Thanksgiving Day is tomorrow and I thought I’d do one more post about something I’ve become far more grateful for in later life than I was in my younger years.  In fact, it’s something that I chafed under as a youngster, but looking back not only embrace, but something for which I’m incredibly grateful.

            Here it is:  I grew up in a home that embraced different.

            Mom created a name for herself in college by wanting to start an alcohol-free women’s sorority.  She was blackballed by the dean and administrators as a troublemaker, rebel and “you mean what we offer isn’t good enough for you?  Who needs more choice?” Her father (my grandfather) was an alcoholic who eventually walked away and abandoned my grandmother and two small daughters.  In college, pretty, smart, outgoing Mom was the pick of the freshmen to join a women’s sorority, but she abhorred the alcohol associated with these groups.

            Dad headed to Venezuela post WWII, eventually buying a farm, marrying Mom, whose family asked “why would you want to go live with the monkeys?” and growing chickens.  He cornered the local chicken market with better birds, angering the other chicken farmers, who charged him with witchcraft and voodoo because they all knew you couldn’t raise clean chickens without black magic.  The 1959 junta gave occasion for these disgruntled farmers to attack our family and drive us from the country.  We lost everything.  I was 4. 

            We bought the most gullied, eroded rock pile farm in the Shenandoah Valley in 1961—why would you buy a dump?  He sought counsel from private and public agriculture experts and went the opposite direction from their advice—spread chemical fertilizer, plant corn, graze the forest, build silos, borrow more money.  He invented a portable electric fencing system, mobile shade, mobile animal structures while the neighbors built stationary everything.

            We fed our garden compost and didn’t spray chemicals on it.  “Why would you pick off Colorado potato beetles when you can just spray Sevin?”  People at church wanted to know.  We read Adelle Davis and concocted her “Tiger Milk” in the kitchen—church friends called it “Panther Puke.” Our farming friends during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s were marijuana-smoking hippies who read Whole Earth Catalogue and Mother Earth News. We constantly embarrassed our church friends with our farm friends, and our farm friends with our church friends.  Our family was never in a box.

Self-respecting farmers drove pickup trucks.  Not Dad.  He bought a 1957 Plymouth from a neighbor, took off all the doors and threw out the seats.  Sitting on a galvanized bucket (this was before mandatory seat belts and automobile inspection), the interior offered the same space as a pickup for a lot less money.  And he could take the kids if he wanted—we sat on chicken crates.

            When the Arab oil embargo convulsed the world in the early 1970s, he bought a 10-speed bicycle and pedaled the 13 miles to his job as an accountant for a metal fabrication firm on the other side of Staunton—in his mid-50s.  “If everyone would do this, the Arabs can just keep their oil,” he would say. 

            While neighbors spent half of each Friday at the sale barn commiserating over their cattle, he pursued direct marketing.  “Why would a farmer want to sell to people?”  Rather than cultivating farmer friendships, he cultivated urban customer friendships.  I ran with that ball, let me tell you.

            When Virginia passed the “Farm Use” vehicle exemption, allowing unlicensed, uninspected farm vehicles to travel 10 miles from the farm to conduct farm business, he tried to get a network of Virginia farmers to sign on to leasing one square foot of land for a penny a year so that farmers could travel the state in unlicensed vehicles checking their various farm properties.  He kept a set of new tires for our car that he would put on for inspection, then come home and switch them out to the bald tires—“I’m not throwing away half-used tires,” he said.

            While everyone else was discovering TV dinners, we canned and froze our garden produce.  We never had a TV—still don’t.  When friends at school talked about their TV shows, I had no idea what they were talking about.  My evening entertainment, after doing farm chores, was reading or writing stories.  Instead of watching TV, Dad read to us.  I still remember him reading The Iliad and the Odyssey while Mom did the dishes.  I still get warm fuzzies thinking about it.

            Once he went completely on his own as an accountant, many of his clients were Amish and Mennonites living in the area.  His favorite technique was to teach the eldest daughter in these patriarchal families how to keep the books so Dad had to ask the daughter for permission to buy things.  It was his way of empowering the women in these families.

            These and hundreds of other examples come to mind as I travel back memory lane, deeply grateful that I grew up in a home that truly didn’t care what others thought.  In fact, we relished different, and as Robert Frost famously noted, “that has made all the difference.” I remember well one of our children asking from the backseat:  “why do we have to be weird at everything?”  Because, my dear, that’s where truth lies.  The lunatic fringe is where innovation happens.  Today I pause to reflect, warmly and gratefully, for growing up in a home that embraced different.

            On a scale of 1-10, 1 being peer dependent and 10 being total maverick, where are you?