Land Rich, Money Poor
Our connection is to the land
We Are Of The Earth
Land Rich, Money Poor
When my partner and I first moved into the house we live in now, it was abandoned. The owner was in foreclosure and tried to sell it. We saw the listing and made an offer, we just had to wait till the bank accepted the offer. The roof was leaking, several pipes had burst, and the grass was two and a half feet tall.
The owner and I spoke and he let us move in while we cleared up the title. He had a deep connection to the land and the area and due to circumstances, had to move away with his family. He loved the house and everything around it. We felt the same way.
My partner and I started cleaning up the place and fixing the burst pipes. We patched up the roof temporarily till we closed. We did all the things you do when you move into a new place with your family.
The first thing I did was mow the lawn. I worked the land.
My late father grew up in a farming village. He hails from a long lineage of German farmers. My grandparents were farmers and their parents before them. They farmed land along the river and up the hill.
My uncles would help my grandfather in the fields growing potatoes, cabbage, and other things. My aunts would help my grandmother raise my father and his twin sibling, my aunt. They cooked and tended to a smaller fruit vegetable garden.
Yes, the duties were separated by gender.
My father would tell us that he grew up poor but they always had food to eat, and they were happy.
When my parents moved to New Jersey, he bought a house with the largest property he could afford. I grew up on the largest piece of property in our neighborhood. He built a huge garden for my mother and himself and we had a big grove of trees at the end of the property.
For a six-year-old kid, it was paradise.
Snakes. They were everywhere in the tall grass. I saw at least 15 harmless garter snakes, but they scare the crap out of you. I was on the lookout for venomous copperheads and rattlesnakes. They live in my area and hunt for mice and other rodents. Tall grass attracts rodents.
I had cut down the grass in the main lawn areas and needed to weed whack the edges. It took me 4 hours to tame the land around the new house and now all that was left was the edging.
I fired up the weed whacker and got to work. I went around the septic field when all of sudden a garter snake came flying up into the area. I had weed whacked the poor thing.
I was standing at the edge of a field in Ranchos de Taos. Water was trickling through small ditches in the field. An old man was walking through the fields, inspecting the small sprouts of alfalfa that had started to grow.
I was up in that part of New Mexico for a project. My friend and project manager Richard came along to help me set up meetings with the local people. Richard was a local guy himself, growing up in this part of the Land of Enchantment.
“You see that farmer, Tommy?” He said. “He’s land rich but money poor.”
Land rich, money poor. That saying bounced around in my head that day and for years later.
I nodded.
“That old man was born on this land, grew up on this land, worked the land, and will die on this land.” He paused. “He is the land.”
The garter snake lay twitching on the grass next to my feet. I looked at it and saw that I whacked off the top of its head. It was a gruesome but quick death for the snake. I felt horrible but this wasn’t intentional.
I spent many weeks thinking of that snake. I thought about how connected it was to the land, like that older farmer from New Mexico. It was born there, grew up there, and died there.
My grandfather died before I was born and my grandmother when I was six years old. Both of them died in their farmhouse, on their land. My father died in his bed, far from where he was born but on his land.
My partner loves to garden and grow vegetables. It makes her so happy to be able to supplement our meals with fresh tomatoes or squash. When the harvest season comes, it’s always so bountiful. The earth is bountiful.
We are connected to the land, whether we want to believe it or not. All of our food has some root in the land. Grasses fed the cow that you eat as a hamburger. The bread you bake came from the land. We are nothing, if not for the land.
We tie our identities to land. My father was German and he felt a connection to where he was born. I have friends from Colombia and they speak of how proud they are of being Colombian. History, lineage, and family are always tied to the land.
Refugees talk of the land they were born on and had to flee. My aunt who fled East Prussia during World War 2 still talks about where she was born, the farmlands, and the peace and quiet.
The land feeds us and connects through generations.
While that sentiment makes for a wonderful story, we often take a narrow view of the land. We always look at how land benefits us, and how we can exploit it and bend it to our way of living.
We dump our plastic bottles all over it. Trash blows over the dunes along the shore. We find aluminum cans in the wilderness. Coffee cups get hauled up from the bottom of the ocean.
We trample over the land (and ocean for that matter) without a care or thought except for what it can do for us.
What about the garter snakes? What about the whales? All the other living creatures that crawl, fly, creep, run, swim, and gallop across the land and sea?
What have we done for them? We’ve pushed them out. We cut up the land with fences. We contaminate it, we exploit it, we overfish it, rip it up, and we give very little afterthought to the other living creatures that rely on it.
What have we sacrificed for the sake of money and progress?
We were once land rich and money poor, now we’re money rich with poor land.
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