I Shoulda Maybe Been A Farmer

Or perhaps I was, in a past life.


I spent the better part of this morning clearing a heavy wet snow from my driveway and sidewalks, then walked through deep snow to the backyard, where I cleared a path to the birdfeeders. And I must say that I felt comfortably absorbed in it. I came into the dim garage, hung the snowshovel on a hook, peeled off my insulated coveralls, came inside for a warm cup of coffee. Ahh. Part of it is simply the satisfaction following good exercise, but I think there is more.


My dad retired from a wholesale plumbing company desk job -- after spending his first 30 or so years as a route salesman, and spent the last ten years of his life on a small farmstead he and my mother bought, along with a dozen or so acres of cornfiel and a large hill dotted with cedars. I truly believe those were the happiest days of his life, puttering around in that old, cobwebbed, barn with its torn slats and dim memories of the time when it was an actual working farm. He’d work on the house or restoring some outbuildings in nice weather, and work outside some in winter, like I did this morning. He died of a heart attack up there, and I can’t picture him dying any other way. It wouldn’t have been right.


Perhaps I am also reflecting my childhood, having come of age in a small midwestern town, surrounded by farming. I lived in town, as did my friends, but the farms were always there, sometimes we even visited someone’s relatives who did farm. And my best friend kept a pony on a small farm just out of town, and in summers we’d take long walks out there and, again, there was that same half-rundown sort of barn, with swallows darting about, weeds at the foundation, the hint of rats or other rodents.


Also, down there -- central Nebraska -- was also in the heart of the Homestead Act of the late 19th Century, where anyone with gumption or misguided enthusiasm could stake out 160 acres, “make improvements” and have their own farm, something that resonated powerfully among the ungentrified Europeans especially. So I grew up with stories of homesteaders and hardship, “use it up and wear it out/make it do or do without.” No illusions of easy success. When I was a kid there were still survivors of the “Children’s Blizzard” of 1888, which had swept across the country’s midsection. When the weather changed from balmy to blizzard in a matter of hours, and children especially suffered, trying to get home from their one-room schoohouses or freezing within. And in my own family my mother’s grandparents homesteaded, survived for some years, then lost it in the Great Depression.


I don’t know how I would have fared with crop failures and foreclosing banks, or balky equipment or any of the business of farming, but I know that I am happiest mending fence (even if it’s just a chainlink fence around my backyard) or tending the crops (garden plot), or raking leaves or shoveling snow, or whatever. And the cool dimness of darkened places still calls to me, and I have felt no greater pleasure than peeling off the overalls and settling inside for a bit,