Instillation
(TANSTAAFL)
Blue collar, with roots deeper than any walnut or oak.
I remember those black walnuts from Uncle Bill’s farm.
Shells as hard as the hammer to break them.
And bitter, but hard work can be that way. Even if
a vacation on his dairy farm was more work than play,
it still made great memories.
He wasn’t a man to shy away from work.
Neither was his brother, whose lessons carried me through life.
Even before I worked beside him on a loading dock,
there was work in the yard, digging a trench for a foundation.
Pulling the transmission out of one of my first cars and replacing it.
Building a barn when he finally bought his own piece of land.
The years I put in on the dock after he retired.
The many years after that driving a truck, making deliveries.
The lesson that got me through all of that was simple.
There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.
This poem is my response to Day 6 of napowrimo.net, which asks us to use a quote from a favorite book as inspiration and as the title for a poem, and then to change the title of the poem. The term TANSTAAFL (“There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.”) was a theme in “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress,” by Robert Heinlein, (1966). The complete phrase was already in use by the early 1940s.
~ Day 6 ~
rivrvlogr 
I like how the labor of opening a bitter walnut led to so many memories.
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Thank you. They sure are a lot of work.
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GREAT example of gratitude for lessons learned through labor.
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Thank you. I had a good teacher.
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I read a lot of Heinlein growing up – mom was a SciFi fan. He lived near my grammar school. His politics today would not pass muster, but he sure had some interesting stories and ideas. And ya, no such thing. ~
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Back in the early seventies, I read every Heinlein book I could get my hands on. Sometimes her could be right on the edge of pulp fiction. My son has all my SciFi paperbacks from back in the day.
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How delightful ~~ you resurrected memories of cracking black walnuts for homemade ice cream many decades ago!
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Mmmm!
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Enjoyed it. I also enjoyed your poem recently on Silver Birch press about how to paddle. It got me thinking about how fun it would be to rent a kayak.
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Thank you, Ali. On a quiet stream, kayaking can be both peaceful and rewarding.
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This is a lovely poem, Ken. I really appreciated its meaning. My grandfather was a diary farmer in England during WW1 – very hard work.
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Thank you, Robbie. That it is.
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“Shells as hard as the hammer to break them.
And bitter, but hard work can be that way.”💜
Love these lines–and how a whole poem emerged from this image!
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Thank you!
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Indeed not. But somehow as a culture we’ve lost that knowledge. That generation never whined either. (K)
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I wish I could say I know the answer to that. It’s not completely gone, but what does it take to set a standard, anymore?
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feel my Grandfather in your lines. Economy, nothing wasted… in every sense.
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The same for my father.
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