?), and the garage will be a studio by summertime. There's room for lots of flowers and plantings . . . and even for a rooftop vegetable garden.

Meanwhile, speaking of getting back to the land, I would like my kids to know the fun of being on a farm . . . how to try milking a cow for instance, Or the sheer exuberance of racing across a field of alfalfa on a neighbor's fat old horse. Or the crisp clear radiance of a summer pre-dawn when the meadowlarks call. Or the scratches and bruises you get climbing an old oak to gather galls for Grandma's dyes. And eating sun-warmed strawberries . . . . But, actually, my parents' farm wasn't much of a step up from the dirt floor tent that my crop picking grandmother had (she raised me for the most part). In fact, I have better memories of her tent out on the California desert sharing our fortunes with bracero familiesthan I do of the wonderfulness of farming.

I mention this because MOTHER is full of letters (the P & S pages especially) from starry eyed people who want to homestead without knowing what in the blazes they're doing. There are a lot of good farms going to waste because people who didn't know what they wanted or what they were getting into have tied up the acreage. How? Simple. They go out and start homesteading (which ties up land in California, for example, for at least 7 years) and then find it's more work than they expected. Or they get ill from exposure in drafty cabins and damp ground and all the other things that happen when tenderfeet go out into the wilds. And the land lies there ignored and forgotten when the people wander on.The fruit trees go wild and the pastures turn to weeds. The state can't do anything with the land until the statute of limitaions runs out, and other homesteaders can't do anything with it either (unless they want to take the chance of just settling in and hoping nobody will run them off about the time they've brought the whole farm up to snuff).

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