Being raised in Eastern Oregon was a privelege. As a child, I didn't realize how blessed I actually was. Growing up under a large sky where you could spend the summers watching the thunder and lightning come and go, and the winters wearing snowsuits and black rubber overboots. My mother and father were home every night, and we ate every meal together after saying Grace. Dad would head out every morning after breakfast to work the place with my Uncle and Grandfather, and mom would clean, cook, milk cows, and sew for us kids and the home. We had a large garden and enjoyed 'organic' bounty from it, and ate Beef, Chicken and Pork, Elk and Venison- sometimes Rabbit as a bounty from the Ranch.
4-H was something every kid who lived on a ranch participated. I had an animal every year starting with a Lamb, and when I was big enough, a Steer.
I learned how to knit, crochet, sew, do Leathercraft, identify meat cuts, bake, can and keep records of all of it from my leaders who were women that did the same things my mother did.
I learned from my dad and uncle how to ride a ranch horse, build fence, brand a calf, pull a calf, how to tell when a heifer or cow was going to calve, how to tame a weiner calf to be a good 4-H beef, how to rope, and a zillion other things I probably have forgotten.
The point is, where I live now, here in the dampness of Western Oregon, I feel much stronger than my neighbor because of how/where I was raised. I have learned resourcefulness, courage in hard times, responsibility, independence, and I can survive in a disaster, AND take care of those around me.
The other thing is, I feel rather alone at times, because there are few people I connect with in quite the same way, who have similar upbringings or backgrounds. My knitting group is great, and I like spending time with them, but I always feel like the misfit. I'm a cowboy living in the city. Like Crocodile Dundee in New York..
So am I whining? A little. Sometimes I feel cheated out of the life I was supposed to have, thanks to poor choices in careers and men. I want those lost years back. It's difficult to keep looking ahead, wondering how our country is going to fare in the next few years. I think about the big picture and try to see how it will affect my world.
In the meantime, I have kids to raise, living by example as best I can, hoping these children will make more intelligent decisions than I did when I was their age. Innocence is so precious, but they need to know. Be prepared.
What does all of this have to do with making stuff? Well think about it. Everything we are as artists manifest in the things we create. A co-worker, (who does Woodturning) was talking openly about his wife's cancer at our lunch table . We, (those sitting around him) have been up to speed on the ongoing events, so I thing he felt comfortable with what he said. "During my wife's time of Chemo, she was violently ill. I found that the things I was turning at that time had become part of what she was experiencing" He also said he looks back on those creations, and nobody wanted them. Everything else sold, or was given away, those pieces sat on the shelf. Do you see? I see him turning, thinking about his wife, and Cancer, and being alone, death, anger, - all of it poured into those turnings. They are representations of what he was feeling.
I make things because I can, and I make things because it's the best way I can express myself.
