We Bought a Farm: How smart they are

As I patched the barn with scrap lumber, pig-tight but ugly, I was forced to confront my own prejudice. I had come to the farm with the unarticulated belief that concrete things were for dumb people and abstract things were for smart people. I thought the physical world -- the trades -- was the place you ended up in you weren't bright or ambitious enough to handle a white-collar job. Did I really think that a person with a genius for fixing engines, or for building, or for husbanding cows, was less brilliant than a person who writes ad copy or interprets the law? Apparently I did, though it amazes me now. I ordered books from the library about construction, plumbing, and electricity, and discovered that reading them was like trying to learn a foreign language, the simplest things -- the names of unknown tools or hardware, the names for parts or structures -- creating dead ends that required answers, more research. There's no better cure for snobbery than a good ass kicking.  -- From Kristin Kimball's The Dirty Life.

I never planned to go on vacation and think so much about farming. But this book has just done something in me. I think the real thing for me is that I am realizing that all of these farming feelings I have been working through the last two years are real. When you listen to someone else paint them identically to the feelings bubbling around inside you, well it's then that you realize that these feelings are REAL and NORMAL.

I am a city girl. Or, at least a Fort Lauderdale suburbs type of girl. Where I grew up there was always a sound of cars and yelling and horns and the only animals we ever saw were dogs and cats. The convenience of life was scattered at my fingertips, and I never EVER thought about where my food comes from.

But now, here I am, living and breathing country air. Cars very rarely pass by our home. I know very few country people who don't have more than a dog and a cat. And I am also realizing how smart these salt-of-the-earth people are that live around me. 

Faye and Robbie are sisters from a family of twelve children. They still reside in the two-bedroom house they were raised in -- their other ten siblings dying or marrying and moving on. The very first home the family occupied is a tiny cabin on the other side of my farm that still stands. How twelve children slept in that home is beyond me. Faye's twin sister Gay lives down the road from them with her husband Billy.

When we need something on the farm or when we hit a crossroads with a farm dilemma, at some point someone says: "We should ask Billy."

And when a tractor is broken or a lawnmower or a 4-wheeler gives us trouble, someone says: "Where's Lloyd today? Lloyd would know."

Lloyd is one of the dozen or so members of the church my in-laws attend with Faye and Robbie and Billy and Gay. They have lived in these hills there whole life, and they know how to do more things than my has-a-degree brain could ever contemplate.

And then there is math. The other day as I calculated how much feed a day x how many dozen eggs would let us break even that month on chickens, I scratched my head as my niece said: "Man Aunt Wendi. You have to do a lot of math as a farmer."

Yes! Math! Learning! Studying! Growing!

I needed this time away to realize: I know exactly where I am supposed to be.