I may walk the streets
of this century and make my living in an office
but my blood is old farming blood and my true
self is underground like a potato.
I have taken root in my grandfather’s
fields: I am hanging my laundry beneath his trees.
~Faith Shearin from “Fields”
There may be restrictions to a summer’s happiness,
but the ease that belongs to simplicity
is charming enough to make up for
whatever a simple life may lack…
~Sarah Orne Jewett from The Country of the Pointed Firs
Flowers seem intended for the solace of ordinary humanity.
~John Ruskin
Weeds are flowers too,
once you get to know them.
~A.A. Milne
I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times a day, and stand in deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny with a love that nobody could share or conceive of who had never taken part in the process of creation. It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world to observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a rose of early peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate green.
– Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mosses from an Old Manse
They put up hay loose there, the old way,
forking it into the loft from the wagon rack
while the sweaty horses snorted and switched off flies
and the littlest kids were commanded to trample it flat
in between loads until the entire bay
was alight with its radiant sun-dried manna….
It was paradise up there with dusty sun motes
you could write your name in as they skirled and drifted down.
There were ropes we swung on and dropped from and shinnied up
and the smell of the place was heaven, hurling me back
to some unknown plateau, tears standing up in my eyes
and an ancient hunger in my throat, a hunger….
~Maxine Kumin from “Hay”
My parents knew that ancient hunger, both born on farms with teams of horses that brought in hay the old way while the children tramped and stamped the loose piles firm.
I’ve known that ancient hunger, having grown up on a farm that brought in to the barn loose hay the old way by tractor and wagon, having danced in the dusty sun motes on the top of the hay on a bright afternoon, the light cut in stripes over the sweet smelling grass.
We’ve made sure our three children knew that ancient hunger, born to a farm that brought in hay bales stacked to the rafters through community effort, those same dusty sun motes swirling about their heads as they learned their jobs, from bale rolling to lifting to tossing and stacking.
And now the next generation of neighborhood children arrive with shouts on haying days to clamor up and down the bale mountains, answering to the same hunger, blowing the same dusty snot and thrilling to the adventure of tractors, wagons and trucks, celebrating the gathering in of sun-dried manna together.
Surely this is what heaven will be like: we are all together, dancing in the light of the sun motes, our hunger filled to the brim by manna provided from above.
Good farmers, who take seriously their duties as stewards of Creation and of their land’s inheritors, contribute to the welfare of society in more ways than society usually acknowledges, or even knows. These farmers produce valuable goods, of course; but they also conserve soil, they conserve water, they conserve wildlife, they conserve open space, they conserve scenery.
~Wendell Berry
When it is understood that one loses joy and happiness in the attempt to possess them, the essence of natural farming will be realized. The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.”
~Masanobu Fukuoka
I should understand the land, not as a commodity, an inert fact to be taken for granted, but as an ultimate value, enduring and alive, useful and beautiful and mysterious and formidable and comforting, beneficent and terribly demanding, worthy of the best of man’s attention and care… [My father] insisted that I learn to do the hand labor that the land required, knowing–and saying again and again–that the ability to do such work is the source of a confidence and an independence of character that can come no other way, not by money, not by education.
~Wendell Berry
Farmers farm for the love of farming. They love to watch and nurture the growth of plants. They love to live in the presence of animals. They love to work outdoors. They love the weather, maybe even when it is making them miserable. They love to live where they work and to work where they live. If the scale of their farming is small enough, they like to work in the company of their children and with the help of their children.
~Wendell Berry from Bringing it to the Table: Writings on Farming and Food
and I may I add to Wendell’s truths:
Farmers love what they do even when a *certain* horse manages to find a way for the second time in his life to tear his lower lip playing with a simple water bucket in a simple stall, then gets it repaired by a gracious vet on Mother’s Day, and then finds a way five days later while out innocently eating grass in the pasture to rip open all his stitches again which will require a far more complicated plastic surgery type repair in ten days after plenty of antibiotics and prayer.
We love our horses, oh yes we farmers do, even the accident-prone, self-injuring ones. We love our vet even more.
And the vets do love their farmers who need them.
(no, sorry, no graphic pictures will be posted of a very gruesome lip wound — I need a little serenity today)
“Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation’s tears in shoulder blades.”
~Boris Pasternak
Sweet peas and pumpkins are strange neighbors on the same table
Always separated by weather and season,
one from late spring, the other from mid-autumn,
truly never meant to meet.
Yet here they are, side by side,
grown in the same soil
through the same weeks,
their curling vines entwined.
A dropped packet of sweet pea seeds
forgotten in the weeds during summer rains;
escapees swelled and thrived, now forming rich autumn blooms
gracing a harvest table with bright pastels and spring time fragrance.
Perhaps I too may bloom where I land, even ill-timed, out of place,
I might run wild, interwoven, bound to others
who look nothing like me, encouraged to climb higher,
to blossom bravely in the face of a killing frost.
“Here are sweet-peas, on tip-toe for a flight:
With wings of gentle flush o’er delicate white,
And taper fingers catching at all things,
To bind them all about with tiny rings.”
~John Keats
Barnstorming 