However, “going out and doing massage was a challenge for me.” “I thought that I could do it until I was really old,” Jane says. Jane credits this phase of life for aiding her transition to full-time farm life.įor more than 20 years, Jane worked as a massage therapist. Another sort of death that wise women of a certain age experience, the change of life can be transformational in many beneficial ways. She doesn’t miss the stress of driving to appointments and getting enraged at traffic, which she admits was especially stressful as she went through menopause. Allowing that “work” part of her to die has been relatively painless. Like Pamla, Jane Post is also embracing her post-career life. She proved Pamla’s words of wisdom true, that you can’t spend your entire life grieving. Read more about her love of organic farming in the first article in this series. Going through that process was tough, and beautiful too.” The shift in life propelled her into the realm of agricultural activism. Her husband passed away during the time she was shrimp farming, and as a result, she says, “I lost a lot of my energy. In her personal life, Susan has also felt the pain of loss. With guidance, Susan learned to basically put the fish into ice cold water and they would slowly go to sleep. She remembers having nightmares about it. How do you kill them? How do you deal with that?” Susan worried next about how to harvest the fish: “I’m going to bring out all these live, beautiful fish. Never saw anything stressed or anything in any way that made me uncomfortable with raising fish that way, which amazed me.” “I never lost a fish, never saw a dead fish, ever. “The idea of keeping tilapia in cages just didn’t seem right to me,” she says, but she reluctantly agreed to try it. To manage shrimp and tilapia in the same pond, Susan had to cage the predatory fish so they wouldn’t eat the shrimp. Her tilapia knew when it was feeding time, and Susan got excited every time they would “boil the water” as she describes it, churning up bubbles when she tossed in food. She went some time without eating meat, has vegetarian friends, and has come to the conclusion that, “If you’re going to eat meat, then you should be able to kill it.” Susan Harkins Karen LanierĪs an aquaculture research farmer, Susan Harkins also struggled with the idea of humanely raising and ultimately ending the lives of the fish she had grown to love. “But you know, soft-hearted women have been doing this for generations,” she says. When she first got chickens to raise, her partner, Steve, doubted her ability to kill them. She accepts the fact that raising meat goats means that taking them to the stockyards will end their lives. “As you get older, too, you learn this: You can’t spend your life grieving,” Pamla says. On the other end of the spectrum, Pamla shares her sense of awe in becoming accustomed to animals coming into this world: “The births were incredible. Even so, Pamla views losing livestock on what she calls “a different scale of trauma.” Chickens disappear when predators take them, and as Pamla says, “It’s sad, but everything loves to eat chicken. It was very hard for her to watch the mothers paw at the babies and cry for days afterwards. She recalls a fiercely cold winter when birthing kids froze to death. She lost many goats to parasites early in her farming ventures. However, she acknowledges, “There’s a big difference between livestock and pets.” She came to terms with it all in a healthy way. She applied this to losing dogs, grandparents, good friends and relatives. Years prior, she had explored the concept of dying well and the acceptance of death. How did she manage learning these lessons later in life? Accepting the cycles of life could be different for someone who doesn’t grow up on a farm. It’s different to live your dream and face the reality of being responsible for other living things that have fairly short life spans. Beginning at age 50 with a new outlook and a new piece of property, she applied the knowledge she’d built over her lifetime to her own farm. Pamla Wood’s retirement was like a rebirth for her. Read their insight in previous articles on the topics of love and money. Five women farmers interviewed for the Wisdom of Women Farmers project share their perspectives in this final installment of articles. We can learn from resilient elders how they’ve built their farm-based lives through cycles of death and birth in a variety of forms. Living through five decades of life means inevitable losses affect you. On a farm, it can be a daily reality, but that doesn’t make it easy.
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