Tag Archives: Family

Father’s Day: a Thanksgiving

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This weekend I am in Oregon for the wedding of my niece, daughter of my eldest sister, Cynthia. Here is a “Thanksgiving” post from the archives about the importance a father plays in shaping who we are today. Happy Father’s Day, dad.

It always seemed cold out on the Louisiana marsh as a boy. On Thanksgiving eve my father and I would head out to the hunting camp, a ramshackle building under centuries-old live oaks. At dinner we’d sit down at a long communal table and enjoy hearty bowls of duck gumbo. The dozen or more men would talk, and we the sons would keep quiet, seen but not heard. The morning smell of bacon and eggs served as an early alarm. And by 4:30 we were climbing into mud-boats and heading off across the marsh. At regular intervals a father and son would disembark into a wooden pirogue and push off into the darkness, usually arriving at a duck blind an hour before sunrise. Our hunt would begin with my father calling the ducks, enticing them to circle and land.

 At the end of the hunt in late morning, we’d head home, pulling into the drive around noon. Thanksgiving preparations inside were well underway, pies lined up on the counter. I’d cast an anxious gaze to determine that a favored sweet potato pie was among them, then off for a shower and a change to clean clothes. The table was set and dinner typically eaten in mid-afternoon; afterward, the calls would begin from distant relatives.

Today, as a grown man, my rituals have changed. I’m now the relative calling across the distance of a time zone and seven hundred miles. Instead of a duck hunt early Thanksgiving, my morning is filled with chores: feeding pigs, sheep, cattle and chickens, stacking wood for the woodstove. Busy, but still time will be made later for a woodland walk on our farm. We eat late, so no need to rush dinner preparations. Some years we are graced by the company of friends, and other years we dine alone. This year, Cindy travels and I will dine by myself or with a couple of friends.

I’ll prepare a roast duck in memory of those boyhood hunts with my father. And I’ll regret the absence from the table of a sweet potato pie. But since it is Thanksgiving, I’ll be grateful for reasonable health, a loving partner, a satisfying life, a full library; that my father is still with us, as is a large abundance of siblings and other kin. I’ll also be thankful for what is absent in my life, namely, the darkness of war and the dislocation from hearth and home of the refugee.

As I step out on the porch before sunrise Thanksgiving morning, the air will smell of smoke from a dozen farmhouses in our valley. It will be cold on our farm here in the hills of East Tennessee. The cattle will begin to bawl. But over their din, if I listen well, I will hear the sound of my father calling the wild ducks out on the marsh.

The Template

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The wind was out of the northwest, the temperature hovering in the low forties, as I hoed the potato beds for a spring planting. A weak March sun broke through often enough to bring out the ruddy freckles of my hands, hands that were the mirror image of my father’s.

At the end of the row, I stopped and put the hoe away and went inside to begin packing to head home to Louisiana to visit my dad in the hospital. My father is just shy of his 89th birthday and has always enjoyed good health, but he had had a stroke and was now recovering in a rehabilitation unit. With good care and the attention of my sisters, he was in good spirits and improving ahead of expectations.

A couple of days later I was at the hospital, helping him tear open a packet of crackers as we caught up on his progress. Earlier that morning, while he was busy with rehab, I had gone to the parish documents office to get a copy of my birth certificate.

Staring down at the record before me, I was struck by the inheritance that came with being the son of William H. Miller of Lake Charles, Louisiana: Fifty-three years earlier, I had been born in the same hospital where my father now recovered. It was the same hospital where all eight of his children were born. The same hospital where my mother and older sister had died, and a younger brother had passed away a few days after his birth. The same hospital where my dad recalled carrying me as he walked up and down the hallway when I was sick as a child.

My cousin from Texas showed up for a visit just as my dad was eating lunch, part of a steady stream of well-wishers who stopped by throughout the noon hour and into the early afternoon — an appropriate testament to a man who for nearly eight decades has been an active part of a community, a man who has lent his hands, as it were, over the years to whatever has been needed. 

That involvement in the community was a lifelong occupation of my father’s generation. Countless hours each week, often on the heels of working all day, were spent in service. Years ago, as a child, I found a handwritten list from my dad’s boyhood, a list of items he deemed essential to a good life. Top of the list was to do a good deed each day without the person on the receiving end being aware of it. No chest-thumping, no look-at-me, just a hidden hand helping others up.

As I prepared to say goodbye and return to Tennessee, I recalled an evening when my older brother and I had sat around the kitchen table with other family members. We both had our hands resting on the table’s surface in front of us. My niece, my brother’s daughter, looked across the table and said in surprise, “You both have the same hands!” I laughed and pointed at our father, who was sitting in a similar pose: “Well, there is the template for those hands.”

It was those hands I shook as I said goodbye, cognizant that my inheritance is both a privilege and a responsibility.

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Reading this weekend: The Peculiar Institution: slavery in the ante-bellum South by Kenneth M. Stampp. A classic work of history that illustrates how and why the burden of that institution haunts us today.

A Crow Perspective

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The wind has been up and blowing hard in the high crowns of the oaks since dawn. The crows seem to love these times, their caws to each other in the trees having only recently returned to the soundscape—a clear indication that fall is near. The crows radiate intelligence and even nobility, black shrouds of solemnity observing the change of the season.

The maple leaves are turning backwards, a prelude to dying in a burst of color in another month or two. The woods are dense with an undergrowth of seedlings and brush. Rabbits seem to occupy the corner of every glance, as does the telltale flag of the deer bounding just out of sight. The high today of 72 is welcome after the recent late-summer blast of 90 degrees.

Last Monday evening Cindy and I were both involved in the type of farming accident that is always lurking in the background. We emerged cut, bloodied, bruised, battered and clothes in tatters. Fortunately neither of us ended up in the hospital, or worse, but for a few minutes that evening, it certainly could have gone either way. The cawing of the crows to each other overhead as we made our way back into the house relayed the news the old-fashioned way.

I left the next morning and caught a flight to my homeland of south Louisiana. It’s a place where the honorific “Mr.” or “Miss” still precedes the first name of an elder when addressed by someone younger. Walking with my dad, now 87, I watched with admiration as he was greeted repeatedly with a friendly “Hello, Mr. Bill.” At a farmer’s market, children approached my sister Kathryn with a respectful “Miss Kat.” At a fast food chain, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the same salutation was used with customers: “Mr. Brian” and I was handed my breakfast.

No crows heralded my arrival or departure from my ancestral home. But none were needed to convey the shades of change coming in the not-too-distant future. Life is, as they say, terminal, and unlike the ancient Romans, we do not need to consult the entrails of a slaughtered bullock to recognize the inevitable change and cycle in life. With my family in the evening, in a house full of laughter, I watched my dad, surrounded by his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. The next morning, he was still hale and hearty as we two stood in the graveyard. The tombstones of my mother, sister, and brother and my dad’s mother, aunt, and father stood in front of us. Without sadness, my dad pointed out where he and my stepmother would be buried when their time comes.

Farming, as we do, fine tunes an appreciation of the inevitable cycles of life: butchering a rooster and hearing the peep of newly emerging chicks, delivering a ewe to the slaughterhouse and assisting in the birth of a lamb; helping our old dog as she struggles to rise from stiff slumber and savoring the first tomato of the season, grieving the death of a sister and sharing a glass of wine with her daughter.

The seasons change, the wheel moves, and the crows always return.

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Reading this weekend: Distant Neighbors: the selected letters of Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder. And, Larding The Lean Earth: soil and society in nineteenth-century America by Steven Stoll

Ties that Bind

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A few weeks ago I was home for the funeral of my oldest sister, aged fifty-six. The four days home saw a constant parade of neighbors and friends bringing platters of food each evening. It started a Monday evening after her death and continued through Friday on the day of her service. Each evening cars began to show up laden with casseroles, fried chicken, roast pork, boudin, banana puddings, salads and cakes of all descriptions. The parade of visitors stayed for only minutes, long enough to voice their condolences, a show of respect for a family that has stayed put for generations.

The groaning tables of food lightened the grief, made festive the gathering and allowed the extended family to have communion together over a shared meal. How often does it happen in our lives that the best memories are centered over a symbolic breaking of bread? An echo of our agrarian past, a statement that as long as we have food on the table we can weather any storm, that we can shelter in place until the danger is passed.

The average American moves 11.5 times in their life. My total was thirteen moves before settling on the farm at age thirty-seven. These past fourteen years of staying put have been an education in how to be part of a place. For me, anyway, the act of being a steward of this land has made me value those ties that bind us in life: community, neighbors, family and land. Hopefully that has made me a more thoughtful steward of those ties. I’ll leave that determination to those who know me best.

Each day when we plow through our long to-do lists each task binds us tighter to this place. Each task completed makes us more a part of this farm and value more our neighbors and distant family.  There are plenty of ways to fracture a community, neighbors, family.  But like the land they can be nourished back into productivity with a little water, manure, sunshine. Once again productive if lightly used they can be lightly harvested.

If nourished well they will thrive. If ignored and not cultivated they wither. We do give so that we can receive, that is part of the compact of a healthy society and healthy land.

And if we have done our part, our community will honor our survivors with food and honest sympathy. That the land we have worked will honor us by continuing to offer food to those who come after. And, hopefully, if the life has been lived well there will be a platter of banana pudding somewhere on the table.