Lucas Farm Stories from Tinia

Lucas Farm Stories from Tinia "Writing when remembering while sometimes farming on a Hill in WV"

What started as a simple homesteading page in 2009 has grown into a Multifaceted Blog that not only tells of our Homesteading Adventure in the Hills of West Virginia, but also about stories reaching beyond this little hillside. On the farm, dairy goats and Miniature Jersey cattle, heritage and rare breed Wyandotte Chickens are raised. I facilitating equine rescue, make butter, speak at various con

ferences and events and write about things of the past and present. I've spent a lot of time working to see changes in the WV and national legislature to protect and preserve the small farm and food freedom.

Throwbacks to the days of milking all the goats and cows on the hill
06/17/2026

Throwbacks to the days of milking all the goats and cows on the hill

Love remembers better than it was; it forgets any failures,holds onto the best of all the times, and it fills in the gap...
06/17/2026

Love remembers better than it was; it forgets any failures,
holds onto the best of all the times, and it fills in the gaps.

He was Daddy to a veritable hodge podge lot of sons and daughters. I think there are some I have never met.

I just happened to be one of many, but I came more towards the end of his life.

I have a note he left to my little sister for Christmas. Inside of the envelope was some money for her. On it, he wrote, "To my baby girl and always will be. Love you, Dad." I have it stored in my dresser. It is also tattooed in his penmanship on my arm. He learned to read and write after he came out of the army following WWII.

I don't know why he wrote Dad on that note or the many others over my time with him. Not a one of his children of any age called him anything except Daddy through his life.

He worked. Always worked. His life seemed made up of only labor. Even when work was over, if he did come to the house where we lived with my mother, he came to mow, graft, cultivate berry bushes and trees. Even when he could not walk, he found a way to work on two canes.

He did not enjoy life, except he did have a penchant towards food. He really only lost his appetite at the very end of it all. It's how I knew he was going away soon.

I've missed him some through the years, but more than missed, I've thought about how I loved him so much that I have continually been glad his life has been over, as in it, he found only sorrow.

Daddy was ever so sad. He was tired of being alive years before I came along. I wanted to write, "he was tired of living," but he stopped that before I came to be. I just don't know exactly when.

Being alive and living are entirely separate things.

He was mine for a lot longer than he wanted to be, and the only reason it was enough for me is because I loved him exactly as I know many of us hope to be loved.

I loved him for who he was, not who I wanted, or maybe even, who I needed.

I have never wished he was any other way, not even in the alone times of late nights through very hard years.

I think back and know I gave him the most complete and unselfish love that I could offer. I think I have known it so much so that it has colored my ability to feel or believe in love when it appears in any other way.

It all seems to lack, to let me down, to pale.

Can it appear in any other form? I'm not qualified to say.

I accepted him in the way he could never offer back to me, and it doesn't bother me at all. It makes absolutely no difference. It's just part of a story.

I loved the hollow old man who worked himself to death. That is all I ever knew. And he was perfect that way, in all his imperfection.

And I don't know the young man smiling there. Sure, that man, it's Daddy, too. He looks happy. A man on the cusp of life and pursuits and glory.

Something killed that in him. Would I have loved that man the same way? Would he have loved me more?

Who might I be if the man I see there, caught once laughing so big in black and white, had been in my life?

Ah, I think you all know, I don't want that man to have been my Daddy. I want the one I knew.

And maybe that's part of the tragedy.

Either way, I'm glad he was the one I had all the days he had left.

Love doesn't just remember better than it was, love remembers that way forever.

Yes, you can make your own breads, bagels and such at home.
06/16/2026

Yes, you can make your own breads, bagels and such at home.

06/16/2026

Sourdough Bagels 🥯

"Life can change so fast, so unexpectedly. Love when you can, while you can, as much as you can," is something a friend ...
06/15/2026

"Life can change so fast, so unexpectedly. Love when you can, while you can, as much as you can," is something a friend once read to me.

Trying intensely to do this or expecting others to can create some pitfalls.

It is good advice on the surface. It's good advice carried out well.

But you can end up feeling no amount of love you give or receive is enough.

You can get wrapped up in what you think, feel and hear pretty easily. And that's not all there is to loving and being loved.

After deafening loss, there can be so much guilt, fair or not, you can no longer hear the truth or share it well.

You can struggle with the belief you've failed to care enough, not just in the past, but the present. You can also stop being someone able to receive care and concern well.

For years, I would tell my two youngest sons I loved them all through the day. That seems ridiculous to write. But you can say it too much. You can, even if you mean it.

I would walk through the house, and all day it would be, "Mommy loves you, Babies."

This was a trauma response.

It isn't my natural way or even what they needed. They were quite obviously secure in being loved well.

It seemed impossible to say enough or do enough. Failure was just around the corner if I missed an opportunity to verbally share. I no longer do this. But it isn't because I stopped feeling I should.

All the times I missed telling someone in the past, I started to try to make up.

But we can't.

Learning from pask mistakes is valuable. But there is a line between doing so while moving forward and actually being so crushed by lost chances, you hyper fixate.

It is almost as if the love I had to give and whatever love was out there for me could only fall short, in measure or worth.

The complexity and broken parts of humans. . .

Wanting what isn't.
Ignoring what is.
Excessive words.
Wasting the present caught in a past that becomes more fantasy than anything.

There is a Book by Patrick Rothfuss that reads:

"You said yourself that there was nothing you could have done."

"I could have,"
Kvothe said seriously, "and I didn't. I made my choice and I regret it to this day. Bones mend. Regret stays with you forever.”

And each time I run across quoting it,
I think, "don't let it stay forever."

So, love as well as you can, while you have the time, but know in doing so, it will sometimes fall short, hurt and flatly fail.

Allow for that.
And Keep trying.

First garden veggie of the year
06/14/2026

First garden veggie of the year

My best bagels so far
06/11/2026

My best bagels so far

Through our lives, we will meet people who say they care for us, but the truth will be they love the bits of themselves ...
06/11/2026

Through our lives, we will meet people who say they care for us, but the truth will be they love the bits of themselves they see in us.

I'm sure I do the same thing, too, sometimes. I hope not very often.

I hope I've mostly surrounded myself with, whether through intention or happenstance, people nothing at all like myself.

I think I am made more complete when I have loved ones with parts I lack.

If you only value reflections of yourself, you are just what you love,

And that's not enough. It's not worth anything.
When I look at my kids, I see only tiny fragments of me there. Yet everything about them is so important and needed and valued.
I would be so disappointed to find an exact mirror of myself in them. That would be a mothering failure.

When people are not like you and you value the differences, it gives you so many opportunities to see more, learn more, go further.

"The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them."
- Thomas Merton

06/10/2026

I open this door 1 hundred times a day, and when it's cool, I prefer to have it open.

I just replaced the old hanging screen with one much more durable.

These take 5 minutes to put up and stay up great, but the cheaper ones fray fast.

This new one seems like it will last a few years; the other one lasted barely a year.

Link to it in comments

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