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Remembering My Dad
It’s my Dad’s birthday today, he would have been 96 years old but he only made it to 61. He died from leukemia two weeks after his birthday. I was in my early 30s, and he and my mom seemed old back then. Now that I’ve outlived him by five years, so far, I realize how young they were! Here’s a Father’s Day tribute I wrote for him when he wasn’t doing too well, and we thought he wouldn’t last the summer but he fought it for another eight months before succumbing.
To My Father, the Farmer, With Love
He always wore irrigating boots. The kind that go clear up, right to your belt and snap on—rubber legs. Essential for slogging through wet barley, dragging canvas dams behind, and a shovel balanced casually on his shoulder with the practiced air of a real pro. When it’s your water turn, you push that stream. Day and night and night and day. Even if it is Sunday. The Lord knows how quickly alfalfa can wither with that sickly, yellow pale.
Lambs have priority over church, too. They always come one right after another on a snow-screaming night in March. Sometimes, and it’s such a clever trick, he’d dress a hungry orphan in a stillborn’s skin and urge it on the unsuspecting ewe. She’d sniff that wool that smelled of herself and let the unrelated mouth drink of her aching abundance, forming a bond that endured long after the extra coat had stiffened and been discarded.
He knew all the tricks! How to carve a whistle from a green willow branch. Just the knack for making the old baler spit them out—chunka—chunka—chunka. How to make Mama laugh with exasperation and delight at the same time.
Some things I learned: Pulling milk from a cow with your two hands so fast that the foam grew high enough to slide over the edge of the bucket. I got to where I could stack hay on a wagon so it would ride securely even when my crazy little brother drove the tractor. But I never learned to make fudge like Mama told me about. The surprise when he whipped it up and wrote her name across the top with the drippings off the spoon.
He would walk into the milk barn, and stop and gaze; I was in a hurry, and he was in the way. But then he’d walk down to, say, Jewel’s stall, and touch her Guernsey hip, and watch her ribs move in and out, and tell me that she wasn’t doing well. And I’d say, yes, her milk was down, but I thought it was because we milked late that morning…And he would take her temperature, and give her a shot, and she’d be perking in a day or two, and I’d still be wondering and shaking my head.
He could walk up in the fields and kick the dirt and pick up a handful, and sniff the air, and listen to the wind and know that this week, and not a day later, he’d better plant. And the brown always turned green right on schedule. I think sometimes the soil produced in response to his love—gut-deep emotion.
February is our month. Our birthdays frame one week, thirty years apart. He always got chocolate-covered orange jelly sticks, and buckskin gloves, and an assortment of really sincere cards drawn on typing paper, and colored with crayons—reeking with love. When I was nine years old, he gave me a shimmering necklace of pink glass beads that changed to lavender when you turned them just so in the light. It was so wonderful and extravagant. I didn’t even have anything to wear that matched. So, Mama had my aunt make a dress—pure luxury.
Once he confided to me his regret at not having taken the opportunity after The War of going to college with the G.I. money.
“I could have been something more than just a farmer.”
Just a farmer! He’s not “just a farmer.” He’s an instinctive, born-to-the-soil, a man of the earth. He’s the finest, purest, craftsman I know. I have learned how to change sprinkler pipes, and I can milk cows for hours on end. I’ve helped pull calves from laboring heifers, and hauled hay bales to the brink of heat stroke, all of these are merely physical functions.
Only he hears the sound of the ongoing theme. To me, it was a matter of calendar; to him, it is the blending of soul to soul. All in nature is spiritual, and his being is fine-tuned to that frequency. He is a farmer, oh, yes! And I’m so proud to be that farmer’s daughter.
This is my mom and dad and my two older sisters. He’s wearing the boots.
I was probably on my way at this point but no one knew yet.
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What a wonderful Dad. What a wonderful tribute from a wonderful daughter. And what a gift to have shared it with him. Thank you for sharing him with us.
Just gorgeous. So much love.
Happy Birthday, Cow Girl’s Dad!
This essay is so delightful with details, and gives much food for thought.
I feel like I could peek beyond my window, and instead of seeing the pines with squirrels hanging off them, imagine your dad on his way out to check out the cows.
Thank you for sharing it with us.
Written from love, thank you for sharing.
Beautiful. Made me think of my own dad (who was not a farmer) and miss him, too. Birthdays and anniversaries can be tough, even many years later.
Touching yet slightly blurry screen near the end.
A beautiful tribute.
Great post!
What a marvelous set of memories! Thanks for introducing us! As to “just a farmer”…Pshaw!
This sounds like all the stories I ever heard about Grandpap.
Except for the lambs. I don’t believe that he ever kept sheep.
Outstanding, Cow Girl.
Wonderful story. “Just a Farmer!” I doubt that any of the people who think they are better could do anything a farmer does every day.
My grandfather had a Peach farm that he was gradually switching to a Pecan Orchard. He also had cattle, pigs and chickens. Most of the time I knew him, he was older, so he directed the work, but there was a lot to do.
These days, we live in an old farmstead in a part of Loudoun County, Va. that is slowing becoming more civilized. We get along with the long time neighbors (mostly farmers) much better than the newcomers, although having been here “only” 19 years, we are newcomers, too.
One of our favorites raises cattle (His business card says “cattleman”) and grows the necessary hay to feed them. He can tell the best stories. He said once that when he was younger and bored plowing fields, he would pretend he was an auctioneer and auction off the telephone poles as he came to them. He demonstrated for us and was hysterical.
I have the utmost respect for farmers, but I am worried that most of them around us are getting older and there doesn’t seem to be many in the generation behind them coming up.
Well, that really is what it’s all about. Anyone who has dabbled in the dirt knows that constant watchfulness — the ultimate expression of love — is required to coax the best crops and flowers from the earth.
That’s why drones and GPS are now used for large-scale cropping. Those tools combined with detailed soil and yield maps can help to optimize the placement of fertilizer and pesticide, and can notice small differences that the farmer’s eye would otherwise miss.
I kind of favor the farmer’s eye myself.