A Traditional Farm Life
By Shasta Hamilton
Greetings from Enterprise, dear friends! Partially hidden and around the corner, I am
listening quietly as exotic place names waft through the air to my chair.
“Where is Bangladesh?” one asks. Necks crane, eyes squint, looking closely at
the new world map on the wall. One after
another, places our children have heard about are named, and the map is
searched until the location is found.
It’s the first day of school at the Hamilton’s. Our “scholars” are getting acquainted with
two new wall maps—one of the United States and the other of the world.
Our Geography lessons will be informal, but hopefully
interesting to the students, as they find the places they read about. The same friend that gave us the maps also
generously furnished an outdated Junior High Geography textbook for our
perusal.
We can’t afford to take our family of eight on a trip around
the world right now, so the world must be opened to our children through the
pages of a book.
Our children are voracious readers, so the Geography
textbook is already in high demand. (Perhaps
a lesson on sharing should come first?)
Through this book’s pages our children are “meeting”
children from China, Russia, Mexico, etc.
Full color pictures of a day in these featured children’s lives leap up
from the page. Perhaps surprisingly to
our youngsters, these children in far-flung countries don’t look too much
different than folks we see around town every day.
It’s a lesson worth learning.
How can we understand our own small world without an
understanding of the big picture?
For our family, the “big picture” is formed by family
discussion and directed study. What
better place to start than with a book?
It takes a lot of “food” to feed this family of
bookworms. If we don’t have what we need
in our own family library, we head to a public library. Simply put, books are an integral part of our
lives.
You can imagine our surprise when we heard recently that the
books are disappearing from the public schools around us. It is our understanding the good
old-fashioned, plunk-down-in-front-of-you textbooks are being rapidly being
replaced with electronic versions on personal student computers. Not being particularly tech savvy
ourselves—by design—this is hard for us to digest.
We just love books, particularly the old ones. Reading an old book is a full sensory
experience—the smell of yellowed paper, the crackle of the page turning,
stories read drawing you so near to a forgotten time you can almost taste it .
. .
Dear friends, I know the wonders of modern technology are
seductive, but please don’t relegate the printed page to a musty, old,
forgotten closet. A book never runs low
on battery, and is a suitable companion for all seasons.
Please call me old-fashioned. . . I can’t imagine curling up
in my favorite chair of an evening with a cup of hot cocoa, staring at a
glowing screen for hours on end. I’m
getting a headache just thinking about it!
The extent to which you use modern technology is, of course,
a personal choice—your choice.
It is safe to say you won’t find me leading a charge against
your favorite glowing screen, for I have quietly retreated to my favorite chair
with a beloved, musty smelling, crackly sounding, dog-eared relic of literary
history—an old book.
As summer turns to fall, cooler evening temperatures make a
late night cup of hot cocoa while snuggled up with a good book sound
tempting.
I
f you’ve only had the kind of hot cocoa where you put powder
in a mug and add hot water, you’ll be amazed by full-bodied, rich flavor of hot
cocoa made on top of the stove. It’s
kind of like the difference between a glowing screen and a good, old-fashioned
book.
Top of the Stove
Hot Cocoa
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup Hershey’s
Cocoa
Dash salt
1/3 cup hot water
4 cups milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
extract
1. Mix sugar, cocoa
and salt in saucepan; stir in water.
2. Cook and stir over
medium heat until mixture boils; boil and stir 2 minutes.
3. Stir in milk and
heat. DO NOT BOIL.
4. Remove from heat;
add vanilla.
Yield: 6 servings.
Copyright © 2015 by Shasta Hamilton
Shasta is a fifth generation rural Kansan now residing in
Enterprise, Kansas. She and her husband
own and operate The Buggy Stop Home-Style Kitchen with their six home-schooled
children. You can reach The Buggy Stop
by calling (785) 200-6385 or visit them on the web at www.thebuggystoprestaurant.com.
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