2 funerals he would not take one bite of meat.
When there’s no funeral, the days were usually a lot less merry. The
whole town’s food comes from a field a thirty-minute walk away from our house. Since the whole town depends on it, families take turns taking care of it rotating once per month. The field is carefully separated into different sections by crop by the math teacher of the town, who happens to have an old nutrition book that determines the proportions of different kinds of food a person should have every day. Of course, we could almost never fill in the meat section, and the teacher suggested that we plant more crops to substitute. When this was announced, most people were disgruntled because this would mean more work. But the math teacher was a good friend of the mayor and people had faith in the mayor, so they obliged.
The season of harvest always brought more hope, at least during a good
year. In good years everything is collected and then rationed out to families according to household size and age (the rules also determined by the math teacher). And the extras, if there are any, will be locked up in the communal barn for relief during ill years. But that relief was never enough and during
Photography By Megan Branstad
