To The Farm - The More Things Change...

As previously mentioned, we scheduled our flight in the wee hours of Christmas morning.  We did this in part so the Tweedles would sleep through most of the flight and we hoped, our wait at the airport.  Due to some troubles with our boarding passes, which I won't get into because I'm still angry enough to spit, we almost missed our outgoing 1AM flight despite arriving at the airport 2.5 hours early.  But ultimately, we did make our flight and arrived in Dallas around Noon.  My Dad (here forth known as "The Old Guy"), picked us up at the airport and we made it to the farm a bit before 4PM.  Just in time for Christmas dinner! YUM!

I had to work the whole first week we were there, so I didn't get a chance to mingle with my visiting relatives as much as I would have liked.  This worked out well for the second week though when I was actually on vacation because I got to have a lot of downtime just with the family.

I can't possibly put into words the feeling of comfort, welcoming and warmth I get from being on the farm.  As a child from a family that moved around a lot, the farm was a constant.  I knew no matter where we moved to, the farm would always be there with grandma and grandpa and cows and cousins.  We didn't have game stations, ipods, movies or internet.  Heck, I can remember having a single rotary phone for ages and ages! 

What we did have was cousins, uncles/aunts and my grandparents.  We had our imaginations and board games.  We had fishing and swimming and plain old tramping across the property. We had chickens to chase feed and cows who had the cutest calves.  And we had an old bull we could ride on he was so tame! 

So much has changed around the farm (not just the house) since I was a kid.  This visit we had movies (netflix and dvds), laptops, tablet games (Angry Birds is soooo addictive!), computer games, and tv.  Loads of tv.  But some things didn't change.  My Uncle Keith - who btw, is the best uncle in the whole wide universe and was always the "fun" one when I was a kid - came to visit every day.  He took us all out to feed admittedly, a much smaller herd of cattle.

There was still fishing at the big pond.

There were still cousins to play with - if only for a few days.

And there was plenty of property to tramp across (this view is still only a small part of it but if you look really hard, you can see the house way in the back.)

It's amazing to me how things change, and how much they stay the same.  I still have the same feelings about the farm as when I was a kid.  I still feel happier and more relaxed there than anywhere else, even my own home.  And yet, the place is so changed from when I was a kid.  I can only hope that my kids (ALL of my kids, even the big ones) find at least some measure of the joy from the farm that I have.


Seriously.. Thoughts?