The smells that surround me as I wait in the breezeway of the family-owned feed store where we do most of our farm business are a heady mixture of sweet feed, rich soil and mulch, and bales of straw and hay, with a bit of not-so-heady chemical fertilizer thrown in for balance. A whiff of propane drifts into the mix and mingles with the others. It comes from somewhere in the back of the storage area where a worker moves pallets with a forklift, wafting by on the cool wave that always seems to flow through the dust-layered building. An auger softly clanks as it screws a load of corn, soybeans, and cotton meal into bins near the grain mill in a distant shed.
The sights and smells of this local institution strike me the same each time I come here for feed, fence staples, field gates, and sundry other farming needs. It’s a physical presence of the past. Now I’m eight years old and standing on the loading dock of Theriot’s feed store just off Ryan Street in Lake Charles, hypnotized by the chicks, ducklings, and turkey poults huddled under the red heat lamps of the brooder, drawn to them once again by some atavistic longing—until my father hunts me down and says it is time to go. The worker at East Tennessee Feed interrupts my reverie when he emerges from the storage area pushing a hand truck loaded with a couple hundred pounds of hogmeal. I drop the tailgate, and he hoists the feed bags into the well-worn bed of the farm truck and I head toward home.
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Reading this weekend: The Need to Be Whole (W. Berry). Seems like a good time to finish this massive book, before the Front Porch Republic conference next weekend—which, if any of you are there, I hope will offer the opportunity to say hello should our paths cross.
Brian,
Your essay sparks memories of my childhood when Institute Farm Supply was still in business. The nice lady behind the counter would sneak me a free candy bar whenever I tagged along with my Dad. They were only 3 miles from our farm and if you were desperate for a soda pop you could jump on your bike and go get one for a dime. They had everything you could possibly need for the farm and the sounds and smells still stay with me even though it closed down over 35 years ago. Tractor Supply just isn’t the same.
TSC is not the same. We are fortunate to still have, not only this feed store, but active farmer’s co-ops to shop with in our area. Of the latter, there are four within 30 minutes.
I think I’d like to hear your thoughts on the Berry book… certain things have put me off reading it.
And as to smells and reverie… I can’t walk into a farm supply or garden center without being dropped next to my grandfather as he explained the difference between soil and dirt to me in his bottom-land fields. If I only smell dirt, I walk out again.
Elizabeth,
I love that recollection of your grandfather (soil and dirt). The sense of smell is such a powerful time-travel device, don’t you think?
Regarding the Berry book, here is my very short response to a long-involved work: His background and how he views himself as part of a community, one that includes everyone, is similar to mine and more so of my late-father (94). That outlook informs ultimately the “whole” of the book and the title. I still have the final two chapters to finish this week. But I have found it helpful to read the book, in spite of that title, as a collection of essays, instead of a monograph, each of which are linked by his general themes that regularly show up in his writings. Reading it that way helped me step back, engage with some, while finding others not as engaging. But one theme, but not the only, that slavery and racial prejudice are linked with the ways in which an industrial (and empire) mindset exploits both the people and the land certainly resonates with me.
As for the third-rail politics of today. The “fuss” about his efforts to find good things to say about Robert E. Lee, I have no problems with personally. I want a world of nuance, where I can appreciate positive characteristics in all (well, most) people, even as I notice they have feet of clay. This is particularly important when considering those who are tasked with difficult decisions. That study of others helps me determine how to act in my own life.
I know from your blog you are an avid reader. So, much of this final statement is of the “preaching to the choir” sort. But my bookshelves contain multitudes of viewpoints. It doesn’t mean I have no True North, I do. But I am culturally of the world, the US, the South, Tennessee and Louisiana (and each of those latter broken into as small a geographic unit as we can measure). That includes, and informs, all of the complexities and fragments it implies, pulled together in a sloppy Whole. You and I both read wide and deep to understand our own place. That is what Berry has done in this book near the end of his life. Measured by that yardstick it is a valuable testament of a lively mind.
But, damn, it is long winded at times.