Three Tales From the Farm

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I Am a VIP

August haying

It is true, yes, that there are moments as a farmer when my status as a VIP is confirmed. After all, I am known to multitudes. That these moments happen only between me and my livestock makes them no less important. So, for any of you yearning for that most modern of currencies, celebrity, for those of you who desire to feel valued, follow along with me as I fill up a bucket of feed near the barn.

The ewes who have been let out of their pasture to graze among the buildings hasten to my side from all points of the compass at the clanging of the lid. They form a tight scrum around me, like bodyguards protecting a pop star. The ones behind keep nudging me to move faster, perhaps afraid that my time in the open may expose me to assault, while the ones on either side stay firm against my thighs. The lead ewes keep turning around, making sure I’m safe and with them still. We march in lockstep across the grass, through the gates, to their feed trough. Only as we approach do they cease to see me as someone to protect. Like Roman legionaries who have missed a payroll, they abandon their post and impatiently begin to jostle, demanding that I yield if not an autograph then at least the contents of my bucket. Celebrity is such a fickle mistress.

Fowl Pox

We both looked at the small blisters covering his face, the eyes that were milky white and unseeing. Two days earlier he had stood next to me in the equipment yard, shifting his weight from foot to foot, head tilted as he listened closely in what we now know was the posture of the blind. But even seeing I saw nothing. The next day he stayed in the coop, in a corner, unable to defend himself against the younger rooster. I noticed, vaguely aware that something was wrong, and continued my chores. On the third day I bent down and picked him up by the feet, avoiding the three-inch spurs with difficulty, and cupped his back with my hand. Cindy examined him and recognized the blisters and unseeing eyes. He had fowl pox and needed to be removed immediately from the flock. It was possible he could recover, but old age would be working against him. I continued holding him on his back with feet grasped and walked to the barn. From the rack over a work table I removed a hatchet. I laid him across a railroad timber outside, stretched his neck over the side, and lopped off his head. His head and body in a five-gallon bucket, I placed the remains in the back of the pickup truck.

Cowboys and Ranches Belong West of the Mississippi

When I think of the habits of emigrants from our Western states, I’m reminded—likewise frequently and comically—of zooming down a sidewalk on my bike as a kid, then tumbling over the handlebars when I reached a section pushed up by the roots of an oak: both bring me up short. So when I say that the big man wearing a cowboy hat, his brand new dark blue jeans tucked inside fancy cowboy boots, stopped me cold, I understate. That he was also wearing spurs that stuck out a good three inches prompted me to ask the ladies behind the counter at the farmers co-op, “Are they filming a Western nearby?” How he drove away in that jacked-up fully-loaded brand new Ford F-150 Lightning with those three-inch spurs on his boots … well, I still both wonder and admire. But he did.

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Reading this weekend: the children’s book A Wrinkle in Time (M. L’Engle) and One Man’s Meat (E. B. White). I never had read the first till now, and I found it charming. Regarding the second, I had only read White’s children’s books. His essays, written from his Maine saltwater farm, are warm and funny and perfect for these cold December nights.

 

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.

 

Farewell, Peak Literacy, We Hardly Knew You

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This essay of mine was first published yesterday, at Front Porch Republic. It is not farming related. But, nevertheless, I think many of you will appreciate it.

Home-cured country ham with red-eye gravy

With all of the worries and whirlpools of existential angst in this world, declining readership of books is top of my list. Where does it rank on yours? Does it even make it into the top ten?

I was an active kid, outside fishing or hunting most days. And when I didn’t have a line in the water or a bead on a squirrel, I was riding my bicycle, a cool Spyder bike with a purple banana seat, all over town and usually the few miles to the local Carnegie library in downtown Lake Charles, Louisiana. That’s because most evenings I was perched on the couch at home reading until bedtime, and I needed an ample supply of books.

Even today, sitting quietly with an open book, slowly turning pages, one after the other, in measured rhythms, occasionally flipping back to reread a passage, is for me an escape pod from the current landscape of our world—not the natural world, with its own measured ways of experiencing, but the largely digital world by which it is now being supplanted. It strikes me that in escaping the modern distractions by reading a physical book, I plunge deeper into “real” life. Sadly, though, this appears to be an increasingly uncommon experience.

The data on readership is dire for those who value books in a culture, especially the numbers for young boys on their bikes. More than half of adults in the U.S. did not read a book to its end in the past year, and an astonishing 10 percent have not read a book in more than ten years. (This number may be lower than others you’ve seen, but that is because most surveys count as “reading” both listening to audiobooks—which, no matter how enjoyable that might be, is most certainly not—and skimming a few pages of a book but not finishing it.) Accounting for this depressing trend by age, readership falls off the map by the time we get to Gen Z—making this essay akin to bemoaning the lack of horse-drawn carriages on the interstate system. Even for those of us still in the category of readers, the number of books read annually is plummeting. And this is before we even consider the question of what is getting read.

In the city nearest where I live, Knoxville, Tennessee, during the 1990s, these bookstores were in operation: Book Star; Barnes & Noble; Borders, two locations; Davis-Kidd, two locations; Apple Tree; Incurable Collector; Book Eddy; Printer’s Mark; Gateway; Walden’s, three locations; B. Dalton; Andover Square; a nicely curated bookstore that focused on rare Civil War finds; and a lovely by-appointment shop in a basement devoted to books on books. Also on offer: Books-a-Million, National Book Warehouse, Book Warehouse in four locations, half a dozen Christian bookstores, another half-dozen paperback exchanges, and McKay’s. That’s thirty-seven just off the top of my head, and I’ve probably missed a few. We’ll call it forty bookstores for an MSA population of 500,000. (I knew this world intimately, by the way, having worked in six of them and owned the Printer’s Mark.)

The book retail landscape has altered dramatically since those distant days. Today Knoxville supports Barnes & Noble (one location), McKay’s, Book Eddy, Union Ave, and a couple of pop-ups, paperback exchanges, and Christian tchotchke shops masquerading as bookstores. So let’s be charitable and say there are ten bookstores serving a metropolitan area population that is now about 750,000. What has changed in these intervening years? Amazon? E-books and audibles? Personal computers and smart phones? Reading habits? The answer includes a bit of all six and at least a handful more.

For purely selfish reasons, the declining health of the culture of the book sorely troubles me: my first book was released in October. And it has lots of company. An astonishing 500,000 to a million new books are released by publishing houses in this country each year, the number burgeoning to as high as four million when self-published books are factored in. Amazon alone lists thirty-two million books for purchase, a glacial moraine of print. All of this, of course, became of special interest to me when my own little book joined that mass of titles in search of readers, and ever since I have ruminated on this decline of a once vibrant culture that, despite the flood of new works, threatens the contemporary printed word.

These grim numbers suggest at least two questions: Who reads any of those new books? And, do we need up to four million new titles entering the market each year? The answer to the latter is “probably not.” I can’t speak for others, but I seem to mine the past for my book readings, much more so than any present offerings. (Do not let that admission, dear reader, prevent you from purchasing the on again, off again No. 1–selling new book release on kayaking.) Why then do so many books continue to be printed? Perhaps the phenomenon can be chalked up to residual human creativity—the ghostly light from a vanishing tradition and culture, the creaking machinery of commerce that continues to operate even after the mechanics who serviced it have long since died. That could help explain why readership surveys also show that while some Americans still buy books, more and more they just don’t read them. The publishing industry is like a mining operation on autopilot that follows a thinning vein of minerals: still over-investing even as the resource and the returns have petered out.

The dwindling number of bookstores and the apparent accompanying loss of interest in patronizing them is complicated. Yet it seems only fair to point out that our willingness to interact with others was a trend that had already been accelerating way before the pandemic kicked it into overdrive (Bowling Alone anyone?). It’s probably not an irony and should not be a surprise that the activity of reading a book, which is after all best done in quiet solitude, is ultimately unable to sustain or justify a public presence.

As an author, I have been going through the process (thus far, a seemingly futile and certainly unsatisfying exercise) of assisting the publisher and sellers with the marketing of my book. It’s a process with which, while I am no expert, I do have some experience. I’ve been struck by how curiously antiquated the printed and bound “product” is to those who are charged with putting it before the public. I’ve also been struck by the number of people in the book-producing-and-selling business who are uninterested in their product. On the retail end, there was the manager of a bookstore who admitted, without embarrassment, that she doesn’t read books and never has. She might as well have been stamping passports for the lack of excitement and knowledge she exhibited as she went about putting books on the shelves.

If the publisher of my book is an example, working in that industry has now become akin to selling harnesses to Model T owners. That could explain why the staff I’m dealing with have been genuinely at a loss as to how to actually promote books, one of the industry’s raisons d’etre. It also might help me understand why the “marketing specialists” would recommend that I post tweets, TikToks videos, and clever Facebook memes in a feeble attempt to pry attention from the distracted gaze of glazed-over eyes; why those marketing specialists had obviously never bothered to examine the titles they were tasked with trying to promote, yet offered pdfs informing authors up front why their book was sure not to sell–then, by their own lack of interest and skill, did their dead-level best to make sure those warnings came to fruition.

As for the traditional venues for using other print media to market new book titles? Well, they just don’t have the presence in our lives anymore to matter. Newspaper readership has dropped from a peak of sixty million in the 1970s to around twenty million today, and that number continues to fall. That a newspaper would decline to run a review of a book for an audience that no longer shows up to read even seventh-grade-level content is somewhat understandable.

As we move towards the possible civic apocalypse of 2024, I’m reminded of what reading books adds to our democracy. Although I often read popular fiction for escape, I just as frequently pick up a book of history or essays to educate myself in the art of being a better person or citizen. It is with that latter point in mind that I ask you to consider these scenarios: Would a Robert Kennedy, speaking to a black working-class crowd today after the assassination of a Martin Luther King Jr., quote Aeschylus … to nodding approval and understanding? In a presidential debate in the first half of the twentieth century, would a “journalist” have asked the candidates, “Which one of you onstage tonight should be voted off the island?” The former occurred in 1968, the latter in the past few months. You may draw your own conclusions about the current state of our informed citizenry and our aspiring leaders.

In all honesty, I don’t know how we can pass along the love and power of reading a book without the physical structures (which includes libraries that are more than just a venue to use free computers) that place them before our eyes. Books have always been a peculiar product, straddling the line between commerce and culture, encouraging personal dialogue and public discourse, both entertaining and enlightening. But in this, our present, more often than not, the physical book is just a dusty curio displayed in a museum no longer visited and seldom open for visitors. Reading a book is now relegated to the same exhibition hall world of playing bluegrass. What was once a front porch activity engaged in as family and neighbors has been relegated to obscure festivals, appreciated only by performing professionals and dwindling numbers of aficionados.

Having worked in the book business for three decades, I’ve watched the declining number of buyers and readers up close and personal, and the one trend that troubles me most is the vanishing boy from that world, the boy destined to become tomorrow’s citizen or even president: he has become a rare sight in bookstores and libraries, almost as rare as a bicycle with a banana seat.

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Much of the research that I drew on for this musing comes from a study done by wordsrated. Although there have also been a host of studies done by other organizations, the picture painted is always depressingly similar. Also, if any of you discerning readers interprets criticism of a publisher to be aimed at Front Porch Republic, please note that my book’s imprint is FPR, which is substantially different than its publisher, which does the printing and promoting.

2023: Ten Reasons I’m Thankful This Thanksgiving Week

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a few shelves, among many.

Thanksgiving Day, that best of all holidays, is this week. It is time for my annual exercise in sharing what I find myself most grateful for in this life. But the exercise is not just done once a year; it’s a practice I carry out daily, when each morning I express, privately, my gratitude and hopes. It has been a helpful habit over the years, one that serves to lessen my too easily accessed anger and general cussedness (family and friends reading this may shake their heads and ponder, “if this behavior shows restraint, dear God…!”). This Thanksgiving I am thankful—

  • For my partner of almost thirty-nine years. Her love and companionship are essential, and her work ethic never flags, in this life we share.
  • That she and I have perfected, with years of long practice, the art of the siesta, an essential three-hour quiet time of the three R’s, reading, rest, and reflection, observed from 12:30 to 3:30 each afternoon.
  • For the lesson from my father, that in one’s community it is better to rub shoulders than to throw elbows. It’s a lesson I plan to revisit each morning during the upcoming election year.
  • For the skills and patience that husbandry has taught me, and for the maturity that has been acquired, sometimes painfully, in its practice.
  • That creation is a daily act of revelation on a planet more resilient than we.
  • That the current drought is a reminder of the fragility of both our work and how we treat the land. Such reminders of our smallness are always good for our species, if we are willing to pay attention.
  • For my younger neighbors the Scarboroughs and the Stricklands, both families who practice the arts of farming and homesteading while working full-time jobs and juggling raising children. They embody the best of this life.
  • For my siblings, their children, their children’s children—and the continued possibility of an endless supply of free labor during their visits.
  • For the books in my library that provide comfort, knowledge, escape, and entertainment.
  • That on Thanksgiving Day I will share with friends around a convivial table the produce from our farms. And in the center of that table will be a country ham, which I cured twelve months back, sticky and shining with a Dr. Pepper glaze.
  • And a bonus, if you are counting: for friends Melanie and Sara, and our tradition of the monthly cocktail hour (it really should be daily, you two).

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Speaking of books, a goofy indulgence this week was My Effin’ Life, the new autobiography by Geddy Lee. It was a fun romp—with a somber chapter on the Holocaust—through the rock and roll life of one of the greats. “We have assumed control.”