Wherefore the Farm? A tribute to Joseph C. Shenk on his 87th birthday.

“Wherefore the farm?” Which, as all my high school Shakespeare students from my past life quickly learned, means not “WHERE is the farm?” (it’s in Linville, gorgeous Central Shenandoah Valley Virginia), but “WHY the farm?”

I get this question often. “Why farm?” Sometimes it’s phrased as: “When you were a kid, did you see yourself doing this?”

No. Not ever. And when I come up with an answer, it’s a variation of this–

Coming back after eight years in Kenya and Ethiopia and wondering what to do, we thought about the land we owned, which at the time was being rented out to several Old Order Mennonite farmers who grew corn and hay for their dairy operations. We didn’t have the heavy equipment or the generational knowledge of our Old Order caretakers, but we had something they did not: Google. We saw it as a challenge. Try to make a (modest) living from the farm. If we failed, we’d have to get conventional jobs instead.

We’ve been working on that experiment for three years. I wouldn’t call it a wild success, but the lure of success is enough to keep us trying one more year before circulating our CVs in other arenas.

But I keep coming back to the question, Why? Why farm? And I wonder if there’s a deeper answer.

Twice in my life Dad gave me some advice or direction. The rest of the time he and Mom pretty much left my sisters and me to run our own lives and make our own decisions. But two times he stepped in and said something that changed my trajectory.

The first time was one Thanksgiving about three years post-college. I was at a loss after spending two years in a volunteer household in New York City working with inner-city kids, and a year being a nanny for my older sister outside of Baltimore. I was feeling my status as a single person without any prospects–no career, no significant other, no anchor, no direction. I expected to feel empowered and free, but I just felt adrift. I confided tearfully to Mom that I didn’t really know how to be single, since most of the adults I knew were happily married or moving in that direction.

A friend from college was moving to California–no context, no particular plans. Did I want to go along? I had thrived in New York City, so maybe San Francisco–or was it San Diego? would do the trick.

Dad pulled me aside and asked what I thought about teaching. I had studied English literature and theater as an undergrad. I had enjoyed two years working with tough city kids in an after school tutoring program in the South Bronx. I had written and directed two plays with them, retelling the Christmas and Easter stories from a South Bronx vantage point. It was unpredictable and chaotic, but in the end a terrific success. Dad could see me as a teacher in a more formal, professional capacity. Why not go back to school and get my teaching certificate?

So I returned to my small home town of Harrisonburg and enrolled at James Madison to study education instead of moving to California with my friend.

The other time Dad gave me some direction was much more subtle. I think it was while I was still in college. Our family was visiting my brother-in-law’s family farm in the mountains near Morgantown, West Virginia.

When we visited the farm, we always spent a morning cutting out thistles while dodging the Black Angus steers grazing the hillsides. I soon learned the rhythm: push the narrow spade against the taproot, bear down on the handle until the root pops, reach with gloved hand to pull up the tap roots, bash them against the shovel blade to dislodge the clods of dirt, stamp the dirt into the root-empty hole. Move on to the next prickly thistle, taller than my waist.

I was hot and thirsty. Sweat burned in my eyes. Thistles scratched my wrists above my gloves. Seed heads pricked through my socks. I got stung by a yellow jacket.

Later that evening Dad and I walked up the gravel road past a neighbor’s farmette. Chickens scrabbled in the yard, and a goat and maybe a donkey regarded us from the cool interior of a barn. Cats lounged in the slanting sunlight. There might have been some ducks and maybe a stream ran through the back of the overgrown yard.

“What a lovely little place!” said my Dad, or something like that. “Rosy, I can see you having a farm sometime. Do you think you’d ever like to be a farmer?”

I thought he was crazy. Why would I ever want to be a farmer? It would be hot and dusty and miserable. I could never work that hard, or get up that early.

After graduation I left the sleepy, rural town of Harrisonburg and headed for the Big Apple and never once thought about farming.

I wasn’t particularity thinking of farming when my first husband and I bought a small piece of land at an auction in 2002. The eight acre parcel, an overgrown pasture with mature walnut and locust trees, was part of a larger piece that his extended family purchased. The farm had once been in his grandmother’s family as far back as the Civil War.

I still wasn’t thinking about farming when my second husband and I added some adjoining acreage to the walnut grove pasture the year after we got married. Then we went to Kenya and Ethiopia and rented the fields to the Old Order folks.

I never thought about my Dad’s vision for me, but perhaps his words steeped in the back of my mind like coffee in the aluminum pot of my childhood, brewed over the gas stove every morning. Bubbles rising through the hollow stem, pushing hot water into the fine grounds. Fragrant brew dripping back into the pot, to be pushed upwards again until the water was uniformly saturated, the color of a brown hen’s eye. The fragrance reaching into my dreams and bringing me in my pajamas and flip flops across the concrete floor in the kitchen of our cinder block house, to my Dad’s knee where he let me drink the strong brew with sugar and milk. “Coffee will stunt your growth, Rosy” he said, laughing into my hair. And I grew up to be taller than he by several inches.

Without consciously remembering them, maybe his words percolated in my memory and I eventually grew into them.

I’m a farmer now. For three years, Bruce and I have been studying farming by trial and error. Planting the fields and weeding them. Rolling out electric fence and reeling it back in again a season later. Loosing a giant slinky of coiled wire to watch it unspool across a field and spending hours untangling it. Taking day-old chicks from their cardboard shipping boxes into the warm red light of the brooder box and watching them grow until their white feathers barely cover their red behinds. Taking the hot, heavy bodies and tossing them gently into their new accommodations, which tomorrow will be drug into a fresh rectangle of grass.

Trying to get the pigs back into their paddock; their maddening refusal to cross the line where the single electric strand used to be, even though it is now gone. Contrast them with the weanling goats, who ignore six strands of electrified fence and squirm through to get to the adjacent field of winter rye. They do this every day for a week.

Selecting which does to breed to which bucks, and when. Marking the calendar for the projected births. Kidding season, like a barn full of gift boxes, each delivery a delight of color, number, gender. The unexpected birth under the shed in the far pasture. Triplets! The horror of a delivery gone wrong, the mistake of misinterpreting the signs. The small burials in the compost pile. The orphan kid knocking against my knees, sucking on my jacket. The loss of a doe.

My father died 20 years ago this summer. He never saw our farm or met our animals.

I was distracted in the summer of 2005, consumed by an even closer grief and rage than the loss of my father. I had four small boys, 15 months to seven years old who needed me to help them through the inexplicable, unexpected loss of their own father. I faced the loss of my husband without the wisdom of my father. I faced the loss of my father without the support of my husband. I remember walking through the neighborhood where I lived in high school the fall after he died–after they died–and thinking, what would Dad want me to do now? And then thinking, It doesn’t matter what I choose to do. My father will never be proud of me again.

One of the thousand small jolts of adjustment into the empty spaces he left behind.

It took me many years to have the space to grieve my father, and to miss him.

Last week I planted a magnolia tree at the corner of our farm house. This tree is for Naomi, our first grandchild, now one year old.

All of his life, wherever he lived, my father planted trees. He helped me to plant a birch tree in the front yard of our first house in Coralville, Iowa when I was six months pregnant with our second son Andrew. Dad chided me for exerting myself in the Midwest heat and took over digging the hole for the root ball himself.

Trees don’t need much in the way of soil amendments or fancy accommodations, just a hole in the ground and lots of water. But dad planted trees with the same expansive generosity with which he typically approached all living things. He dug a pit, wider and deeper than the root ball, and mixed compost in with the soil, back-filling the hole with the mixture as I held the tree upright. He staked the trunk, wrapped it against deer damage, and watered everything until the lawn was soggy.

Dad would have turned 87 today. Sometimes I wonder what he would think about the farm if he were here. Would he have wanted to help cut down the 100-year-old mimosa tree that died last winter? Would he have helped to bring in the hay, stacking up the small square bales in the barn before the summer storm? Or would he be too frail for the physical work that once defined his character?

Naomi’s tree joins dozens of other trees planted on the farm to mark special occasions. The line of oak trees and another magnolia tree we planted during Christian and Leigha’s wedding that took place under the walnut trees six years ago. Dogwood trees I planted each year in May for my mother on her birthday. (That was my intent–to gift her a tree every year for her birthday and plant it on our farm in her honor. The reality is a bit less precise. Most of the tree purchases and plantings did not occur on–or even near–her birthday. Some of the trees died. One got eaten by goats.) This month I planted two white oak trees to mark Andrew and Laurel’s first wedding anniversary.

And this spring I planted a dozen sycamore saplings, bareroot twigs, really, in the rich bottom soil down by the creek. I didn’t dig a big hole, or add any soil ammendments. I stomped a shovel into the black soil and pushed the handle over until a crack appeared between the dirt and the back of the shovel. Stick the wet roots down, remove the shovel, and heel the dirt against the tiny trunk.

Twenty years ago you left. You got up before dawn, made coffee in an old tin percolator on a small gas stove in a cinder-block house with concrete floors. You read devotions at a wooden table, a single light bulb overhead. You went out for your morning run, the smell of Lake Victoria on the pre-dawn air. You ran the red dirt track through the mission compound out to the main road and turned onto the macadam. You ran up the gentle incline towards Musoma Town, the rising sun glinting across the lake. Maybe you waved at the bicycle coming down the hill towards you. Maybe he waved back at you, or maybe he was looking at the sunrise. He didn’t see the pot hole until the last minute when he swerved into the path of an oncoming truck, who swerved to miss the man on the bicycle.

I miss you Dad. I’d like to show you our farm. The sycamore saplings have put out sturdy leaves and are thriving in the reeds and goldenrod of our wetlands meadow. The magnolia trees are full of blossoms, their sweet fragrance in competition with the heavy musk of the bucks, who spar in the adjacent pasture. A feral hen hatched out a clutch of chicks from a nest hidden in the barn, and scratches and exclaims in the loose hay. I’d like to introduce you to your great-granddaughter Naomi, and the new baby who will arrive this winter.

I’m proud of you, Dad. I’m proud of the choices you made and the way you raised your girls. I’m proud of the things you left me. Curiosity. Knowledge. Passion.

Rest well Dad. From what I know, I don’t think you had any regrets.

Neither do I.