Worn
Aging rural woman, tired and distressed
That farm was in my Daddy's family for over 150 years. I grew up playing in the barn and the fields. We took it over when Daddy died and worked it, and for 20 years we made a good living from it. Didn't get rich, but it put food on the table for our 5 kids and us and we had a pretty good life. We had to take out a mortgage on it in order to finance a new tractor, which we sorely needed - you can't run a farm these days without a good tractor. We needed some other machinery as well. It was all going OK for a while until we had 3 summers in a row of drought. That meant 3 bad years for crops.
We didn't make enough to keep up the payments. We worked with the banker, and I went and took a job at Wal-Mart, just to have some insurance for us and a little extra cash. But then it just got to the point where we had to let it go. I feel so ashamed, like I've let my Daddy and Grand-daddy and all my family down. Feels like a spike right through my heart. Now we live in town and I feel like all the people look at us like we're losers. I mean they know us, but we don't fit in with the town-folk and we're no longer country folk.
It don't make a lot of sense any more, how hard we worked and to end up like this? It just don't make sense.
That farm was in my Daddy's family for over 150 years. I grew up playing in the barn and the fields. We took it over when Daddy died and worked it, and for 20 years we made a good living from it. Didn't get rich, but it put food on the table for our 5 kids and us and we had a pretty good life. We had to take out a mortgage on it in order to finance a new tractor, which we sorely needed - you can't run a farm these days without a good tractor. We needed some other machinery as well. It was all going OK for a while until we had 3 summers in a row of drought. That meant 3 bad years for crops.
We didn't make enough to keep up the payments. We worked with the banker, and I went and took a job at Wal-Mart, just to have some insurance for us and a little extra cash. But then it just got to the point where we had to let it go. I feel so ashamed, like I've let my Daddy and Grand-daddy and all my family down. Feels like a spike right through my heart. Now we live in town and I feel like all the people look at us like we're losers. I mean they know us, but we don't fit in with the town-folk and we're no longer country folk.
It don't make a lot of sense any more, how hard we worked and to end up like this? It just don't make sense.
