This Farm Note is from the archives, before I began to regularly post on the blog. The Farm Notes began in 1999 and were shared for those years with a group of friends and family. Over the coming year I will post periodically from those archived “Notes.”
Last Saturday, early, I hooked up the disc harrow and headed to the lower fields. It was time to reseed the lower pastures. The lower field, our primary hay field, is about six acres. There is an additional smaller field of about an acre, enclosed with woven wire, on which we intend to finish out lambs this spring and summer. Both were in need of reseeding. As I finished the smaller field I spied our neighbor trudging up the drive to visit.
He, of the paranoid fantasies about little Chinese men wanting his property, had not been seen much this long cold winter. We had both kept an eye on his chimney: as long as there was smoke we assumed he was okay.
Quite the character, about six foot, burly with a beard down to his belly that he keeps tied like a pony tail, usually stoned and a conversational style to match. As he approached he began to use his own personal semaphore code to direct the landing of my tractor. I signaled back that I needed three minutes to finish and I’d meet him at the barn.
Pulling through the gate I turned off the engine. “Hey man, how are you doing”, I said. “Since you are the landowner I’m required by Tennessee law to notify you that I’m carrying a loaded weapon onto your land”, he replied.
Shit, just what I want, a paranoid depressive with a loaded gun. It reminded me of the upstairs neighbors we had back on Morgan Ave in Knoxville: when they weren’t rattling our china in lovemaking they were rattling the china in fistfights with each other. One night Butch stormed down and banged on our door. Standing there wild eyed and waving a pistol he said, “I couldn’t start my car this morning, last night I saw a man who looked just liked you monkeying under the hood of my car. I him here to tell you if I see him again, I’ll start shooting”. “Butch”, I said. “Put your glasses on first”, and shut the door.
Well, as I stood there last Saturday with our neighbor, who informed me he hadn’t had a bath in two weeks (I had noticed, even in the stiff breeze), he kept reaching in his overalls under his arm like he was holding something. I thought that this could be a silly way to check out of life as he moaned about people driving new pick-ups that cost more than he had ever earned in his life.
I definitely did not like the turn of conversation. So, I invited him out to see our pigs. He likes pigs. He once worked on a large hog farm in North Carolina helping gather boar sperm. As we talked pigs he returned gradually to earth and left me with this priceless gem while he gazed fondly at our hogs: “I have had more boar semen on my left arm on a Saturday afternoon than most people shake salad dressing out on their salads all week”.
As he shambled back off down the drive I laughed long and hard. This was a better anecdote to share than the headline in the local paper that morning about the cops being called to the First Baptist Church of Rockwood to break up a fistfight between the pastor, who had just been fired, and his parishioners.
Ah, life in the country.
