Self-Sufficiency in Style
grandmother's skills
|
Self-Sufficiency in Style grandmother's skills |
|
|
In a hundred years from today, will anyone know that you had ever existed? |
|
They might have a name, perhaps a date and place.
But that is about all. Take a piece of paper and work it out. How much do you know about your forbears in the year 1902? Unless they were particularly infamous, you won't know much. In a hundred years your great grand-children won't know too much about you either. It is quite a chilling thought. Shakespeare, that genius for all times, had it right.... |
|
|
“The evil that men do lives after them; the good that men do is oft interred with their bones.” |
|
|
You could rob a bank. |
We all know that to be true. The
quote is familiar, of course. It comes immediately after "Friends,
Romans, Countrymen..."
Short of going out and robbing a bank, there seems little we can do apart from writing a best seller on a Shakespearian scale. Let's face it, we are going to be forgotten. |
|
Not quite. The bard forgot the memories of children. Think back to your earliest memories. Those are the ones that made the strongest impression and are the least likely to be forgotten. Those are the memories that you will repeat to your children and grandchildren. They may well repeat them, in turn, to their children. A kind of immortality, for a time, perhaps. |
|
|
Wanting to be remembered for ever is a poor motive for doing anything, but
the actual memory may well be of something much more worthwhile.
School teachers are often part of those early memories, even more so a parent, or commonly a grandparent, that has taught a child something worthwhile. |
Most children remember a teacher that made an impression. |
|
You can return to adulthood and Inheritance. |
To teach a child to milk a cow, or make butter or cheese: to ride a horse
or to swim, to shoot or to fish, to knit or to sew.
To give them a little of a childhood amongst butterfly meadows and shady trees. To roam with a dog or feed a chicken. To watch a lamb being born or struggle through the mud to water the sow. These are the things, the skills, of which childhood are made. You will leave something of value, the memory of which will last several generations. "My grandmother could milk a cow, she taught me. She told me that her grandmother had taught her." ...a worthy kind of immortality. |
|
a kind of immortality from the appropriately named Hangman's Cottage, just to the south of Misery Corner. |
