Home Economics Honorary Degree Less Obvious in Mid-Spring When My Toes Cramp on the Stairs

I Can't Separate I Am Grandma Throop 2022, painted over 2021 failure to express the same realization. Acrylic on canvas, 16 x 20"

In 1936, my grandmother Evelyn graduated from Cornell University with a degree in home economics. She learned many tricks of the “being alive” trade. Her parents allowed her a college education in order to find a “good family” to marry into. Ha! The joke was on them! She found my grandfather Ronald, a poor civil engineering student, and brought all that accumulated home business knowledge (for a would-be millionaire) to a modest little paradise in the small town where my parents and then I was born. Evelyn was an expert canner and knew how to skin and cook squirrel. Ronald took a steady, low-paying job with the state highway department, played on his tractor in spring and summer, and in the autumn, helped Grandma fill the root cellar (basement) with enough potatoes to feed a family of four until June.
Today, I hold an honorary degree in home economics. I think my grandmother would be proud. Long ago when I was still in high school, she predicted that I would become either a restaurant chef or a philosopher. I got close to both, but never achieved full status in either profession. After my grandmother died, some time between acting chef and philosopher, I tacked on painting as probable bread-winning pursuit.
No dice.
I am just a non-credentialed stay-at-home husband and father. I will continue to paint, and cook, and think about ways and means to the good life. In spring I’ll notice that near-constant wiggling of my toes and pressing urge to clear out the winter, clean up the nest, and find self-worth in a world that has for the most part abandoned post-secondary degrees for the family-raising arts. I found my bread-winner and built a modest little paradise without the back-slapping congratulations from a broken society uninterested in an able-bodied man (or woman) taking up where his or her grandmother left off.
Sort of.
I refuse to barbeque the local squirrels. But I do make tortillas from scratch and grow my own garlic. No degree necessary.