“We Will Always Have Fencing”

In the Wodehouse novels, it is always fine hay-making weather and aunts are always to be feared. While aunts are scarce (though not unknown) in the pages of this modest blog, there are and always remain certain constants. Sixteen years of writing a mostly weekly account of farm life and I’m to be forgiven, I hope, if I repeat the odd theme once or twice, or three or 50 times.

There will always be fencing: The one and true constant for me (besides my partner) is the need to keep a few miles of fencing in good repair. It has become a back-weary joke with friends to offer up the answer before I can reply to their question, “What have you been doing today?”

The cattle catch sight: It would not be my blog if it were not recorded at least once a month that the cattle thundered down from the hill or their bellows reverberated off the ridges upon catching sight of me in the morning. For me, it is the trope most often used to convey the insistence of farm life to wait for no man’s breakfast.

There is weather: As Twain wrote in the foreword to one of his works, “There is a 100 percent chance of weather.” So is it true of this blog. On our farm it is always raining, snowing or freezing, too hot, too cold, too wet or too dry. Or, at the very least, it is threatening one or more of the above.

The seed corn has been eaten: The world is going to hell in a hand-crafted basket of our own design, and I’m going to tell you about it … again.

I go for a walk and ruminate: A cigar, the company of dogs, and a good log to perch on are all that I need on a fine spring day to right my position in the cosmos.

There will be books: Recording what I’m reading is a curious form of autobiography that will continue. The well-read life informs the well-rounded farming life.

There will be food, good food: Curing a ham, making kraut or pawpaw butter, cutting greens, eating a tomato fresh off the vine — it’s what we do, darlin’.

And shared dinners: The pork roast, seasoned with fresh minced herbs, will be cut into small medallions and fried, then served over stewed greens and a ladle of creamy grits. Dinner is at 8. Come out around 6 if you want to walk the farm and see the new piglets. And bring a dessert.

And, always, convivial evenings: At our secular celebrations, friends will gather from town and country. There will be feasting and moderate imbibing. The house and porch will be full, a Mariachi suit worn, pregnant ewes visited, and modestly exuberant activities engaged in by all.

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Reading this weekend: A Gracious Plenty: recipes and recollections from the American South

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6 thoughts on ““We Will Always Have Fencing”

  1. Ah, Wodehouse novels ladled with Pawpaw butter!
    (Have the former, and will be planting three of the latter as soon as it warms up a bit and I find three spots next to where a puddle appears after a heavy rain. Hope that’ll work.)

      • Thanks.

        For me its a tiny bit more forgivable when we forget the human bond with folks in another silo. But when the folks who’ve helped you get where you are end up being the same folks you kick to the curb… that grates my goat. To get to a really convivial world we will need to get to the next level – like you say, and slow down before we demonize even those outside our individual spheres.

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