“Two or three times a day my dad would check the fields. Sometimes I’d walk with him. He didn’t talk much, just look at the fields and then the sky, then back to the fields. Like a black jack player in Las Vegas, he was weighing the odds. If he cuts today is it ripe enough? If he doesn’t, will a tornado or heavy rainstorm hit and flatten everything? Will it rain so the grain will rot in the fields? He had invested a lot of time, money and energy into getting the crops planted. His decision now would affect whether there would be any money for extras such as the purchase of a new tractor.” This story is part of the memoirs Sally Salzl Thelen wrote about her childhood, growing up on her family’s farm in Stearn’s County in central Minnesota.

Sally’s sister, Marilyn Salzl Brinkman, also wrote a book entitled, ‘Aprons, Flour Sacks & other Folk Histories’ a collection of articles about the everyday men, women, and children and about the farming communities in central Minnesota not from a scholarly perspective she said but from a folkloric perspective. As I read her stories it reminded me of stories I heard in my own family about farming in Alberta. The stories also reminded me of my childhood growing up eating fresh fruits, berries and vegetables from our family garden in the summer with the excess being canned by my mother and the aunties so when winter rolled around we ate the preserves of their labor.

It was churning around in me when I read Sally and Marilyns’ stories…I realized that engaging in the process from growing food to eating food gives us the connection we need to make food important, something we value rather than just a commodity, that we stuff ourselves with with no real interest as to where it comes from. I believe that it takes time, it takes people, and it takes working together with nature to grow food to nurture people.

Marilyn Salzl Brinkman, Aprons, Flour Sacks & other Folk Histories,Sentinel Printing, St. Cloud Minnesota, 2008
Sally Salzl Thelen, Thrashing Time on the Farm, Stearns History Museum, Crossings Volume 34, Number 1, 2008