Family Transitions

Here it is in June, mid-way through the year and I have got to say this one has been a wringer!  In March my grandfather Jim Wright, the one who purchased the multi-generational land where we live, and farm passed away.  Jim lived a long and productive life,  the list of achievements are almost too long to list: raising a family with his wife Emily,  building numerous hand crafted houses and buildings, a very long and prosperous career as a chemical engineer,  helping with the cleanup of Chattanooga which once was one of the most polluted cities in the country,  the purchase of the land that is now Sequatchie Cove Farm and the adjoining forested land that is Dixon Cove.  Jim left an incredible legacy that will live on for generations to come and also left a hole in the fabric of our family after being an integral part of it for so many years.  What an amazing opportunity I had growing up with my parents and grandparents on the same land and now our children experiencing the same thing and having such a relationship with their great grandparents!  Even as I write this my grandmother Emily is not doing well, her and Jim were married 70 years and I cannot even imagine the void that she has felt since his passing.  Emily has also lived such a long and productive life, providing so much for her family and community.  I feel deeply for her and honestly it is a tough thing to witness, this no doubt being the toughest chapter in one’s life the final chapter before the next story begins, whatever that story may be, the great mystery of life.  ***Update on Emily***. Emily breathed her last On June 14th.  She passed peacefully in her sleep surrounded by her loving family.  No one could ask for a better life or a more peaceful death.  We will all miss Grandmama so very much!  It’s hard to imagine life on the farm without Jim and Emily who have been here supporting us since the very beginning! 

Starting off with that heavy news it seems selfish and absurd to talk about trivial things like the weather.  But then again that is the kind of thing we humans do isn’t it?  Particularly after a loss or during stressful or painful times.  And it turns out for us farmers whose lives and livelihoods are spent out in the weather every single day it really is not a trivial thing at all it is a part of our being, engrained in our experience of life.  This year’s weather has rocked my boat.  February through most of May the clouds seemed to just dry up, I think we had a total of 3 inches of rain during the time of year that typically is soaked to capacity, often times to the point of flooding here in the cove.  All the predictions of El Nino or La Nina or whatever this year is were describing the driest year in decades for this part of the country and severe flooding for other parts.  Naturally we were stressed, the pasture plants stopped growing, the seeds we planted in the gardens were not sprouting or if sprouted were withering out in the harsh sunlight.  This was shaping up to be a very tough year.  And Then everything changed!  One day a couple of weeks ago the rain gods changed their minds and down came torrential downpours day after day!  We had 8 inches of rain in one week and we are up to another 8 inches or so in the following weeks!  The corn that we rushed to plant when we saw the rain in the forecast is now sitting in puddles and on the days that the sun does shine and dry things out the weeds are sprouting and growing faster than I have ever seen in my life!  It is a daily occurrence now to hear a crashing and booming sound that sounds almost like thunder but is actually another giant tree on the mountainside falling and ripping the surrounding canopy to shreds.  The roots of the forest must have been weakened some by the early drought and the now the saturated ground cannot hold the weight.  Many of these are trees that have grown and stood strong for nearly 100 years!  My mother Miriam went out to check the potatoes, one of the crops we got in early and seemed to be thriving even in the dry conditions.  Instead of perfectly beautiful new potatoes like she anticipated she found them rotting, turning to mush still attached to the plants.

These riveting swings in the weather can be entertaining no doubt, I certainly am not bored when I am wondering if we will have a flash flood that will wash away all 6,000 of our chickens.  But there are other more relaxing ways to stay entertained.  Relaxing is an activity that has eluded me so far this year, in fact I am beginning to wonder if I can remember how to even do it!  7-day work weeks have become a norm, and I don’t even know why, I just have to remind myself, “Kelsey this is all self-inflicted, you made these life choices, nobody forced you to raise thousands of chickens and hundreds of sheep.”  And that’s true, I did choose this life.  It’s kind of strange that even on days when I’m out soaked to the bone and doing something absolutely disgusting like digging out a feeder filled with mud and chicken manure or even worse digging out some dead birds that made a bad choice of where to spend the night when it rained 3 inches, even in these times I tend to just be ok with it.  My wife Ashley is probably right when she says need therapy, I mean my behavior does seem really strange, most people just don’t put themselves through this kind of muck over and over again on purpose. 

So why do I keep on going, why do any of us, and I’m talking about farmers in particular, keep on going even when every single thing seems to be telling us that things aren’t going to get any easier?  Well I can’t answer for anybody else because I know from experience we all have totally different reasons for doing the things we do, even my parents who helped shape me into the farmer that I am today have their own reasons and their own tics to their own clocks.  For me farming has become who I am.  I mean literally, not just like “I identify as a farmer” but rather it’s the air that I breath and the water that I drink, the literal food that I eat and the fuel for my soul.  The repetition has helped mold me, waking up every day for decades tending the livestock, observing the pastures and the health of the animals, sowing seeds and watching them grow.  Harvesting crops and eating meals from the farm.  The meals that we eat on a regular basis far exceeds just about anything I have had at any dining out experience!  Now when I walk out over the land I observe with my eyes, I think about what is to be done with my mind, but even more powerful of a force that guides my day to day is a deeper feeling, I don’t fully know how to describe it, intuition maybe, a feeling that literally will push a thought right into my mind.  For example, this happens to me on a regular basis when a thought just pops into my head like “oh I should go check that back field where the lambs are”. My logical mind says, you don’t really need to do that you already checked on them earlier and you really have more important things to do, maybe like relaxing.  Fortunately, I rarely listen to my logical mind and so I go check the back pasture and find that the fence somehow fell over and lambs are wandering in all directions.  I kid you not this kind of thing happens to me ALL THE TIME!  I’m not bragging or trying to say I have some kind of superpowers I am just trying to express to you that something has happened to me.  I now feel this deep connection to the land and to the plants and animals that inhabit this land.  It’s a feeling that is really difficult to put into words, but it has become a part of me.  I guess at this point  life I can’t imagine doing anything other than watching the water flow down that gully that has been dry all year and is now rushing water full of sticks and leaves or watching the beetles, bees and butterflies that are swarming the thistle and milkweed patch that I have been making a point of not mowing down all spring.  Or monitoring the persimmon thicket down in the lower river pasture sprout up and grow from the fruits that the squirrels and other critters have scattered about.  That particular persimmon has the sweetest and most plump fruits nearly every fall/ winter something that we love to snack on as we go on family walks down by the river.  I could go on and on about these experiences that define and fulfill me, but I won’t.  And yes, there are hard days and hard things to deal with.  I could go on and on about those too.  But now that I have grown up a little bit and no longer think that the world revolves around me, I have come to the realization that everything good and satisfying in this life comes with hardship and a certain amount of suffering.  Its almost like this is just part of what it means to be human.  For me the hardship and suffering that I put myself though by farming for a living is by far outweighed by all the beauty, and wonder, and the feeling when I lay my head down on the pillow at night exhausted, that I have done something good, I have done a good job taking care of this land and these animals and that I have honored our ancestors who have worked so hard over the hundreds and thousands of years to keep human life going and moving forward here on this planet that we call Earth.