Betsy Samuels: Love Thy Neighbor (Even if You Don't Want To Sometimes)
Image courtesy of Betsy Samuels.
Meet 84-year-old Betsy Samuels, a retired Christmas tree farmer and military spouse. In this episode, she reflects on life at Foxfire Christmas Tree Farm, her experiences growing up in Virginia Beach during WWII, and the lessons she learned moving across the country as a military spouse. Betsy also shares her philosophy on the importance of community, resilience, and choosing happiness, no matter the challenges life brings.
Hear her talk about:
how the war came to the shores of Virginia Beach
how she and her husband started their Christmas tree farm
the lessons she learned as a military spouse moving across the country
Her philosophy on happiness and being a good neighbor
You can find more of Betsy’s stories in her book.
See all episodes of Wisdom of Age.
“People to a great extent have the opportunity to control whether they want to live their lives as happy people or unhappy. And you might as well choose happy because you’re not going to change the things that make you unhappy.”
Read the Transcript for Episode 3
Wisdom of Age, Episode 3
Betsy Samuels: Love Thy Neighbor (Even if You Don't Want To Sometimes)
Stacy: I'm looking forward to hearing about the farm and its beginnings. I mean, I read a little bit about it in your book. The book just gave me lots of questions. I have a whole page of questions. So it's very exciting.
Betsy: I hope I've got a whole page of answers!
Stacy (as narrator): Welcome to the wisdom of age podcast, where we journey with our elders back in time, learning about life as they lived it and the lessons they learned along the way. I'm Stacy Raine.
If you happen one day to be traveling west out of Richmond, following along the James River, and you reach the point just before it starts to bend again towards the south, you'll pass by Foxfire Christmas Tree Farm somewhere to your left.
Stacy (as narrator): This is the farm that Betsy Samuels and her husband bought in 1968. They picked the location southeast of the Blue Ridge Mountains and just south of the river because they had heard that Christmas trees grew best on the south side of a large body of water. And, they knew the area well from growing up in Virginia Beach.
Betsy: We're high above the James River here. When you drive down our road, our old dirt road, it looks like you're about to fall off the edge of the earth into the river. And you look across the Blue Ridge from my bedroom window. I see the Blue Ridge every morning when I get up.
Stacy (as narrator): It's the farm that she and her husband Robert managed together until he passed in 2007, and the one she managed on her own until just recently when she sold it to a family nearby.
Stacy (as narrator): It's the land that was the centerpiece of their lives for so long, and the land where she still lives, though she doesn't own the farm anymore. It's a place that she loves dearly. She still remembers the day they bought it. They had heard the land was for sale, so Robert and his dad went to an auction and successfully purchased it.
Betsy: When I heard from Robert, he was down in a little town called Sprouses Corner. He called Lisbeth, Lisbeth! We got the farm, but I don't think I can ever find it again.
Stacy (as narrator): Though Robert had grown up on a regular farm in Virginia Beach, he specifically wanted a Christmas tree farm.
Betsy: He did not want a real farm because he had spent too many years with a cow named Toby standing on his foot while tried to milk her, so he wanted something that he could take a vacation from. And so when we were in Savannah looking for a Christmas tree, we said, maybe we can raise Christmas trees. And we really did think we were the only people in the world who ever thought of that. Of course we weren't.
Stacy (as narrator): They named it Foxfire, a term I'd never heard, but she described for me.
Betsy: When logs rot in the woods. It’s sort of like St. Elmo's fire, see, they give off a phosphorescence, and my husband loved being out in the woods and then seeing the foxfire, and, uh, when I met him, he was 16, and he said, I hope someday I'm going to have a farm and, and be about 200 acres and I’m gonna name it Foxfire.
Stacy (as narrator): This place that he'd named Foxfire long ago, and he wasn't so sure he'd ever find again once he bought it, is the place where Betsy learned how to plant Christmas trees.
Betsy: I was the one who was riding the planter the whole time.
Stacy: Really?
Betsy: And I planted the first crop upside down.
Stacy: How'd that work out?
Betsy: Well they were very attractive, the little roots. Well, the Chinese, I'm sure, enjoyed them. Actually, we went back and pulled them all up and I was really just upset. My father-in-law, who was such a farmer, he came in and helped us when it was planting season, usually, and he would separate the little seedlings so we could plant them more quickly, because we usually only had two days, it's just the weekend from Robert's duty in Washington.
And we would come down here and pick up the seedlings on the way down and start planting immediately Saturday morning. And if everything went right, which it almost never did. We would be done by Sunday afternoon and we could go out to eat on the way back, which for us at that time was a real nice-looking celebration because we didn't get to go out and eat very often.
It was an adventure. I learned something every day about farming.
Stacy (as narrator): She talks about going down with Robert from D. C. because Robert was in the military, and that's where they were stationed when they purchased the Christmas tree farm. He was an electronics engineer with the Air Force, at one point maybe working on missiles. She said a lot of his work was classified, top secret stuff.
We talked about life as a military spouse, and life growing up in Virginia Beach, and of course, life on a Christmas tree farm. It's probably been said by more than just me that Betsy is quite a character. I was introduced to her as Ms. Betsy, but when I asked her to state her name, she introduced herself as Elizabeth.
Betsy: It's Elizabeth Samuels. I live in Buckingham County, Virginia, about 35 miles from Charlottesville.
Stacy: And is it okay if I call you Ms. Betsy?
Betsy: That's fine. Or Betsy or whatever. I was Elizabeth for a long time, but they called me from birth, they called me Betsy.
Stacy: Oh, really?
Betsy: Yeah. And I told my grandfather one time that I want to change my name to Violet, but he could call me Vile for sure.
Stacy: What did he say to that?
Betsy: He chuckled and told the whole the rest of the family and I didn't understand why they were laughing.
Stacy: How old were you then?
Betsy: Oh, probably
Stacy (as narrator): Betsy was born in 1939 and grew up in Virginia Beach, originally on 16th Street when it was still a very small town. So small, she said, that her phone number was 510. I didn't know what she meant by that, so she explained that back then, you were given phone numbers according to how long you'd been there.
I couldn't confirm this, but I would think Betsy would know, since telephone operator was one of her first jobs.
Stacy: When you say that your phone number was 510, do you mean it was 510? And that's it?
Betsy: That's it.
Stacy: There was no rest of the numbers?
Betsy: And then the first alteration was they put a J on it. Really?
And I worked for the little telephone company there. And the letter had to be run a certain way, and since J was the first in the alphabet, it got one ring with the thumb pressed down, and then it was W and two more. I can't remember right now, but they got one, two, three, and four rings, and it was local calls.
Then you just ran the cable up to the person who was calling. And my future mother-in-law worked for the phone company, and she took a liking to me, and would not let my future husband get calls through to anybody else for quite a while.
Stacy: Ah!
Betsy: So that worked.
Stacy: So, were you an operator?
Betsy: Yes, I was. Mm, in high school.
Stacy: Okay. So you were in charge of plugging the lines from one house to the next, right? Is that how it worked?
Betsy: Yes, yes. And it was one of the few jobs that a teenager could have that paid a reasonable wage, and I was tickled to have it.
Stacy: About what year was this?
Betsy: That would've been about 19 50, 87. It was before Ma Bell was broken up into a lot of little bells.
Stacy (as narrator): I asked her what the world was like when she was a small kid in Virginia Beach.
Betsy: I suppose it was as it is to any little kid. It was at once wonderful and a little scary because of the war. You know, in Virginia Beach, the adults built these large plywood screens at the end of the road so that the subs could not see us and the ships out there could not see us, they painted them black and at night we were invisible and then every now and then we had blackouts and all of us had blackout screens.
Betsy: And when I was very small and I, I still remember it, I think because people were so impressed with it. They torpedoed a sub right off the beach. And I was, you know, more equally engrossed in building a sandcastle and watching the sub. But everybody came down to see it. And then, uh, as we were growing up, there were still bunkers down there that our parents would tell us, don't go in there because they're fraught and there may be some, uh, live ammunition in there.
So of course we had to go in. Fortunately, there was none in the bunkers we were in. It's just, it was a very small town. But in the summer, of course, it bloomed and blossomed.
Stacy (as narrator): This story about the sub stopped me in my tracks. The war? Here? I always thought of World War II as fought elsewhere, never making it to our shores outside of Pearl Harbor, of course. But it turns out I was wrong. There were incidents on the West Coast, in Alaska by the Japanese, and operations by the Germans on Long Island and in Florida, as well as off the eastern seaboard, Gulf of Mexico, and Caribbean.
In 1942, when Betsy was probably three, a German U-Boat was bombed off the coast of Virginia Beach, so this might be what she's referring to. Or it could have been one of the times that German U-Boats targeted the merchant marine ships in their quest to disrupt Allied shipping. All in all, the German operations off the coast of Virginia Beach resulted in the loss of many, many lives.
Stacy (as narrator): So I've always thought of the war being fought somewhere else. But it was, it was real for you.
Betsy: Yes, it was. And not, you know, because of my age, not as real for me as it was for the adults. My great uncle was an air raid warden, and he would come around and tell us when we needed to pull those blackout shades, and when we needed to get down and lay low, and it was a, a little bit of a scary time.
Betsy: I had nightmares because of the newscasts at the movie theater. We would go and watch the movie and then they would run the newscasts of the B-52s dropping their bombs. And when they didn't do that, of course, it was Franklin Roosevelt and the March of Dimes. So either one was equally scary. If you were at the beach, polio was just as scary as the bomb.
Stacy: So you remember the newscast about polio?
Betsy: Oh, yes. Roosevelt had polio, you know. And, he was part of the advertising campaign to raise money for the cure.
Stacy: So, in your mind as a kid, the polio virus was just as scary as the war happening right off the shores of where you lived?
Betsy: Just about, because there, out with the ocean and all the tourists, we had outbreaks of polio because when the water got warm in the summertime, it was apparently a good transmission medium and we would sometimes have to stay out of the water for a while.
Stacy (as narrator): Betsy had at one point, which she calls a bad bum leg for a while. She ended up in the hospital and remembers getting an x-ray on a machine, which she said looked like something from outer space. They didn't know it at the time, but years later, her doctor guessed that polio might've been the culprit.
Stacy (as narrator): Betsy kept herself busy while growing up in Virginia Beach. As kids, they’d go crabbing, which she called her favorite sport. She told me they would all pile into the old Dodge, head to the narrows and catch a bushel. On the way home, the crab bucket would inevitably get turned over and they'd have to catch them all over again.
Stacy (as narrator): On other days, she and her sister would pick gardenias off her uncle's huge gardenia bush made lush, she thought, by the coffee he dumped on it every day. They'd make bouquets and take them down to the boardwalk and sell them for 25 cents. When she turned 15, she started working summers in the dime store.
Stacy (as narrator): Then she worked in Mr. Okada's gift shop. He was a Japanese American gentleman that everyone loved, she said, who was interned during World War II. Betsy said that at the time, all the other merchants kept his shop going for him until he returned. She talked about some of what she did in his shop.
Betsy: We have a lot of ships because they sold very well. Made of shells for tourist items. And because I like doing calligraphy and, and he liked keeping me busy, he would ask me to write Souvenir of Virginia Beach on these shells. And I would do my best calligraphy and put Souvenir of Virginia Beach and if he turned it upside down it would say Made in Occupied Japan.
And even at that age I got a tremendous kick out of writing Souvenir of Virginia Beach.
Stacy (as narrator): Betsy worked at one of the hotels, but she said she wasn't thrilled with it, and they weren't really thrilled with her. She finally landed at the Cavalier Hotel, a prominent hotel there in Virginia Beach, as a night switchboard operator.
Betsy: As an operator, you never knew who was going to be on the phone at three o'clock in the morning.
Stacy (as narrator): She also kept herself busy with family. Betsy had a big family, and as a child, they were often all under one roof. In the summers, it was her grandparents Virginia Beach roof. In the winters, they all migrated to her great aunt's house in Norfolk. I asked her why they did this, and she said it was to save on heating bills.
Stacy (as narrator): One house is cheaper to heat than two. Betsy has always been creative her whole life, and she even wrote a book that chronicles many of these characters, as she calls them, and details one hair raising scene in particular.
Stacy: Well, so that house in Norfolk was, there was a lot of, a lot of family in it.
Betsy: And there was a target range in the basement. It had a big basement.
Stacy: Let's hope so.
Betsy: Yeah. You know, they would deliver the coal. And I'd love to go down and watch it come in through the window. But at the end of it, because we didn't want to send anybody off to war with no practice, my great aunt said, Sure, you can put a target range down there. And so they practiced with the 22s, probably about 12 inches below us, up in the living room. And two generations learned to be very careful.
Stacy: Yeah, I was going to ask you what kind of activities and entertainment happened in the evenings, but now I think you just answered it.
Betsy: And jazz was very big then, and I grew up, all the boys were in from the war in my best memories of this place, and they all sat around there admiring one of them had his big toe shot off in a bomber. And so he had a great big purple iodine place where the toe used to be, and we would all admire that in the wind. And my memories of jumping over these long legs from these young men who had come back from the war, and they had lots of stories to tell.
And, uh, my cousin Jack was at VMI, and he came home on Christmas, and my aunt, who was sly as ever, my great aunt, which we'll call her Auntie because that's what we all call her, said, and she knew exactly what she was doing, she said, Son, there's been a letter for you on the mantel for a while. And she said, it's from the president. It turns out it was greetings from the president you've been drafted.
Stacy (as narrator): Right around the time her little sister was born, she said her dad did something that crossed the line, though. She didn't say what, but her mom told her dad to leave and never come back. So he wasn't in the picture for much of her life.
And I imagine being a woman raising three girls on a teacher's salary in the forties and fifties wasn't easy, but it seems they stayed surrounded by family. Betsy said it was a close-knit family, and she always knew they had her back, even when they weren't together.
Betsy: It's not always visible, but you know that they're behind you all the way, and that no matter what you do, they're going to love you anyway. And that is a lot to give a child.
Stacy: Where do you think that approach came from?
Betsy: Well, from, just from my mother and the family. That's the way they were raised. The reason they could all live together in the same little house for periods of time that were beyond normal.
Stacy (as narrator): Eventually, Betsy met Robert while they were in high school. Then they both went off to college, where Betsy majored in math and Russian language, which was a popular course, she said, since there were Russian trawlers off the coast at the time, and the U.S. wanted to listen in. Robert was in ROTC and eventually was chosen for the Air Force education program to study engineering at Washington State University.
So that sent them over to Washington State where they both finished college. We talked about what it was like to be so far from home.
Betsy: My family was forever away. I didn't think I'd ever get home.
Stacy: Really?
Betsy: And it was one of those things. I was, I was so homesick and, in those days, a long-distance call was an arm and a leg. So you really had to save up to make one.
Stacy: Did it feel like a totally different kind of culture going from Virginia Beach and Norfolk to Washington State? It's a big, big move.
Betsy: Yes. Yes, it did. Virginia Beach is green and, you know, green and growing and flowers everywhere and it's semi tropical. And Washington State, the part that I was in, I never got to the, to the west coast.
We were down in the, uh, Idaho corner, Idaho and Oregon, down in there. And so, every tree that was there was one that somebody brought in from somewhere and planted. And we were in the middle of the wheat fields. My husband, being a farmer's kid, we had to stop and admire every 50 foot combine that he saw out in the field.
Stacy (as narrator): They had their first baby while they were there, and she said her time in Washington state was the first time she ever went sledding.
After graduating, they went back to Virginia Beach, and they had their second baby that summer. And then somewhere in Texas, Robert received his commission. They moved a lot, as military families do, and we talked about what that was like and how she handled it back then.
Betsy: Every place is different. I think it was our second assignment when we went to Massachusetts. I had to make up my mind whether I was just going to hate every place I moved to because it wasn't home, or if I was going to love it because each one was different and interesting. And there's no way to spend your life just hating that you're not home.
Betsy: So I became somebody who enjoyed where they were and I met the most wonderful people.
Stacy (as narrator): She admits that sometimes she wasn't so sure who she would meet.
Betsy: In Massachusetts, of all places, I was expecting, you know, all kinds of terrible things because you know, how you, if you're raised down South, you think maybe the folks North of the Mason Nixon line have green ears and do all kinds of weird stuff, but there were wonderful neighbors there.
Couldn't ask for better.
Stacy: If someone were to say, how do I be a good neighbor? What advice would you give them?
Betsy: Just be open, I think. Be open to other ideas. And don't be afraid to state what you feel. And if you don't get a decent reception to it, then, it's probably not really worth investing your time, but do the best you can. You know, you just try and be thoughtful of other people.
Stacy (as narrator): As she was telling me a story about making paper mache carolers for her window as part of her building Christmas party while stationed in Maryland, she spoke again about the importance of caring about and spending time with neighbors.
Betsy: If you get together, and we found that to be true here too, if you get together with neighbors, you can get a whole lot done in this world. And if you don't, you can't. It's that easy. The formula is simple. Love thy neighbor, even if you really don't want to sometimes.
Stacy (as narrator): One of the things I'd heard about Betsy is that she loves everyone she meets. I asked her if there was a particular way she liked to meet her new neighbors.
Betsy: Well, when I quit smoking, which was in 1991, I missed my after a vehicle cigarette most. And so I just went out and went to call on people I'd never been to visit before. And that was great fun.
Stacy: Yeah. So you just showed up.
Betsy: Hi, I'm Betsy. And I'm here because I'm trying to quit smoking, and I need to do something. I also, I was on the school board for 20 years, and in the process of doing that, I had to go meet and greet a lot of folks. That was interesting, too. And you learn that your way is not always the right way. Of course, I still think it is, but sometimes it just, it's marginal.
Stacy: I've been thinking about something that you said earlier, and I want to come back to it because I'm curious how it's kind of impacted the rest of your life.
You said that you had to make a decision when you were a military spouse and moving from place to place, whether you're gonna hate everywhere or love everywhere and you decided to love everywhere Do you feel like that lesson that you learned impacted the rest of your life?
Betsy: I do. Yes, because people to a great extent have the opportunity to control whether they want to live their lives as happy people or unhappy. And you might as well choose happy because you're not going to change the things that make you unhappy. So you better get something good out of it. And I always have found good things. Well, you know, there's a whole chapter in my book about the neighbor in Massachusetts who just had a wonderful time being the Wayne Gretzky with her smoke container, pushing it down her driveway. You know.
Stacy: Yeah.
Betsy: Happiness is where you find it.
Betsy: There's things that make you smile and laugh everywhere. And Massachusetts was hard because my husband had me take a picture of him shoveling the driveway with the snow up four feet to remind him why he didn't want to come back there. I don't think he actually ever needed the reminder.
Stacy: When you say that people need to decide to be happy, if someone said to you, Ms. Betsy, well, how do I do that? How do I find that happiness? What would you say?
Betsy: I would say just because the way of doing things that they're employing is not the way you would do it, enjoy it for what it's worth. You know, you might learn something. Who knows?
And if you can't enjoy it, don't worry about it because you're not going to do anything about that either. You're sure not going to change your mind. They've been living a long time with their own principles and actually don't need your set. So it just depends. Enjoy what you can and try to forget the rest.
Stacy: That's really good advice.
Stacy (as narrator): They moved from Massachusetts, met new neighbors, they moved again and so on, until finally buying the Christmas tree farm in the late 60s.
Stacy (as narrator): They still lived in D. C. for about a decade after while Robert worked at Andrews Air Force Base. They went down to the farm just about every weekend. By this time, they had three kids: two daughters and a son. They began planting right away but lost that first crop.
Betsy: We hired some folks to plant them and, uh, there's a thing called J root that happens with Christmas trees. They don't dig the hole deep enough and so the little roof bends up like a J. Well, then it gets up in the air and the tree dies. The little seedlings die. So we lost the first crop.
But losing a crop with Christmas trees, it's not unusual. We’ve just about, I guess one in four of our plantings took the first time. The other three took a little nursing along, you know, we lose very many and sometimes my husband would just say, well, you know, rather than try and sort them out, I'm just going to mow the old crop down, we start fresh.
Stacy: That same year?
Betsy: Yeah. Well, so we were planting in the spring when we started. As the year went by, we sort of moved over to most of the time planting in the fall because it seemed to be more reliable rain.
Stacy: Oh, that makes sense. From that first year you planted, how long did it take until you kind of opened the farm for people to come and cut their tree?
Betsy: 1977 was the magic year. And I still had customers coming last year, two customers. One was here that first year and one was here the second year too. It's a long time.
Betsy: They brought grandchildren.
Stacy: That's so sweet. So it was an eight year labor of love. Yes. Wow. What do you, what do you remember about the first customer?
Betsy: Oh, my mother said she was going to be my first customer. She gave me a $1 bill to frame.
Stacy (as narrator): And that first year they began selling trees, she said, was wonderful.
Stacy (as narrator): Originally, the plan was to raise wholesale trees. But it was Betsy's idea to see if people might like to come right out to the farm to make their Christmas memories.
Betsy: My husband had a Christmas tree lot in Charlottesville. And I said, I know how far I would drive to get a tree, and I'm sure we'll get a customer or two out here.
Betsy: And everybody said, no, you're not going to see, nobody's going to drive that far. It's 45 miles. And it's way out in the country. By golly, we had something like, uh, 40 some customers that first year.
Stacy: So, you originally intended just to grow the trees and sell them wholesale, but then you became a cut your own tree kind of destination.
Betsy: Yeah, nobody believed that we would sell any out here.
Stacy (as narrator): Eventually, once Robert retired from the Air Force, they left D.C. and settled down on their Foxfire Christmas tree farm just south of the James River for good.
Betsy: Once we came here, we found all just the most fantastic neighbors and enjoyed so much. And my neighbor nearest to me is a wonderful character and she said, Well, my philosophy is whatever floats your boat.
I love it. It's a wonderful thing. That's the way it should be.
Stacy (as narrator): Eventually, the word got out about Foxfire Christmas Tree Farm, and they were selling up to 500 trees a season. It wasn't always the easiest work, raising trees.
Betsy: Some of them really got away from us. We raised scotch pines primarily. Our soil seemed to be suited to it. Robert and I were much younger. Scotch pines are the hardest of the trees physically to raise and um, the pruning of them and the care of them. It's a great deal harder. The Norway spruce is the easiest one to raise. You hardly have to touch in, but um, we didn't do Norway spruces for quite a while.
Stacy: So did you grow both of them? Both those ones, the easy and the hard?
Betsy: Eventually, we grew some Norway spruces. They have a reputation, and sometimes it's deserved, and sometimes it's not. On the night, you know, Christmas Eve, all the children are trying to go to bed, and what they hear is the sound of needles falling off the tree. And every tree will lose all the needles it has.
Now, I have experimentally tried quite a few Norway Spruces. I've never had bad luck with them. I've had several people, every time I had a tree come back, it was invariably a Norway Spruce.
Stacy: Mmm. People would bring the trees back?
Betsy: Well, yeah. They'd bring them back and say, Look, look at this tree! It doesn't have a needle left on it.
Stacy: Oh!
Stacy: What's your favorite tree?
Betsy: Well, I love the Scotch Pine. Because it's got substantial branches, it's a beautiful dark green with a good Scotch Pine, and it also will hold up heavy ornaments. I had accumulated quite a collection of heavy ornaments. My youngest daughter made a plaster hand cast in kindergarten. They must weigh 400 pounds, but Scotch Pine doesn't even whimper or whine about it, it just holds it up. But, they also make wonderful wreaths, and I call our cast iron wreaths. We've gotten quite a nice reputation with our wreaths. We do Scotch Pine primarily, and then we've added other greens in, and, Baby's Breath and a red bow.
Stacy (as narrator): Foxfire churns out about a thousand wreaths a year. Betsy said that in her younger days, she was making about 16 wreaths a day during the holiday season. I asked her if it was Christmas, if she wasn't making a wreath. She said it wasn't, and maybe she'd drive everyone nuts by going to help, now that she'd sold the farm, but
Betsy: They're going to have to run me off with a stick or something.
Stacy (as narrator): Of course, you can't talk about living on a Christmas tree farm without talking about the potential magic of when it snows.
Betsy: I love, you know, being a Christmas tree farm. Those first few flakes are just beautiful. And after that, snow is my least favorite four letter word of all the four letter words in the universe.
That's the one that I like least. I have had more people, well, I've been stuck in a lot of places, but I've had a lot of people stuck here on the farm. Because, if you're in town, snow seems like a really good chance to go out in the country and get a tree. Wrong. Ha. Yes. No. Mm mm. Lots of people stuck out here from time to time.
But we didn't get any snow this year and that surprised me a little bit and worried me a little bit.
Stacy (as narrator): Betsy helped run the Christmas tree farm, greeting customers starting somewhere around mid-November, selling cut your own Christmas trees, manning the wreath sales, the Cider Shack, and the Christmas shop. She raised her three kids and now has seven grandkids. I asked what she thought her grandkids could learn from her and her experiences, but her answer wasn't one that I expected.
Betsy: Not much. They have Google.
Stacy (as narrator): Google had come up earlier in our conversation, too, when I had asked Betsy about the differences in the world then when she was young versus now. She said she wasn't sure if it was a simpler time, but she did say this.
Betsy: I think it was much easier to make decisions then than it is maybe now.
Stacy: Really? Why do you say that?
Betsy: Well, there's so much to complicate it. You know, before, if my mother said something, she didn't have to worry about me Googling it. All she had to say was, because I said so.
Stacy: Yeah.
Betsy: And she didn't have to worry about my being on the phone with my friends all the time.
Stacy (as narrator): In addition to her work at the farm and her work raising kids, she also, as she mentioned earlier, joined the school board.
Betsy: It took me a year to learn the acronyms because Ed-speak is so full of acronyms that you wouldn't believe it. It has more than the military.
Stacy (as narrator): I asked her what she learned on the school board, and she said one thing she learned was that sometimes someone might not have all the information that you do, and it's important to take the time to explain.
This reminded her about something her husband Robert learned, not from the Air Force, but from his time as a Boy Scout leader.
Betsy: My husband, because of the way he was raised, he always felt like anybody could do what he did. And looking at his career, that's, you know, just not so. But he didn't realize that, and he said it wasn't until he took over as a Boy Scout leader. Then he realized that some things that were easy for him were extremely difficult for some people. And I think as a school board person, that's something that I learned too.
Stacy (as narrator): Robert's been gone for years now, so I asked Betsy about life on the farm without him. He's fine. He's happy as a hawk. She says there was a hawk that frequented the farm that everyone decided was Robert, since he always said he would come back as one.
Betsy: As my number one wreath maker said, she said, Betsy, I hate to tell you, but I think he had a woman with him. We had a good life together and we got a lot done. And he loved the business and I loved the business. More than that, we loved the place.
Stacy (as narrator): Betsy still very much loves the place. She no longer owns the Christmas tree farm, though she still lives in the house she and Robert built together there.
She talks about the views, the neighbors, the memories that she and her customers made every Christmas, and what she's learned along the way.
Betsy: Every year there's something different, a problem that you, it's like any other kind of problem. There's a problem you need to solve, there's bark beetles or funguses in the Douglas Firs, that kind of thing. And the only way you can take them is one problem at a time. And it worked out.
Stacy: Is there anything that you would say that you've learned from having the Christmas tree farm?
Betsy: Pretty much everything I know. I've learned that you better go ahead and deal with whatever the problem is. Because it's going to be there tomorrow and the next day.
Stacy: It seems like kind of a metaphor for life, don't you think?
Betsy: Yeah, I do. You know, and they come when you least expect them. And you pick up, pick it up and keep on going.
Stacy: As we ended our conversation, I asked her my final question. Well, after 84 years on this earth, what do you know for sure?
Betsy: Tomorrow's going to be a new day.
Betsy: New problems and new solutions and new excitement and new joy.
Stacy: Ms. Betsy, thank you so much for your time today.
Betsy: Well, thank you for yours.
Stacy: I have loved every minute.
Stacy (as narrator): That was Ms. Betsy Samuels. I hope you learned something from her reflections and the wisdom she shared. Thank you to Ms. Betsy for being on this show. In the next episode, you'll hear from Ms. Mary Alice Husted, a great grandmother in Monroe, Louisiana.
If you have a guest suggestion or just want to share your thoughts, head over to wisdomofagepodcast. com. If you enjoyed this episode and want to support the podcast, you can follow the show in your favorite podcast app, leave a rating and review and share it with a friend. Wisdom of Age as a Raine Media production produced by me, Stacy Raine with editing and sound design by Sandra Levy Smith. To discuss how we can help you bring important stories to life through sound, visit rainemediaco.com to get in touch.
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