Day Three - Your Parents
4 Sep 2010 18:20![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nephirI mentioned them in my intro but my folks were something unto themselves.
My father wanted desperately to be a survivalist... in my teen years our garage had enough canned goods in to to keep us fed for 3 years. To this day I don't eat canned veggies as a result. On top of his canned food obsession he also hunted.
There was this one time where he returned from a hunting trip while I was in the shower. I was used to showering then taking a run though the house into the garage to grab what I was going to where that day. This particular day as I stepped into the garage I didn't bother to flip on the light and ran head first into the deer carcass hanging from the rafters 4 foot from the door.
I was not terribly amused as you may have guessed.
He was very much a 'self taught' man and believed that to stop learning was to a terribly crime and it was I think through him that I gained my love of reading and learning.
My mom was a true daughter of pioneers - she and her family had traveled to the central valley of California during the Dust Bowl era from Oklahoma. Grapes of Wrath? Yeah, that was my mom's family pretty much. While she was in school until a few years after my sibs were born she worked in the cotton fields chopping cotton and other fields picking fruit and veggies.
As a result she had a 'do it yourself' attitude for everything in life and I got a fair share of that for myself from her. She never met a home project that she couldn't handle and if she did, she had five brothers that were willing to lend a hand if needed.
I lost my dad to a heart attack in 1996 and my mother to complications of COPD in 2008. Without them I wouldn't be the person (flaws and all) that I am today. I miss them both.
My father wanted desperately to be a survivalist... in my teen years our garage had enough canned goods in to to keep us fed for 3 years. To this day I don't eat canned veggies as a result. On top of his canned food obsession he also hunted.
There was this one time where he returned from a hunting trip while I was in the shower. I was used to showering then taking a run though the house into the garage to grab what I was going to where that day. This particular day as I stepped into the garage I didn't bother to flip on the light and ran head first into the deer carcass hanging from the rafters 4 foot from the door.
I was not terribly amused as you may have guessed.
He was very much a 'self taught' man and believed that to stop learning was to a terribly crime and it was I think through him that I gained my love of reading and learning.
My mom was a true daughter of pioneers - she and her family had traveled to the central valley of California during the Dust Bowl era from Oklahoma. Grapes of Wrath? Yeah, that was my mom's family pretty much. While she was in school until a few years after my sibs were born she worked in the cotton fields chopping cotton and other fields picking fruit and veggies.
As a result she had a 'do it yourself' attitude for everything in life and I got a fair share of that for myself from her. She never met a home project that she couldn't handle and if she did, she had five brothers that were willing to lend a hand if needed.
I lost my dad to a heart attack in 1996 and my mother to complications of COPD in 2008. Without them I wouldn't be the person (flaws and all) that I am today. I miss them both.
