"Sell That Fine Pig"

Lily is wearing a sleeveless ruffled top with her shorts and cowboy boots. Her long red curls are tied back from her freckled face with two ribbons. She has walked into the sales ring at the Atchison County Fair from a Norman Rockwell painting. I cannot help but be charmed. But when the auctioneer reads her name, she bounds across the sand, with one finger beckoning to the shaggy lamb behind, who follows her, his leash trailing. This makes me clap my hands in delight and sing under my breath,

"Lily had a little lamb....."

And everywhere that Lily went,

The lamb was sure to go."

Surely this performance earned the young lady a couple more bids on the premium for her animal. The lamb knew Lily and Lily knew her lamb.

Jilli's sheep is tired by the time she is called to the sales ring. But Jilli isn't. With enthusiasm that is not entirely communicated to her animal, she somehow moves him to the center of the ring with her hands, rope, boots, and the sheer force of her personality and will. She is working so hard. The bidding takes a good long while, long enough that the reluctant sheep gives in, stands pat, and allows Jilli to mold it into the preferred stance. It may or may not matter at this sale, but her folks have impressed upon Jilli that she should never stop working until the job is done.

Because of the heat and humidity, the sale starts late this year. Whether its the hour, the temperature, or just the ongoing slow decline and consolidation of our county's business community, the stands are full of family members, but not as many buyers as one would wish for the number of exhibitors. Nonetheless, the bidding can be brisk; it is always good-natured; and whether the animal is a hog, a rabbit, a goat or a chicken, the kid will get a nice check and the buyer a round of appreciative applause.

When Lee and Ann and Ben showed animals for 4H and then FFA, the barns were full with up to 70 steers and one year, on top of 200 hogs. Six or seven Hurst cousins worth of cattle did contribute to the bounty. Today's show ring features a solid representation of pigs, a pampered lovely handful of steers, sheep, goats,and a rainbow's worth of rabbits and chickens in arms. Farms have changed in our county, but the faces of the parents watching from the barn, the fence, or the stands are ever the same: focused and intent, alert to the bidders and the auctioneer, poised to offer advice and encouragement to the showman in the ring.

Some of the bidders are the same too. It does my heart good to hear some of the self-same folks bidding that were buying animals at the fair almost thirty years ago when Lee and Ann first led a steer into the ring. Now Lee and Ryan and Ann and Matt are the ones reminding their kids when the pigs were born and how much they weighed and Aaron, Lizzie, Gabe and Abbie are the ones with whips and brushes, ever watching the judge, and stuffing ribbons in their jeans' pockets as they drive the pigs back to the pen.

"Sell that fine pig!" All the pigs are fine by the end of the evening as the stands thin and the buyers settle up. Every time the ring man raises his hand and calls,"Yup!", its a vote for tomorrow, a down payment on the success of the little girls with star spangled belts and boys with sweat running down their faces.

"Sell that fine pig!" and pay it forward for the kid whose pig peed on her boot or the kid run over by his animal in the alleyway. Raise your hand and you'll send a message in a bottle from the past to an unknown future where the lessons of responsibility and conscientiousness pay interest and more.

Sell that fine pig!" and record for posterity the common language of hard work between generations. Support your fair and vote for the heritage of blood and land and tradition personified in kids and pigs, moms and dads, goats or sheep, steers or chickens.

Posted with Blogsy

The Truth about Small Places....

"Be present at our table, Lord.

Be here and everywhere adored.

These mercies bless and grant that we

may feast (dwell) in paradise with Thee."

When our family gathers, it is for three reasons:

1. For a birthday
2. For a holiday.
3. For a meal.
4. Any combination of 1 or 2, but always 3.

And when we gather, we pray. Often Blake's dad says the grace.  This is the man who calls his sons regularly during the long winter days to complain about Democrats, calls during baseball or football games to castigate coaches and managers: he is rock solid in conviction and integrity, a man who eased into flexibility late in life, coincident with the birth of his grand and great grand children .But when he closes his eyes to say a blessing, his voice is husky with emotion; when Charlie thanks his Creator for this family, this land, this work, this season of harvest, his gratitude wells up from deep within.  The amens around the table, or in a corn field, or around the Christmas tree or before fireworks are serious, heartfelt, and unanimous.

This is ground zero for our family farm. Blake's mom and dad, their three sons and daughters in law, and now a host of grandchildren, all farm together here in Atchison county, Missouri, not the western most outpost of the Corn Belt, but certainly on the fringe.  Folks irrigate on the Missouri River bottoms and 100 miles west of us, the productive lands soak up their moisture from the underground river surrounding the Platte. That is Nebraska.  One hundred miles north, the summer fronts stall and drop their beneficial rains on corn that is never more than 6 feet tall and never yields less than 200 bushel per acre.  That is Iowa.  But here in north west Missouri, our prairie soils  do their best work in the summertime, gathering the quarter inch, one third inch and one half inch rains and metering them out to the corn and soybeans wrapping the hills in ribbons of contoured rows.  In the tradeoff between soil and moisture, we have advantage soil, but its a rare year we live through a cropping season without a six week hiatus from rainfall, wishing for a monsoon in New Mexico or a hurricane in the Gulf to break the meteorological spell.  

Some farmers are born; some farmers are made.  Blake is a scion of a scion of a man and woman who survived the dirty thirties without knowing they were survivors; starting from nothing...again...was not unusual for that generation.  Sturdy, stubborn, hard working but also  frugal, clever and forward thinking: Blake's grandfather and mother and then father and mother grew their farms and their families with one eye on the future and another on their bank accounts.  Experience can be a brutal teacher.  Exuberance is not to be trusted.  Optimism should be relegated to baseball.  Blake and his brothers lived and breathed the family ties: the hierarchy, the expectations, the responsibilities, the fables and stories and oral history of the community, as well as the wet spots, rocky slopes, sandy points and gumbo of the land.

And this is the real reason our country needs small places. I am reminded of this every holiday, every turn of the calendar to a new year, every Memorial Day that my neighbors show up for planter boxes of flowers to set out at the county cemeteries.  'For when two or three are gathered', the talk will turn to relationships 'unto the third and fourth generation'.   I did not learn this at my mother's knee, but I began my apprenticeship thirty seven years ago in a similar bitter cold Christmas season in the dining room of my future in-laws.  The room was paneled with a walnut chair rail of lumber salvaged from the previous house on the same site; the conversation was peppered with references to families resurrected from farms and homesteads with occasional interjections and clarifications about who married whom, or what year they graduated, or where they were buried. I learned a mighty lesson that day: that time is a perennial in farm country, dormant perhaps, but long lived.

We have lots of family nearby, but still plenty of out of towners and young people old enough to hunger for their past.  Christmastime at Blake's aunt and uncle's is a jolly affair with the little kids shedding their church program finery for fleecy footie jammies and wishing the old folks would move on so Santa can make his stops.  Years past, we'd shed our coats as we passed the threshold of Grandma Nelson's house, tossing them on the immense mound on her bed, making our way to the kitchen where carrots and dip, chips and Mogen David, cheese and crackers accompanied the jokes and reminiscences. Memories are never far from the surface; this night we piece together a mental quilt of Grandma's yard...the cistern, the goose, the front yard swing,the name of her Doberman (Tilly) and now-what-was-the-dog's-sister's-name? (Mary Ann had her....)

Tradition sends us to the next stop on our Christmas Eve rounds; here the Yule log scents the room. We need pliers to pin our Christmas wish close enough to the crackling wood without scalding our fingers..mine slides off but incinerates into dust instantly.  This has always been a house with lots of children at the holidays and still is; they are well past the footie jammie age though. Someone is getting an immense copy of an 1882  Atchison county map for Christmas; I am drawn to maps like the Yule sparks fly up the chimney.  We gather around, pointing out the locations of our current farmsteads along the non existent roads of 19th century Atchison county, noting the now phantom railroads linking the communities they brought into being, and keenly aware of the ephemeral nature of man upon this prairie.

On Christmas Day, Blake's mom hands him a heavy volume in his stocking....its a book with a note listing two pages and "the back cover". He says, 'whoa, you need to help me figure what I should recognize on this back cover..' , a collage of black and white snapshots from the 1930s, 40s, and early 50s. Turns out not to be much of a problem; the dark haired young lady riding a goat between a young man in a uniform and an older gent in cap and dungarees has got to be one of Blake's aunts and before long we figure out it is aunt Lyllis.  Lyllis and Millie have each contributed a tale to Lye Soap and Sad Irons, a book of pictures and stories by the people who grew up in northwest Missouri; it is a treasure, living history at the most immediate and elemental level. To leaf through this volume is just like sitting around the table Christmas Eve at aunt Debbie's or drinking coffee on a winter morning at Millie and Charlie's.

And this is the truth about small towns, the little farming communities with speed limits that scarcely make you slow down, the blasts from a past when what necessities you didn't raise yourself could be had at the intersections of two lettered roads.  Sure, these days the bounty of the land provides food, fiber,exports, etc., etc., etc., to places far flung from flyover country. Yes, we denizens of farm country are breathing evidence that nothing stays the same, like it or not.  But the people of the land, the rooted ones, the hangers on, the folks with mailboxes that match their headstones: these are remnants of our national nature, the institutional repository of knowledge so arcane, it may as well be the Biblical 'begats'.  We need them; we need to know this part of our historical culture is still out here, to realize that all the satellite news, social media, technology micro- and mega- has not completely erased nor replaced the "deep geography"of our rural past.

Read a weekly newspaper.....you'll see.