"Summertime and Wintertime, Morningtime and Eveningtime"

   

 

      College is for control freaks. Looking back on four decades of self employment, I realize how little I appreciated the freedom to choose my classes, subject matter, and hours.  Not only that, but college afforded the luxury of almost one-to-one risk/reward and input/output. Want a good grade?  Apply yourself.  Luck had almost nothin' to do with it.  

My father  worked for the government, but when a new Administration decided nuclear power was no longer worthy of research funding, he saw the writing on the wall, moved back to Missouri, got a job as a television repairman (does anyone do that anymore?) and bought a few cows.  Lesson learned: jobs come and jobs go.

Farming is different. I thought I understood that when we left college to return to Blake's family's farm, but I really didn't have a clue. Even though I was raised to keep my "nose to the grindstone"and believed all that Poor Richard's Almanac stuff like "early bird gets the worm", "make hay while the sun shines", "no pain, no gain", I didn't realize that hard work and application were only part of the farming equation.  The summer we married, Blake sent me some Polaroid pictures of beautiful shoulder high corn circa fourth of July, but by our wedding day in August, everyone knew it would be a short droughty crop.  The next spring it rained every weekend we came home from school to help put in the crop.  Instead, we worked to remodel our little house and chased cattle through sodden bottoms when they got out.  Harvest that fall drug on with tractors and chains to pull the combines out of the muddy fields and finally finished with the guys chiseling icy gumbo out of wheels and other moving parts.  The only reward the hard work and long hours could promise was.... an end.  Eventually. Not Thanksgiving, but by Christmas.

That first winter back the dirt road across the bottom drifted higher than our car.  Blake's dad made a way through...for the tractor and wagon to get feed to the cattle.   Chores took all day.  It was a drastic introduction to the invisible elephant in the room of our life: the weather.  I thought I'd been attuned to weather before, but it became...and has remained!...the fallback subject of any casual conversation and the bedrock concern more days than not.  At five past six, KMA would give the weather forecast. One Christmas my present was a satellite dish system that displayed the markets...and the radar.  These days forecast.weather.gov is just a thumbprint away on the front page of my phone. 

The weather doesn't care how hard you work.  The weather won't wait, won't judge, and won't pat you on the back.  Like Matthew 5:45 says:

 "That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust."

Nothing personal. Comes with the job.

This was just a warmup, so to speak, for the plant business.  For the summer afternoons and evenings we built greenhouses, for the plants that fried because we missed a spot watering or froze when the wind found a gap or got too big or stayed too small.  If those plants had been animals, we would have been cited for cruelty too many times to count!  Babies, of any species, are vulnerable, a truth we learned through all manner of trial and error.  Diligence may not guarantee success, but it can postpone failure.  There's an alarm to call when the temperature in a greenhouse gets too hot...or too cold.  There's a squadron of portable heaters to deploy and generators in case of catastrophe.  

We have a communal family nightmare and it involves water;  did I shut the hose/hydrant off?   Did I forget to water my steers?  Did I miss some plugs/cuttings in a greenhouse I haven't looked at?  Anyone can wake sweating from the dream that you're testing for a class you forgot you signed up for, but not everyone takes a nocturnal stroll to see if there's water running unabated from a hydrant somewhere.....

If you grew up in outer suburbia, even if it was the borderlands, your antenna picked up 5 television stations, water always came out of the tap and a power outage was not your responsibility. This is what I took for granted growing up  and what most people consider civilized.  But farm life still requires a certain level of self sufficiency, MacGyver-like ingenuity, and a tolerance for both occasional lapses in personal creature comforts..and willingness to forego those for the sake of some other creature.  

Sure, we work for ourselves, and our families.  But we feel responsible for even more.  

God Bless the Child

I’m painting again….

Seems like I’ve spent more time painting in my life than most folks: painting as in primer and enamel, Rustoleum and latex, barns and gates and secondhand furniture.  Walls and wallpaper (don’t judge), ceilings and cement.  Scenery, signs, one 1966 Chevy pickup (construction orange) and perhaps my finest work, the big red geranium in a clay pot that graced both the false front on a long gone greenhouse and an even longer gone Ford three speed delivery van.

 

This propensity to paint is just one way I am my father’s daughter.  The only question is whether this craving to cover with color is a result of nature or nurture.  We earned our stripes the old fashioned way: no paint brush until until the target was scraped clean or wire-brushed free of flakes and rust.  My sister and I served at least a seven years’ apprenticeship painting farm gates and ourselves with gallon after gallon of barn red from Orscheln’s.   By nature, these children of the Depression and wartime were thrifty and fixed what broke, a task made easier by my mom’s talent with a sewing machine and my father’s engineer mindset.  By nurture, their children picked up sticks, pulled weeds, painted peeling farm buildings….and still do all of the above.  I shared with both my folks an appreciation for the timeworn and a desire to resurrect and put back to work stuff with some miles left to go.

Me, painting the numbers as high up as I wanted to lean

My dad, painting at the peak of the Red Barn roof

That's me, painting the numbers on the big red barn lots and lots of years ago.  In this picture, I've got a lot of rungs in front of me and I'm feeling pretty secure up high. Full disclosure, I did some of the painting on the gable sides of that barn, as high as that ladder could reach.  It was terrifying; I even curled my toes inside my shoes in an effort to make myself one with that ladder.  Exhibit two: my father, two ladders up on the steeply angled roof of the tallest barn in Moniteau county.  Lightning bolt high.  Once, on a vacation in South Dakota, he offered to race us to the top of a fire tower.  Laura scampered up ahead, as nimble as a squirrel on a high wire.  I made it about three flights before freezing up and retreating to join my mother on the ground.  When it came to heights, I was definitely my mother's daughter.

By nature, my father was orderly and tidy...I’d say almost to a fault, but that would be accounting using my standards of organization.  My mother’s best friend says my mom would hurry home from a visit to make sure the messes on the counter, or table, or other remains of the day were shoved under a counter or into a closet or otherwise cleared from the deck.  This story makes me laugh, being as picking up stacks of books, photos, mail and magazines and transporting them upstairs far from the beaten path of any company is my chosen way to deal with clutter. This habit is just one of the ways I’m my mother’s daughter. Over time, piles of lists and papers and catalogs accumulated on my parents’ kitchen table too, proving that even my father’s sense of order was no match for Newton’s Second Law of Thermodynamics.

The haphazard little girl learned discipline primarily through practice.  For much of my life, music was the strongest bond and common language between my father and me. He was a good teacher; I learned to listen to the sound I was making, to formulate an ear for what a clarinet should be...based on my dad’s clear bright tone, not the assortment of squeaks and groans in our school band. In music, he was patient with my mistakes, counting effort and practice to the good, but that didn’t keep me from quaking every week when it came time to test my exercises. My life is forever richer for the bond forged with my dad and the knowledge and appreciation of music heard and music performed.

My father was witty, quick with a quip or retort.  I wished I could be.  He was the sort of man one listened to.  My mother was kind, a patient and sympathetic ear during our one long distance conversation a week during college, or while she cooked in her farm kitchen and I chattered from the table.  In her later years, she was quiet, and I missed our conversations, though she was still perfectly happy to hear me talk about gardens and kids and loved to look at the pictures I took of home and farm or travels far away. Now I have stacks and stacks of the photo albums she constructed, reminders of a curious mind and an artist’s eye with the lens. I grew up with houseplants in every room and a camera bag on every outing; those habits are second nature not just for my sister and me, but deeply ingrained in her grandchildren as well.

What do we remember of our childhood?  I watched two people do their jobs: my father as the breadwinner and spiritual leader and my mother as caregiver, homemaker, and partner.  But these separate jobs were overshadowed by what they did together, which makes Clint Black’s lyrics oh so true….

“The way we work together is what sets our love apart

So closely that you can't tell where I end and where you start.”

A Man of Few Words

‘Talk less; smile more’, sings Aaron Burr to Alexander Hamilton.  And there are nights I meet my pillow with the melody in my ear wishing I had followed that advice.  

I do take to heart the admonition in James chapter 3:  “7 For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by mankind,8 but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. 9 With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God. 10 From the same mouth come blessing and cursing.” But just when a sin of omission would be the proper choice, (Talk less! Smile more!) is when I find all kinds of words to say….repetitive words, superfluous words, and the ever popular foot in one’s mouth words.   Oh, blessed Father, please keep me from offering advice unless someone truly asks for it.  

For the most part,  my parents led by deeds, not words.  We were expected to pitch in during any family task; we were expected to get up on time and take care of ourselves. I know we gave out good night hugs but I don’t remember anyone coming to wake us. We were expected to tell the truth, behave at school, and clean our plates.  Some of those tasks were easier than others; when I was young, I didn’t always get around to my chores.  I didn’t think it was laziness on my part so much as forgetfulness...a distinction without difference in my father’s opinion.  But my mother and father always cleaned up together after a meal; we  attended church and Sunday school together; we finished our work before we played, and somehow, though it wasn’t a topic discussed over supper, we knew our parents saved for everything they purchased.  They practiced without preaching, bringing to mind 1 John 3:18:”Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.”

All that aside, I can tell you two very specific instances that my father spoke to me very seriously, and, in doing so, set the course for my life.

During high school, I spent all my spare time playing music: giving lessons, playing in jazz band, playing in the pit orchestra for productions.  And I was encouraged by my director...and friends...to pursue a career that included music. But my father had a strong opinion on the subject and what he told me had the solid ring of truth.  He reminded me that one needs more than practice, more than talent, to be a musician: it is a profession that requires, if not genius, then passion...a single-minded devotion to perfection that very few people can sustain.  And I wasn’t one of them. Like him, he said, I could love music...and enjoy it as an avocation all my life.  Better, said he, to choose a profession that would undoubtedly serve mankind..one so encompassing of the various threads of knowledge that a person would find it not just rewarding, but also fascinating, whatever contribution he made.  

So..I got a scholarship that paid for clarinet lessons and enrolled in the College of Agriculture.  My piece of the ag pie may have been a small one, but it has never been boring.

That was vocation.  His second piece of advice was issued after Blake and I were engaged.  I was coming down the stairs into the basement of their house in Jeff City when he turned to me and said: “After you are married, you cannot come back home.”  That wasn’t all the conversation, but that short admonition told me I was on my own, a grownup, and responsible for my own life from here on out.  I guess Blake and I thought at the time that we were grownup, and neither set of parents told us we were foolish, but I always remembered and took to heart the gravity of that exchange.

I cannot imagine better advice than that which yields four decades of happy marriage and satisfying work!

Handiwork...or The Old Fashioned Way

Happy last week of April...a time of year that truly deserves special appellation on the calendar for those of us in the "seasonal"professions. Barring the types of abominations that bookend a bell curve of weather expectations, events like snow, a hard freeze, seven inches of rain...you get the idea.....this is the week machinery of all configurations typically crowds the fields and highways. With the first of May peeking out from under the next calendar page, trees in full flower and the whine of mowers a constant accompaniment, gardeners throw caution to the winds and clog the parking lots of garden centers and nurseries like bees in a hive.

But at the greenhouse, the mechanical helping hands that sped the job of transplanting and filling flats sit idle as the tide of spring brings a transition from planting and growing to picking up the flats of flowers, vegetables, and choosing the finished hanging baskets and mixed planters for customers in four states. There is always an element of art in the growing of plants; there are rules of thumb and seasons of experience we rely upon. But when push comes to shove, we cannot grow plants from our devices or our instruments or our rules and records, or even necessarily follow our hard won experience; we have to get out amongst 'em, feel what they feel, pick them up, turn them over. It's detail, it's habit, it's time consuming....and absolutely essential.

So much of this enterprise is handwork. Watering in is rule 1,

but tagging is a close second. A perfectly beautiful flat of flowers will be left behind like Cinderella from the ball without a tag.....and no one wants to guess whether that vine in the corner will grow to bear a 20 # pumpkin....or 2 dozen zucchini!

Whether our customers order one flat of this and two flats of that..or 256 flats of marigolds and 243 flats of mixed zinnias, they are all picked up and carried by hand, two by two, the most ancient and elemental means of transport. It is piecework and not the stuff of glory...and it is the grand accomplishment of every single day. Flat by flat, basket by basket, truck by truck,until the greenhouses get too hot to bear and the whiteboard calendar is bare.

I am reading a book about work right now, believe it or not, a book that deals with work from a Biblical viewpoint, work as a vocation, a calling. I am comforted and encouraged by this interpretation when I do the most menial of tasks during the day: bagging the trash, emptying the dishwasher, putting away the laundry.

 Even though these chores are replayed daily, hourly in households world wide and require no especial talent, still, it would be universally acknowledged that the world is a better place when work like this is done. According to Martin Luther, these homely commonplace jobs are as beautiful in the sight of the Almighty as any other service rendered to His glory.

 With this insight, the work of the farmer , the gardener, the carpenter, the truck driver, the plumber, the welder, all become holy offerings when performed with our whole energy and effort. The outcome may not suit us; there won't be a standing ovation; we may consider our work menial or pedestrian or ephemeral....but our goals should be our best...no less.

These are the thoughts I ponder as I fill the carts with petunias and marigolds, snapdragons and salvia. Common annuals, beautiful and fresh as spring this day on April, but gone with the season like the proverbial lilies of the field. Some days my job seems trivial compared to the weighty burdens of the mighty, but I trust it is an offering to grow beautiful plants using the raw materials God has provided and the blessing of day by day work, no matter how humble.

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Lizzie and Josh and Ecclesiastes 3:9-13:

     9 What gain has the worker from his toil? 

10 I have seen the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. 11 He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. 

Lizzie and Josh are riding back to town with me after work today.  As we pass the truck parking lot, Lizzie tells Josh, "That's a truck for hauling pigs."  Josh says, "My daddy drives a truck.  He drives a flower truck."  Lizzie: "Josh, you can haul pigs when you're big and I'll haul flowers. Grandma, does it cost to work at the farm? "

Me: "Lizzie, when you work, you get paid; you don't have to pay to work at the farm. You make money if you work."

 Josh: "I will drive the pig truck."

More than a couple of springs have come and gone since Matt joined us at Hurst Greenery and more than a decade since Lee and Ryan got married, came home, and made us a two generation operation.  I won't tell you how many years since Blake and I hauled our stuff home from college in the back of a '74 Ford grain truck.  When I hear the kids in the back seat talk about working in this family business like its a foregone conclusion, like its as natural a progression as winter turning to spring, I  don't make 'em sign on the dotted line, but it does bring a smile and a little prayer of gratitude for an upbringing so transparent that they know at age three what work is and who does it.

Out here on the farm, we can take this particular phenomenon for granted. In no other industry is generational transfer the norm; in no other business in this modern age in this nation do parents routinely "take their kids to work" and children "follow in their footsteps", learning at the knees of not just mom and dad, but grandma and grandpa, too.

Ahh.  But this gradual learning curve is one of those passes not granted to in laws.  As an import myself, I have often thought that marrying into a family farm must feel like being blindfolded and thrown into a trunk, only to be freed in a country where everyone speaks a different tongue that you don't understand.

This is what brings the Ecclesiastes passage to mind.

How else would I take pleasure in all my toil; how else would this "business..to be busy with.." be "beautiful in its time."   There are disappointments and distress; there are sharp words and fatigue;  but there are bonds strengthened under stress and relieved with laughter and the knowledge that tomorrow and tomorrow and the days after we will still work together.

There are the kids helping pick out pretty flowers (he knows what he likes!)...

At seed time there is no guarantee of successful harvest.  We plant the flowers and hope for happy customers and repeat orders, for the winds to be gentle and the checks to clear. We hope to flourish;we want to grow. We pray with the Preacher of Ecclesiastes that, like Lizzie and Josh, we may appreciate God's gift to us all on the land :

 12 I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; 13 also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God's gift to man."

"You choose a Life.."

Why was he a professor of literature? “Because I have an obsessive relationship with texts.” You choose a major, or a life, not because you see its purpose, which tends to shimmer out of sight like an oasis, but because you like its objects.......Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker.

By the seventh day God completed His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. Genesis 2:2

Another Labor Day eve is upon us.  The day has blessed us with not just a longed for rain shower but also a drop in temperature of fifteen degrees. Farewell, fiery August and welcome to September, which begins with passionate heat and wanes gently through the equinox into the perfect  harvest days of October.  

We will labor on Labor Day, but this Sunday morning rain has enabled us to rest as well from the work which we had done and have been doing for weeks on end now.  Like farmers we have watched the barren sky whether the day is ice blue or blistered, but we have the will and the way to make water flow on our tiny patch.  So we do, and we watch the mums grow from stems to balls til the buds emerge and swell with color and the whole patch tilts over the edge 
of green to a rainbow of harvest hues.

"You choose a life, not because you see its purpose....but because you like its objects."

Unlike the Almighty, we are not given to see the reason why we are working or what we work for.  Rather, "ours is but to do and die"(Tennyson) .  We choose our work, our labor, for many reasons, or for no reason but necessity, but given a choice, we work for love.  We will accept tedium, dirt, danger, risk for one thing...and it isn't money. We will labor for what we care about.

Count me in. From morning glare to quiet dark, from drought to downpour and back again, from leisurely hours of observation and reflection to the headlong rush that waits for no thought, my work is a labor of love inside the dome of God's creation.  

Would I choose to push my glasses up my nose for the thousandth time or wipe them clear of fog, to lift these feet of clay and arms of stone for the twelfth hour, to worry about the wind, the clouds, the lack of clouds, water above, water below, and many of God's less attractive and destructive creatures, if I did not live to watch the many layered greens fade to the far horizon, hear the meadowlark, the robin, finches, chipping sparrows, wrens, and watch the killdeer lure me from her young?  The majesty of the seasonal procession and my tiny place in its mosaic does not terrify or awe, it comforts with its intimation of order and place.  

I find peace and pleasure in the miracles of plant anatomy, from seed to flower to fruit.  To pick strawberries or apples or blackberries or grapes is to catch a hint of Eden's glory and appreciate our tasks as stewards of this bounty. 'The earth is the Lord's and fullness thereof.' (Psalm 24) 

''Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food.  And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.” (Genesis 1:29)  A good number of those plants find their way into our hands, to sprout fragile roots, then reach their full flower and glory. What a great job to have!!  

 Or...we watch the planters follow the contours of our fields, the first duo of green to haze the surface, then an explosion of energy fed by sun's heat, the mineral earth, and mystery of the genetic direction within each plant.

We love this land, its mingling of rounded hill and flatland river made since the Ice Age. We accept and survive its uncertainties in return for its trump card: a soil my sharpshooter spade will slice silently, stonelessly. With each year's promise dim in the future, we still take pride in the labor expended and its ultimate fruitfulness.

By the sweat of your brow

    you will eat your food

until you return to the ground,

    since from it you were taken;

for dust you are

    and to dust you will return.” 

                                           Genesis 3:19-20

All is not goodness and light in the labors on the land.  Sometimes you not only eat your food, you eat the sweat and dust, too. Sometimes we are not master of the beasts of the earth and often we are mastered by the creatures that move along the ground. There is a place for them in creation, but surely I can be forgiven for wondering where it will be in the new earth?

At the end of each laboring day, we wash the dust of our work off and rest.  At the finish of this Labor Day, we give thanks for the blessing of work to do that ties us to the objects we love.