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.