inheritance

“I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in.”

In class when we talked about this quote the main focus was on the money encumbrances and other monetary issues that went along with inheriting a farm in Thoreau's time. Having inherited a farm myself, I don't believe that this is solely what Thoreau is referring to.

My grandfather died about eight years ago, which left my mother, my grandmother, my aunt, my two cousins, my brother and I to do all of the things that make our small hay farm work. We were lost. The grass grew slow that summer and we didn't know how to speed up the process. What had grandaddy done? No one knew how to drive the tractor around the field to cut the grass down to dry, and then turn it so that the dew doesn't mildew and then the baler. Should we do square bales or round bales? We decided to let someone else bale our hay on halves. He would bale it and we would keep half and he would take half. The hay that my grandfather bred at the agriculture research center, well known for it's nutritional value, horse-quality hay. So we moved our half into the barn and packed it into the truck, carting it to everyone that we could think of, Ms. Philip's donkeys and such and so's horses. Quietly, desperately, we tried to sell enough to cover the fertilizer and the pesticides and the fees for spraying. In the winter we burned off the fields, putting on bonnets and face masks and boots and raking the coals behind us along the edges of the field, watching the brownish-gray grass turn black towards the center, watching to make sure that the trees don't catch fire. We forgot to watch the boys, and they grew up wild, with no taste for farming, and Nana got tired and old and started to give up. Quietly, desperately, we tried to hold on to his legacy, but the vegetable garden lie fallow and the round bales went unsold and, eventually, we burned them. We rented out the fields, but we couldn't stop farming. We got cows and chickens, grew onions and herbs. We were conquered by the weeds and the braying cows and the squawking chickens, chained to the ground and the addicted to the drug of pulling your livelihood out of the ground. The farm equipment that grandaddy used to pull behind the tractor was rusted, just scrap metal really, but we wouldn't dare haul it away. We were farmers and this was our farm. We can't imagine our life without the farm, the barn full of power tools that we don't know how to use, the cow, the chickens, some raised from chicks, and the gardens with their herbs so sweet and savory.