Gabriel: Welcome to Earlobe Calming: a collection of desperate, vulnerable, and collaborative acts.
This is a money talk by my mother, Deanne Coleman, entitled Milk.
Deanne: I remember my mom mixing powdered milk with water and sometimes powedered milk with half a gallon of powdered milk and and half a gallon of regular milk and just trying to stretch things. I think that is probably one of the first memories I have of things being a little bit stretched, that we weren’t like other families that just had their gallon of milk in the refridgerator because of the size of the family and because we had — you know my dad on a teacher’s salary and eight children in the house. I remember not liking it but it wasn’t something that I felt like I would complain or criticize my mom for or feel bad about having that. I think it was just something that I knew that we had to do, you know, in order to make things meet.
The dream of theirs, of both my parents was to be able to have a Grade A dairy farm. I was going into high school and so was not as happy about the move that we made but that was a central part of our making a living. So milk was everything, that’s how we made our money, the cows were very important. The whole family worked hard to make sure it was a good dairy operation. It was a point of pride you know, when you had milk out of the bulk tank and cream that we never had you know? When I was little I don’t remember ever having cream in the house and that you could have cream on your cereal, that was a prideful thing. That was a really great thing.
And then when the farm crisis hit not too long after we moved, a few years after we moved onto the farm, the milk again was what we had – what we always had. Whether we liked it or not that was what kept us going, being able to get the milk out of the bulk tank and potato soup and macaroni and cheese and anything that you could make from milk and cheese and butter, that’s what we had. So it was a good thing that we had that, that we were able to have that to sustain us but also kind of a love-hate with milk and the cows because they were also things that were kind of dragging us down, the amount of work that we had to put into it in order to continue to have that be sustained. My dad lost a lot of weight which, you know, was good to some extent but they worked really really hard and then you see that as being more of a chore, more of a negative.
Both of my grandparents, or both sets of grandparents were farmers and all growing up my parents had land, sometimes just a few acres but enough to keep some animals on and have crops – and always had a big garden. All throughout my life and even to today that’s what’s given me hope when things have been tough or we’re wondering how to make ends meet that’s one thing that we always had was a little bit of land to grow something on, the knowledge to make your own food, to know how to stretch it. So that ability to provide for yourself and to provide for others was improtant and still today. I can see that throughline of experiences kind of tying that together with the farming, the dairy, their dreams. You know, they made it work. And so I guess in my life that’s what I try and do, like hold onto some little thing to try and make it work.
Gabriel: If you’re interested in contributing a Money Talk you can get in touch via the email in the episode description. If you’d like to propose a project for Earlobe Calming you can do so at https://gabriel.town/earlobe/create. Thank you for listening and thank you for your help.
Be First to Comment