Climbing and Swimming

As a proud logophile (that is, lover of words—thanks, Google for that info), I can’t believe this quote by Albert Einstein escaped me until now.




“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”



When we got married, I went from a small town girl to a farm wife just 70 miles from where I grew up. Some days I may as well have become a rice farmer’s wife and moved halfway around the world for how different the two worlds can be. Where I come from, farming is different, people think differently, and many of the older generation even talk differently as they are fluent in conversational German.

Our delicacies are based around dough and carbs (our ancestors had to feed hungry families on a diet consisting of mostly flour and eggs), and foods many other people wouldn’t touch, like sauerkraut, borsht, and pickled watermelon.

Here—yes, so close to that hometown of mine—things are very different. So is my home environment. I am not complaining. I do love the man I married, what we do and where we live.

My fins have strengthened a bit over the years and I have made it a little way up the trunk. But, it is still not my natural environment. It can be very easy to judge myself solely on my ability to climb. And then I can start to feel pretty stupid.

Maneuvering the loader bucket on a tractor is not second nature. The gestation of a cow is not in my brain’s storehouse of trivia. The inner workings of running a business as big as a farm operation are completely beyond my intellect.

When my children are acting up and I am completely overwhelmed and I can’t even escape to the bathroom for a minute and I completely forget that I once was intelligent enough to earn a college degree, I start to long for that pond I once swam in.

So, I have to find little puddles of water to swim in when I can. I’m not sure what I am a genius in, but I do have a few talents that I can feel pretty good about. I know my way around the kitchen pretty well (Landen didn’t even know cookies could come from the store until he was 3 years old), I am pretty creative and crafty around the house, and I love to write. I am still not sure where this writing thing is going to go, but someday it will have some direction!

That will be my resolution for this year. I will find places to swim when I can, and when I do find myself resembling a fish out of water, I will try not to let it make me feel stupid.

We all have our places of genius.

Sometimes we just forget.

What are yours?