The thrill of fetching eggs

I was a farm kid. My boys are not. Oddly, they seem to have the farming bug -- perhaps more than I do. On a recent trip to my parents' house, my older son Liam spent an hour with my mum grinding wheat in a coffee grinder to make flour. Later that day he said to me, "Dad, I want to grow wheat so I can make flour for people."

This past week, my family and I took a drive to Minneapolis-St. Paul for a short holiday. One day while my wife was shopping at the Albertville Outlet Mall, the boys and I went to Kelley Farm, a working 1860s farm near Elk River northwest of the Twin Cities. I couldn't get them to leave. They were thrilled with fetching eggs and pumping water. I used to help my grandma get the eggs out of our old coop. The Kelley Farm coop looked and smelled exactly the same. A woman dressed in a long dress, apron and bonnet helped them lift the flap, look in the nests and reach under hens for eggs. The boys went to the hen house twice and got four eggs in total. If you asked them, they might say it was the most memorable event of the trip. After that they pumped water from the well to take into the house. Fun!

While we were there, another visitor volunteered to fill the ox-drawn wagon with sheep manure to take to the fields. The farm also had four pigs -- three sows and one boar -- outside in the mud. You know the expression, "Happier than a pig in sh**" Well the only thing that seemed to make these pigs happy was when we scratched their dandruffy skin with a stick. Modern pig raising techniques are far cleaner and much more appetizing.

Pigs kept outside also stink just as much as pigs in barns. When we first arrived a man was chopping wood to take into the house. He held a piece of oak for us to smell. "Maybe I'm weird, but I love that smell," he said. "All I smell is pigs," I thought. He then piled the wood on my boys' arms and guided them to the wood bin inside the house. Work. Work. Work.

I've been thinking about that old fashioned farm ever since I got back. Do we really yearn for that life? Just because two little boys had a great three hours among animals and pumps and wood stoves, does that mean they'd really like to live that way? Of course my first thought was, "Not a chance." But then again, there might be something satisfying in knowing that everything you need is right there around you. In those days, you also had another 20 people living within a one-mile radius of your farm. Pioneering was hell, but you were also building a life and a community from scratch. Was that more satisfying than farming today?

I have no interest in going back to those days. I don't want to live like that. But just say my boys and I did choose to live like that. Could we be happy? Perhaps. We'd also be lonely because we'd never see their mother again.