It is a little hard to believe that I haven’t posted since 10/31/2020. This is a side note, but when I think of October 31, I don’t think of Halloween, which is a pagan holiday. As a Christian, I don’t celebrate the holidays of other religions, so my recognition of October 31 comes from two other significant events that took place on that day.
The first is Reformation Day. On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the church in Wittenburg, Germany. He took issue with the Catholic Church’s sale of indulgences as a way to buy forgiveness of sin, which is found nowhere in the Bible, and thus began the Protestant break with the Catholic Church.
The second event was the Battle of Beersheba, October 31, 1917. The EEF, the British Egyptian Expeditionary Force, had been unsuccessful at capturing Jerusalem, which was key to bringing an end to the fighting in the Middle East during WWI. Sir Edmund Allenby had recently replaced General Archibald Murray as commander of the EEF. Trying to move north through Gaza along the Mediterranean Sea had proven too diffucult, so Allenby decided to go through Beersheba, which was held by thousands of German and Turkish troops, to reach Jerusalem. He sent in the 4th Light Horse Brigade of the Australian Mounted Division. Light Horse were mounted infantry, not cavalry. They would ride in, then dismount to fight.
On that 31st day of October, 1917, 800 men and horses rode into history. The Light Horse captured Beersheba with the wells intact, which meant men and horses had water in that desert battlefield. Those wells, by the way, dated back to Abraham, who swore an oath with local leaders concerning the wells. That victory opened the way to Jerusalem, ultimately bringing an end to the fighting in the Middle East.
Since October 31, 2020, I have spent untold hours moving to a new farm. I sold my house, which meant leaving behind gardens that had taken me eighteen years to create, and moved to my daughter and son-in-law’s place. I’m still in the Northeast, just farther out in a more rural area. More land for much less money. How is this a bad thing?
The next few posts will detail what we are doing to create a new farm, only larger and capable of producing more food. I hope to do in four or five months what took eighteen years to do before. What I hope most of all is that I have learned from my mistakes at the old place and will do a MUCH better job here.
Stay tuned!
