Maybe Someday I’ll Be An Old Farmer

Maybe someday I’ll be an old farmer… and an old writer. In the meantime, I’ve got my little homestead, and I write in fits and starts, but I never slow down on reading. I read every post by Gene Logsdon, an old farmer and old writer. It doesn’t surprise me that my attitudes about the land line up with those of an old timer. It does surprise me when this 80 year old man seems to share a lot of my political ideas, too. Whatever he has to say, it’s always interesting to me in a surprisingly quiet and intimate way.

My homesteading scars are limited to a couple of lines on my arm from the wood-burning stove. I’m sure there are more to come, though. From Scars Keep The Record of Our Lives:

If you want to get a lively conversation going among farmers, bring up the subject of scars. For some reason we glory in telling about the marks of maiming or near death that decorate our bodies like so many road signs along the trail of life. Hardly a one of us doesn’t have a crooked leg or missing finger, or a lost limb… Perhaps it is the gravity of the situation that awes us into wanting to talk about it.

This spring has been undeniably bounteous for me. The growth, the babies, my joy in the details. It always seems like spring comes just in time. From Nature’s Promises Kept Again:

Going into March… I am torn between despair over a political process descending into lunacy and an economic process that guarantees only an ever-growing poverty class.  I am glad I do not know how to tie a rope into a noose.

Then I look out the window one morning and see the great miracle… Slowly but surely all the spring wildflowers return— actually this unusually warm spring, they came fast and furiously— and I feel that great uprising of joy and hope once again. Nature does not renege on her promises.

The resilience and stability of nature is amazing and we often miss it because the news of the day focuses on the failures and threats, not on the successes. In all the earth-shaking changes that have shattered our sense of security over the past forty years or so, here on our farm, right here, the state of wild nature is remarkably little changed.

And then Living At The Whim of the Weather was written right as spring was snatched back momentarily this year. I don’t think I lost any plants, even though I definitely planted early.

Gene’s most recent post It Pays to Stay Home resonates with me, too. I love to go out into the world, but I love to stay home at The Wallow, too. Until I moved here, I never knew how interesting one’s own backyard could be.

Staying home has to be one of the most unpopular ideas in America where the whole culture embraces faraway travel as essential to happiness. Many of us don’t really have homes that can provide as much enjoyment as travel promises. Rather than spending our money to acquire such a property, we are taught to buy such enjoyment with far away travel. Perhaps what we need is proper publicity. To advertise traveling at home, a documentary could open with unbelievable close-ups of ants herding and milking aphids on an apple tree, a raccoon destroying a bluebird house, a hawk dive-bombing a mouse, a flint arrowhead sticking out of a creek-side cliff. Then a roll of drums and a voice sonorously introduces the docudrama:  “Today we are going where no explorer has gone before— YOUR BACK FORTY.”

If you’re ever in the mood for some down-to-earth farming posts with insight, I recommend Gene Logsdon at The Contrary Farmer.