"Hi, I'm Darlene, nice to meet you."
"Hi Darlene, my name is Random Person, nice to meet you too. So, what do you do for a living?"
"I'm a travel agent."
"Oh, wow, so you fly for free and get more free trips than game show contestants and you work from a cruise ship all day and sit around looking at all the pictures you took on all of your free trips?"
Um, no.
But I completely understand the tendency to glamorize the job of a travel agent. TRAVEL is right there in the name.
I do the same thing with farmers. I want to live on a farm and feed the animals and eat fresh eggs and smell the country air and cook hearty breakfasts for the farm hands and tend the gardens in boots and ride a horse to go check on the fields and see the stars at night.
I know in my head that farming is actually hard work. There used to be a dairy farm in my extended family in western Pennsylvania, always with milking cows but also random goats, turkeys, ducks, chickens, and horses. I spent many days as a girl with my cousins wandering the grounds, talking to the animals, climbing in the barns, and chasing the chickens. The rose-colored portion of my brain imagines a farmer's life as just like that.
Now I live in a condo with a tiny patio, and idealize Farm Life. Grass is greener, et cetera.
However, I've managed to grow some food on that patio, and tonight I harvested chard and thyme, two expensive ingredients in tonight's dinner that I didn't have to add to the grocery list. Eating food from just outside my back door is extremely satisfying and extra delicious.
I am late on this post, but just had to chime in. I do exactly the same thing with farms and farmers even though, like you, I have farmers in the extended family. I dream of some imaginary pastoral future when we'll grow all of our own food, and yet have lots of time to sit around relaxing... ha! :-) But it's fun to dream about it, and even more fun to eat what you grew yourself! I miss our little patio garden in LA... even though it was small, the climate made it so easy to grow everything. Your chard and thyme were beautiful!
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