talking about her chickens or the apocalypse, I wind the conversation down
I think I've missed something here
Turkish, are her chickens scary ?
No, they are all right. It's kind of a joke now. Forest creatures decimated her chickens last year. I was thinking, "now she can save money on animal feed." She went out and got 10-12 more chickens. A raccoon or something got a lot of the new chicks. She went and got some more chickens. No reason, just to have them. Realistically, 3 laying hens give you all the eggs you need. It's not about that, it's about hoarding (and some plan she keeps talking about like selling the eggs, but I don't think she ever gets to that point to make some $$).
Rabbit dies. Get another one. All it does is sit in a cage all day, poor thing, while forest animals circle it at night. At least it's of the ground. The geese were also killed (I don't feel sorry for the gander, as it always attacked me when I fed it, but I do feel bad for its mate). At least she hasn't gotten more geese.
She's into doomsday prepping. She used to say that if something happened, that I was to bring my whole family (a toddler and a baby, mind you), and uBPDx's extended family up her 5 acres to survive. I replied that it's hard enough to get out of the city on even a Saturday afternoon sometimes, much less with 3-4 million people, at least a million of them having the same thoughts. Get away from the coast. Cross the central valley of California (going through another million people), and somehow getting 130 miles to my mom's little spread, where she probably would have already been looted by local bandits (and though it's a nice, small community, there is a "scumbag" element up there). How would we get fuel, food, water, and defend ourselves from bandits? I have firearms, and am well trained and skilled with them. But life isn't an action movie. I'm a father, not the Terminator.
I then asked what we would do for shelter (her home is unlivable short of weeks of work to clear out junk, and that doesn't account for the animal waste, mildew and smoke). She said we could build shelters. What about food? We could plant crops. Ok, but what about in the meantime, what would we do for food while we waited months for food to grow, assumnig we could water it? Her creek is all but seasonal, and unpotable for drinking (not to mention that upstream people would probably dam it for water supply). No real answers to this.
She's talked for years about putting a million gallon water tank up the hill for gravity fed water. It's actually a good idea, but where was she going to get the money for that? She has no well, despite me encouraging her when she bought the place my last year of high school to drill a well so she could get off the county water system. My buddy and I crawled under her house a year ago and ran a new water line from one side of the house to a faucet on the other side. We bypassed all the plumbing in the house, basically. She gets her water from an outside faucet to water her animals, to drink, and to haul into the house to flush her one working toilet. All dreams, no realistic plans, or putting those plans into action.
When I was a little boy, she used to talk about a farm we were going to have. I loved her descriptions, so vivid! I can still recall in my mind 35+ years later how I envisioned what she was saying.
In the '80s, it was all about global thermonuclear war. This was around the time she was into the freeze-dried food pyramid scheme. She segued into how we would survive after the apocalypse. Emerging from a well stocked bomb shelter, we would find other survivors and built a new community. I would find a local girl, get married, and start to build the population over.
All the things she talks about are quite imaginative. Maybe I get more of my wild imagination from her than I think! I'm a realist, however, and it's done me well in life to withstand getting influenced by peoples' fantasy and magical thinking. Well, except for uBPDx, but that's another story... . and I resisted a lot of what she "planned" from the beginning, which is why we had trouble from the beginning.
My mom's story is not over. Such a long life, and a very hard beginning. So much potential, and so much waste. Living on the edge is what she knows best, kind of like my uBPDx and her abandonment script. Driven by their fears is no way to live, but live like that they do.
