January 31st, 2023 Collette Kramer's Rememberence Day

 We celebrate two Collette Kramer anniversaries here on the Farm. The annual Birthday notice, and this secondary day of remembering her after-life. I write about her a few times a year in remembrance, this is a seven year anniversary so perhaps more important to me than others.

I wrote this public obituary on Facebook seven years ago, prior to this I had kept her name out of my postings for the most part:

Collette Kramer passed on this weekend after fighting for a month or so against a stomach tumor which came out of nowhere. She was sixty-four (near as I could tell) and the person who I bought the Farm property from. She lost everything more than once during her life, never had anything worthy of any notice, collected everything she found in hopes of someday having something she could call a life achievement. I found her living on the street in her broken down Toyota and all life is precious, all is temporary, all is suffering. She lived like a tiny boat on a big sea that didn't seem to owe her anything. She fought against almost everything and everyone in a effort to keep her dignity. In the end the pseudo-dignity she got from having a fingernail hold on a peice of property was really all she had to pin her hopes to. She sold me that property in some pie in the sky scheme to eventually find herself a permanent home. Her life didn't amount to all that much in the end. A short story with a bunch of sad chapters. Tragic only because it was so short. The shortness becoming something of a mercy.

As for us and the Creekside Farm Project, nothing is ever easy. We haven't done much that was over-funded or straight forward except being married to one another. Our successes have all been hard fought. We have the plan and it might work whether we build it in Manning or some other place. She left us with a bunch of legal hurdles to jump before we can call the place ours by virtue of a deed with our name on it. Only time will tell.

I think Collette would be proud of what we have built here, had she made it. There's still a bunch of legal hurdles to jump over before we finally get the place to ourselves, but things look okay going forward, at this point. 

She lives on in our memories.