Some things never change (repost)

Back in the 70’s, when my parents first discovered the land that eventually became Becnel Family Vineyards, it was an old sheep and cattle ranch with no real infrastructure.   At best, there were road-like paths but no electricity and no running water.  It was a far cry from the comfortable home we had been living in but the landscape captured the imagination of our dad, Leo Becnel, and he started to envision a unique lifestyle he wanted to share with his family.  He saw an opportunity to teach his children, first hand, what it meant to work towards something together. 
    
When we were young, family time often meant mending fences or filling potholes in our dirt road with shovels and an old pick-up truck.  During high school, friends of my brother, Kevin, would spend the night only to be woken up by Dad at the crack of dawn so they could pitch in around the ranch.  Go figure, most of them never came back.
   
Our new lifestyle meant a lot of learning—things like building a water system that delivered water from over two miles away or knowing the uses for different sizes of PVC pipe and how to properly seal a coupling.  Sometimes it meant waking up to no water at all and making due with jug water to wash up with for the day. To be honest, there were plenty of days I wasn’t so crazy about our new lifestyle but this was home and we were in it, together, for the long haul. Dad has always been a big believer in hard work and the ranch was not only the perfect outlet for his efforts, it strengthened us as a family. His work ethic is something we kids are now passing on to our own children.  

A lot has changed in the past thirty years, but some things stay the same. We still have a supply of PVC pipe on hand, and, believe it or not, we still sometimes wake up to no water in the pipes.  Dad still spends most of his free time filling in potholes in our dirt road or spreading compost in the vineyard. There are more of us now, but Dad’s hard work remains an inspiration to us all.

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