7/21/24
The blame partially goes to Gene Logsdon (11/5/1931-5/31/2016) RIP, and to his friend and mentor, Wendell Berry. Sometime in the late 1990s, I heard an interview on WOSU radio between Fred Andrle (the Radio Poet) and Gene Logsdon, the man known as "The Contrary Farmer". The interview was engaging and I purchased a copy of Logsdon’s book, The Contrary Farmer. His handbook is full of practical knowledge for managing a small farm, and Logsdon's humor and writing style is a pleasure to read. Thus began the first “Hit”.
Our American Gothic
On July 25, 2013 (eleven years ago this week), Rett and I left suburbia for a three acre “hobby farm” in Madison County, Ohio and we named it “Merry Mount”. At sixty years old, I still had enough energy to do my daily farm chores of feeding barn cats, goats, and chickens; mowing grass on weekends and after work; and helping Rett with garden duties; while holding down a university teaching job. Somehow, I found some time for reading and writing. During the first fall season, I was given, hit by a farm, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Barn, by Catherine Friend. After reading how two lesbian city-dwellers adjusted to owning a sheep farm in southern Minnesota, the thought occurred to me, I wonder what adventures we are about to experience? and our neighbors debated how long these Artist/Teachers from the city would last out here?
Well, we did okay. We quickly adjusted to country living and the exclamation “I love Merry Mount!” was often proclaimed and echoed down the halls of the big, yellow farmhouse. With wide-eyed enthusiasm and ample energy we began to make this place our own: planning and cultivating gardens, planting trees, refurbishing the barn, and choosing and birthing farm animals. In 2016, identical twin granddaughters were born and we headed into Grandparenthood. Asa Ruth joined us in 2020. We consider Merry Mount a sanctuary for the girls.
We had been hit by a farm and we took the punch and energetically bounced back with joyous resilience.
Now at age 71, I feel like I have been “hit by a farm” from a different direction. Everything seems to have slowed down: my energy, my physicality, my cognition; but I remain “in good health”. The farm calls out to me as before, but I do not always want to listen. Perhaps I have become lazy, if so, to justify this laziness I turn to Gene Logsdon and his thoughts on Taoism.
Well, okay, Taoism sounds a little like a fancy justification for laziness. But that’s what all of us go-getters need, or at least our hearts do: a dose of laziness. Farmers and gardeners are by nature control freaks. We get a lot of satisfaction out of taking a small piece of this earth and turning it into our notion of loveliness and order. We reject all arguments about how chaos rules nature. Not on our farms; not in our gardens. We will have order. We will have straight rows. We will obliterate every threatening weed, bug or animal from our domain. Our fences will never sag. Our machines never squeak or rust. No thorny brush will sully our fence lines.
I’m not a Taoist (although I'm familiar with "The Way" ), but am I a “man born to farming”?
The Man Born to Farming
The Grower of Trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,
whose hands reach into the ground and sprout,
to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death
yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down
in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.
His thought passes along the row ends like a mole.
What miraculous seed has he swallowed
That the unending sentence of his love flows out of his mouth
Like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water
Descending in the dark?
from Farming: A Handbook, 1970
-Wendell Berry
A handful of compost from the dung heap at Merry Mount
I have not yet swallowed the miraculous seed; I’m not a Taoist; but I am most definitely a creature of chaos.
As for sparring with a farm, I’ll continue to proclaim, “I love Merry Mount” while taking its hits!
CPW
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