Category Archives: Farm Reflections

Remembering with Christmas Cards

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A few nights back, we sat at our kitchen table and wrote out our Christmas cards. Our house is still undecorated, as it is our personal tradition to put up a tree, decorations, and greenery the week before Christmas. Although, on the mantle, over the woodstove, there are a smattering of early arrival cards. Not entirely festive, yet. But it is in the air, you know.

This post, below, was published back in 2016. Since that date many of the older generation of friends and family have passed away. But we both have nieces and nephews who have moved out, married, and now have growing families of their own, since I wrote this piece. So, the list as we worked through it remained both familiar and new, a summary of the arc of life contained in an address list.

With Vince Guaraldi in the background, we wrote and addressed our annual Christmas cards last night. An old-fashioned exercise that echoes in our warm kitchen with news of the past year. Our modest notes convey best wishes, some with hopes to see more of this friend or that family member in the coming year. Inevitably there are deletions due to death, divorce, or the odd friend who drifted away.

Sending Christmas cards is a practice in the naming of the past, a remembrance of the history of our friendships and family ties. For myself, the ritual is carried out with little eloquence and appalling handwriting. Yet, each year I look forward to the occasion.

We sit amicably at the table for a few hours before a late dinner, occasionally commenting but mostly in silence. We jot down a few words to convey knowledge of intimate details. There are those to whom wishing joy seems misplaced: the friend whose only sibling collapsed this season after shoveling snow, a nephew and niece still feeling the loss of their mother, the friend facing his second Christmas as a widow after the unexpected death of his wife, my cousin.

There are friends and family far away that we visit with seldom except through letters or phone calls. The friend I met in an Asheville pub one evening who has a longstanding invitation to visit our farm from her village in England. Another in London whose annual Christmas Day call is a tradition of over 26 years. The friends in town and in our valley that we see often and would see more of if our lives were not so busy.

The act of signing the card becomes a bridge. Though the words are too short and not particularly profound, the underlying message is that there is a bond. That there is a connection across distance and time and in some cases through death that each card represents. It gives us a moment to reflect with gratitude on those who are part of our lives.

One Good Day: Part 1

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A really good day on the farm slips its way into being, sly and unnoticed. The day is planned—only the how-it-will-turn-out remains uncertain.

Lake Bistineau, Louisiana, in draw down.

When I step out on the back porch at 5 a.m., coffee cup in hand, the morning star is locked in a tight embrace with the slim crescent moon. Staring at the heavens is a longtime practice of mine that informs even as it inspires. On this morning, once again, the sky is clear of clouds: rains are but a dim memory shared in travelers’ tales, September and October having left behind only dusty footprints at the doorstep of November.

With my gaze lost in the limitless depths above me, I sense nothing malevolent at the tail end of the bright night. Taking that as a sign of celestial goodwill, I leave the porch and walk to the barn, as is my wont at the beginning of each day. I grab the three-tine hay fork and a scoop of sweet feed. A shifting of heavy feet at the far end of the chute system indicates the presence of the Angus cow and her daughter, a Charolais cross. Hearing me, they let out a muted lowing. If you have been around cattle, you know the difference between that sound, one of contentment, and the more full-throated bellow for action that hurries a farmer’s steps.

These two had arrived at the farm a few nights earlier, delivered by friends paid with cash and a dinner of crawfish étouffée, who in turn repaid in conversation and good company. Having cattle return to our farm, even in this small way, after a four-year hiatus feels like a homecoming. The cow is bred and will deliver next May. The six-month-old heifer will be fattened for our freezer and friends’.

I pour a little feed into the cattle trough, winning me if not love then at least attention. As the cow and her calf busy themselves eating, I fork a half-dozen loads of fresh hay into the large manger inside the barn before scattering a couple of forkfuls on the floor to cover the overnight deposits. Out in the dark corral the sheep are sleeping islands. I navigate among them, listening, then check that they have plenty of water. (When sheep or cattle move to eating hay, their daily water intake increases.) I also make a mental note to bring them a fresh bale of hay later in the day. The extreme drought of our county has had us feeding hay 4-6 weeks earlier this year than usual.

Back in the barn’s breezeway, I seek out two five-gallon buckets near the feed barrels. The buckets are for the hogs. The first is for the three feeder pigs. It is filled halfway with hogmeal and topped off with the last bunch of overripe bananas. To the second I add a couple of large scoops of hogmeal destined for our sow, Ginger, and her latest beau, Jack. This mating is (and I mean it this time) her last chance to conceive.

As I feed, I watch with both appreciation and predatory interest as the three pigs destined for a January date with the grim reaper demolish their breakfast. When they are finished, I once again gaze skyward and find that the moon has moved away from her partner, the pas de deux having ended. In the time it took to complete the early morning chores, the dawn hours have closed in and the stars have begun to fade. Yet I am still in the dark when I return my buckets to their hooks before heading inside for another cup of coffee, a bit of reading, and breakfast in preparation for the coming day.

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Sorry for the late posting this week. I have been hanging out with my brothers, nephews, and great-nephews in Louisiana the past few days.

 

Drought and Delay

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a cow and calf added to our farm.

The piece I was working on for this morning is still incomplete. We have been struggling to finish more of a large new fencing project on our farm; made difficult as our East Tennessee region, after a wet summer, slid effortlessly into an extreme drought.  Each effort to dig post-holes, because of the hardening soils, requiring more time (and physical recovery on my part) than is normal. Those delays, plus our ongoing re-fencing of the 25-year-old inner corral, seem to have kept me from my desk.

But I have been reading:

The Soul of Civility: timeless principles to heal society and ourselves (A. Hudson). A new title that I felt was necessary to read before the social-apocalypse of the US election year in 2024 destroys any vestige left of our civil structures.

Local Culture: Friendship, Fall 2023. The new fall issue of  the FPR journal issue landed in my mailbox last week. It starts with a piece by Wendell Berry and promises to be something to absorb my morning readings for a few weeks.

Selections from Against the Grain: a deep history of the earliest states and The Art of not Being Governed, an anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia, both by James C. Scott. I find myself in the face of the meaningless political choices on offer, reexploring my more youthful anarchist impulses, but from a less ideological perspective.

Which brings us to my final book added to my stack, Human Scale (revisited), a new look at the classic case for a decentralist future (K. Sale). Billed as the single best book on how to build a localist world, it fits my mood these days.

Well, the cattle (we have cattle, again) are bawling, the sheep stare at my lighted window with hungry eyes, and I must go.

At East Tennessee Feed and Seed

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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.

October Notes

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After three seasons of rain and damp, I have been gifted exactly what I requested: a drying landscape. With little rain over the past six weeks and little in the forecast, the pastures that were grazed hard and late are already brown; fortunately, though, those grazed earlier in the year are still relatively green. And a trip down our gravel driveway yields a small dust bowl in the truck’s wake.

September and October are historically our driest months, so I am not unduly worried. Fall also brings cooler temperatures, and I enjoyed the 37 degrees I awoke to at 5 this morning. And I appreciate the opportunity to start my work earlier in the day. Many of my farm tasks can only begin when the dew has dried. During the summer that means work starts when the heat is at its most intense, but the past few weeks have found me out on the tractor bush hogging or even weed-eating as early as 9. This drier weather allows me to be more productive, leaving the farm looking more, well, neatly barbered. I’m happy for the dry now, though if you ask me again in another eight weeks and the rains haven’t come at least a few times, I may be singing a different tune.

Along with the lack of precipitation has come the seasonal arrival of massive combines on our two-lane backroads, slowing traffic throughout the area as they move from field to field. Farms in East Tennessee are not set out in neat Midwest grids. Even the largest fields may be only fifty to a hundred acres, often set in sprawling irregular shapes. A farmer with several fields of such size to harvest, and perhaps scattered across several small valleys, negotiates narrow twisting county highways driving a machine designed to reap, thresh, gather, and winnow grain on the Great Plains. From plot to plot, the farmer and his entourage traverse these blacktops like a Main Street parade on July 4th composed of only combines, dump trucks, and an accompanying fleet of pickups. We don’t farm the big commodity crops of corn, soybeans, and wheat. Nonetheless, I like to see such industrious rural action. And truly, I don’t mind anything that slows me down in this life … much.

During these past weeks that straddled summer and now have crossed over into early fall, the tulip poplar leaves began to flutter off the trees, marking a falling rain of foliage that continues until early November, when the arrival and passing of a single windy cold front leaves the forests naked to the coming winter.

Farming routines are marked by these seasonal and annual changes—much like the recent departure of the Kid, who has been replaced by a new Kid. Our much-appreciated helper of three years, Aiden, eventually matured into a well-rounded older teenager with too many extracurricular hobbies and sport interests (coupled with working on his own parents’ farm) to be here enough to help. So now the thirteen-year-old nephew of our neighbors over the hill has taken up the mantle of following direction and reading the mind of your crusty scribe. The new Kid made me smile when I caught him singing the South Park work song Master’s Got Me Working as he dissembled an electric fence yesterday.

Out on our lower fields the rams have been enjoying a conjugal visit with their respective flocks of ewes. A handsome Tunis boy leased from a neighbor will be returned later today. Both flocks will then be merged, leaving the Texel as the clean-up ram, which means that he will be tasked with breeding any ewes not already bred by the Tunis, in addition to those in his own flock. Lambs to follow in winter and early spring.

And finally, behind the equipment shed in the farrowing yard, Ginger, our Red Wattle sow who was given the butcher’s reprieve, has spent the past fertility cycle with a young inexperienced boar. We hope (though we half expect another failure) that she was bred, never having witnessed the act firsthand. Perhaps the young boar got the job done, but without being too graphic for your Sunday sensibilities, we saw him mount and finish his job from every damned approach but the right one. Poor girl, poor boy. He was leased from another neighbor and returned home earlier this morning. The upshot is that if Ginger comes back in heat a few weeks from now, we will have another difficult decision to make. If not, then look to hear about our new piglets in three months, three weeks, and three days.

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Reading this weekend: Judgment Prey, the latest John Sandford mystery, and Book Madness, A Story of Book Collectors in America (D. Gigante), a dense, well-written glimpse into the early years of collecting in this country.