My Ninety Acres
(Page 2 of 4)
So I went down toward the creek, and as I turned the corner
by the barnyard I saw him down below, moving along a
fencerow. Two sheep dogs were with him, the
great-great-great-grandchildren of the pair I had known as
a boy. They were running in and out of the hedgerow yapping
joyously. I stood a moment, watching the scene.
RELATED CONTENT
Musical icon and Farm Aid president Willie Nelson kicked off last September’s annual Farm Aid conce...
Recently when damaging floods inundated nine Midwestern states, farmers in those areas were forced ...
Few in US spell out how they want to die; House health bill includes end-of-life counseling...
Eating locally and seasonally requires creativity and flexibility. But it takes on a whole new mean...
How to turn housesitting into a business and an acceptable, profitable substitute for home ownershi...
It was Nellie that had that idea about lettin' fencerows
grow up. I always found out Nellie was pretty right about
farmin'. She was hardly ever wrong... I guess never.
The fencerow bordered a meadow of deep, thick hay, and
below, among feathery willows, wound the clear spring
stream where I had often gone swimming with Walter's boys:
John, who had been everything Walter had hoped for in a
son, the best loved, who was buried somewhere in the
Argonne; and Robert, who had gone away to become rich and
powerful. There was something lonely about the figure of
the old man wandering along the fencerow filled with
sassafras and elderberry. For no reason I could understand
I felt a lump come to my throat.
Then I noticed the old man's-erratic progress. He would
walk a little way and then stop and, parting the bushes,
peer into the tangled fencerow. Once he got down on his
knees and for a long time disappeared completely in the
thick clover.
Finally, as he started back along the far side of the
fields, I set off down the slope toward him. He seemed to
realize I must have seen him for a long time, ducking and
dodging in and out of the fencerow. A faint tinge of color
came into his face and he said, shyly, "I was just snoopin'
around my 90 acres, I like to see what goes on here and I
don't get time during the week."
He looked down at his big hands and noticed, as I did, that
some of the black, damp loam of the fencerow still clung to
them. He brushed them awkwardly together. "I was just
digging into the fencerow to see what was going on there
underground. A fellow can learn a lot by watching his own
land and what goes on in it and on it. My son John - you
remember the one that was killed in the war - he went to
agricultural school, but I don't think he learned more
there than I've learned just out of studying my own 90
acres. Nellie always said a farm could teach you more than
you could teach it, if you just kept your eyes open ...
Nellie ... that was my wife."
