{"id":8704,"date":"2024-12-21T00:01:00","date_gmt":"2024-12-21T00:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brendans-island.com\/catholic-citizen\/?p=8704"},"modified":"2025-05-29T17:01:05","modified_gmt":"2025-05-29T17:01:05","slug":"damp-farmland-an-accident-and-accepting-good-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brendans-island.com\/catholic-citizen\/damp-farmland-an-accident-and-accepting-good-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Damp Farmland, an Accident, and Accepting Good News"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

My father told me that a few generations back, his forebears got stuck with farmland near Lake Michigan. It wasn’t a marsh, but it wasn’t particularly good for growing crops, either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They found someone who’d buy the place and moved west. Again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Time passed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My father’s father got hired at a construction site, working there until someone dropped a crane on him and several of his colleagues. Unintentionally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I gather that the crane operator relieved the tedium of his job by what he might have viewed as a harmless drink or seven.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At any rate, folks were sorting the resultant mess out into live bodies, dead bodies, and inorganic debris when a rescuer noticed that one of the dead bodies was bleeding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I haven’t verified this, but I’ve been told that dead bodies don’t bleed: and that this is why my father’s father got reclassified as not-dead. Under the circumstances, not being dead strikes me as good news. Moreover, most of him had been pulled out in one piece. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of his legs, on the other hand, stopped being a leg somewhere above the knee. But medicos found enough extra skin to cover the stump. Which I’ll also see as good news.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If there’s a story about how he got equipped with a wooden leg, I don’t know it. But I do know that a knack for refocusing, plus maybe skills picked up in construction work \u2014 with a fair portion of determination \u2014 helped him make a living as a woodworker. And that’s another topic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, that land near Lake Michigan changed hands quite a few times. Can’t say I blame the owners. It really wasn’t good farmland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>\"Alex<\/a>But if the family had somehow managed to hang on to it, they’d now own a sizable chunk of Chicago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I could try coming up with morals for my family’s stories: particularly how these ancestors avoided owning some of the choicest real estate in the Midwest. Maybe something along the lines of ‘wealth is a burden’, or this bit from Proverbs:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

“It is better to be humble with the poor
than to share plunder with the proud.”
(Proverbs 16:9<\/a>)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

I won’t, since then I’d feel obliged to start talking about context. Which would involve Sirach 29<\/a>, loans and neighbors, truth and beauty \u2014 basically, it’d be more effort than I’ve planned on for this week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So here’s the usual link list of family-related good news and other experiences:<\/p>\n\n\n\n