City Slickers

When I was 3 years old, my mother surrendered to cancer. My father’s younger sister, Edna, came for the funeral to assist my father. She stayed for four years until Dad remarried. Each summer she went to her homestead farm and I tagged along enjoying the new environment. This continued until I was a teenager when I became useful on the farm.

I cultivated and hauled hay with a tractor, milked five cows along with my aunt and uncle, slopped the pigs, fetched eggs from hens that resisted, climbed to the top of the windmill when no one was looking, drove my uncles’ car from one farm to another and even did the chores for a neighbor who had left home for a few days, and dodged a runaway horse that was crossing the road full speed. What memories of 80 years ago.

None of the neighborhood kids I played sandlot softball and football with and shot basketballs on driveways ever visited a farm, much less spent summers on one. They were real city slickers: a person who lives in a city, and has no experience of or knowledge about living in the countryside; first used in 1914 thirteen years before my time. I too would have been a city slicker except for my aunt Edna who postponed her wedding for years as she became our maternal mama.

If anything, our American culture has swooned into an urban and suburban society and farms have also changed considerably along with some countryside. I saw a March-April 2020 Midwest Living magazine and read a story by Author Timothy Meinch Where The Wind Pumps the Water. It made me want to go to Kentucky to visit the countryside he described while visiting a 77 year old farmer who fled upstate New York sixty years ago to become a farmer and lived in five states.

Timothy describes the countryside beautifully with its rivers running alongside sparsely populated sandhills, boaters kayaking along the eroding ridgelines spotting bison, turkeys, a fox, bald eagles. Before long he spotted the state’s tallest waterfall where he enjoyed the water splash on him. Soon he reached the riverside cabin with its creaking porch where he spends the night.

Lets ignore another definition: City Slicker is depicted as a spoiled selfish lazy rich person who considers people living on farms to be poor and ignorant – who never enjoyed the countryside or most likely never kayaked or watched the sunset from a creaky porch. What do we call ourselves today?