We lived in the country. My family was complete at the beginning, dad, two sons, and mom, which is me. I was grateful to live on this farm. My husband and I decided to settle there when we got married. Ha, that was many years ago. I will tell you my story:
There we got used to living, to seeing our plants grow, and our own farm animals. We grew stronger as everything was abundant around us. The cow had her first calf and after it came others.
Fire in the field
The hens had so many eggs that we had to start giving them away to friends and then we started marketing.
The pig also became productive. It was too much for the four of us, so we hired two workers to help us.
The harvests were always produced with much pleasure for us. The seeds we collected were good for sowing again; our land had been graced by God so that everything was produced with the greatest comfort. We also had to hire 3 more laborers to help us with the crops.
The children grew up, and the years passed. Each acquired his own habits. One of them was the worst. The worst decision a man can make when he is a working man. My oldest son insisted on drinking alcohol. Every day after work he would take his horse and go to the tavern in town.
At first, we didn't see it as bad, but then we realized that it was getting worse and worse. He was more and more in a hurry to finish early and gallop off to town. He had fallen in love with a girl in the tavern, which was the second worst decision in his life.
Meanwhile, our daughter, our poor daughter who helped us with the chores in the fields, married the smartest man in town. I say smart because he deceived all of us in the family.
My daughter silently put up with his mistreatment. She even became pregnant, but her husband's mistreatment prevented her child from seeing the light of day.
One bad day the decline began and the whole disaster started with our daughter. When she lost her baby she went into unbalanced behavior. To say the least, she went crazy. Her husband sent her back home. My daughter had a lost look in her eyes, she was no longer her old self. The abuse coupled with the loss of her child caused her to lose her sanity.
Many disasters were happening at home and all of them were caused by my poor daughter. I had to go after her to take care of the things she did without malice.
After she passed the title to my eldest son, nothing good came of her infatuation. He left in the taberna and next to that woman all the money he earned on the farm. He even got into so much trouble that we had to start getting rid of many animals and farm equipment to pay off his debts. Yet he continued to squander and nothing would get him out of his mistake.
He would arrive drunk, leave the horse to his fate, grab his lamp, and head for the barn to continue his drinking. On his last chance, he was not so lucky, and the stable caught fire. We didn't realize it in time. Our house began to burn, and my husband felt the creaking of the timbers as they fell and collapsed from the fire.
As best he could he helped me to get out, we tried to look for our daughter but she was not in her room. We could do nothing, the fire did not allow my husband to find our daughter. In a few minutes the house, the barn, everything around us was just rubble and smoke.
My son didn't even realize he had started the fire. He fell asleep, drunk, and there the fire found him. Alone and defenseless before the flames.
My husband and I were left together, with a sense of desolation. The whole farm that had given us abundance for so many years of our lives, was now just clutter, debris, and darkness; traces of where there had been life, now all had been taken by fire, turned into food for the ground.
We had to sell what was left, the land with no harvest, no house, no animals for sustenance.
Today we thank God because we pick up the old rags of what we are given by the good people we meet. Because of our friends, those with whom we shared harvest and good times, they were gone. They were all gone, not their physical person but their spiritual person. Nothing was left of them to the point, they forgot us.
We collect as many old clothes as we can. We share them with the most needy, so we manage to carry on life, now that we are old and can still keep ourselves alive until God's will is done in us. God gives it to us and God takes it away.
