My drive to the dump in Paint Rock is a short four and half miles away. This day, Buster, the rat terrier, rides shotgun next to me, and we both gaze at the cloudless spring day outside. I pull past the Baptist church, then the volunteer firehall, and I see that the little corner market next to the dump is doing a thriving business in the exchange of children. The parking lot is one of those rural designated drop points where surly estranged parents offload their offspring for the weekend. But the failures of the formerly conjoined are not what is on my mind. I’m thinking instead of another spring, one that led me to this farming life 22 years ago.
farm meals
While I have attributed my desire to farm to the influences of authors like James Herriot, I could credit the agrarian models of family as well. One of my grandfathers farmed rice and cattle before the Great Depression in Acadia Parish, and another oversaw a pecan plantation in Beauregard Parish near the town of Rosepine.
My farming journey also got a heady boost in the 1990s, during another glorious East Tennessee spring, one spent delivering meals to rural shut-ins. I was marking time between jobs and volunteered to do daily lunch drop-offs to the elderly. Each morning I’d load up hot meals in my pickup and head out to the more sparsely populated areas of Knox County. The recipients lived in tidy, humble homes, almost all with vegetable gardens, often with some chickens scratching in the dust or a hog near the shed. Without exception, the occupants would cheerfully greet me on my arrival. One 90-year-old woman was routinely in her woodshed splitting wood. Upon spotting me, she would swing her axe into a large chunk of firewood, wipe her hands on her dress, then approach me with a friendly hello and collect her lunch.
During those few months I delivered meals, I watched the season unfold in such lovely and minute detail, and I was seduced. The experience shifted my gaze from our trafficked city life, opened a door I wasn’t aware I had wanted to enter. The evident contentment of my charges, the blossoming spring landscape, the loving care of those humble places — all of it moved me. Likewise, leaving those winding country roads for the city’s sprawl and congestion made me want to heave the wheel and turn back around.
And one spring, a few years later, we did.
Good Morning Brian!
One early summer day my Dad and I were walking down the cattle lane. It was about 76 degrees, not a cloud in the sky, and the cows were eagerly munching the new grass. And my Dad stopped abruptly, gazed over the landscape, and said, “You know, we are some of the luckiest people on Earth.” That was over 50 years ago and I was too young to realize the gravity of his statement. I now appreciate how right he was.
Smart man.