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I fancied myself the village atheist for many years, until I looked around one day and realized the villagers had usurped my position. So ever the contrarian, I began to farm, and found myself, to my surprise, standing in the vestibule of a now mostly empty church, listening for the words.

Now when I attend, alone and usually in the woods (or occasionally on the front porch), in God’s own cathedral, I sometimes glimpse what I’ve struggled to see. In quiet I’ll often find my focus drawn upwards into the trees, to the branches bending in soft breezes. Here in the unwritten is a certainty spoken with eternal words. In these winds are the forgotten ancient hymns, each leaf falling to an elegy of birdsong.

It is here in the woods when I feel most keenly a peaceful acceptance of this, my small place. It is here on this fallen tree where only in hushed unemotionalism could tears fall.

As another has written and it has seemed true to me, both gods and peasants stop at the city gates, where lives in such places the baleful eye whose glare and reach search wide for ways to separate us from past generations and understandings. It always offers up for free that most seductive and confusing gift: our own individual natures.

I stay a bit longer, to engage in some silent routine dispute with my kith and kin. As I wrestle with those old familiars about the questions of our guilt and my own continual role in this despoilation of the world, I’m reminded of Berry when he says, “There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.” I resolve to do better.

My cigar nears its inevitable end, so I rise for the doxology. A hawk screams its praise to creation and dives to the ground. And then I, and the small dying rabbit in its beak, chant the called-upon response.

This is the moment each day when belief surfaces and I am most aware of my own soul—on the porch in the predawn, where I sit, watch, listen, and wait. At first only the maples in the front yard are visible in the dimmest light. Each limb droops, tired it seems from heavy rains, reminiscent just for the moment of conifers in the narrow winding valleys along the Oregon and Washington coast, wet, bedraggled, ancient, and possibly sentient.

Then the inevitable rooster crows, broadening my awareness to the sound of dripping beyond. An inch of steady spring rain has fallen overnight, and the leafed-out trees and the grass growing thick on the ground provide a slow release for the fallen water. The bird song makes its first presence heard as lonely soloists begin to call out in the woods and orchards. Whether their plaintive voices rise in search of lost others or offer some personal meditation on the nature of life and grubs, I do not know. But the light is changing fast. The bulk of the big hay barn with wisteria twining up its southern side emerges from the gray fog. In front of it the wethers and the new ram lamb appear creamy white ghosts in the gloom.

The dawn has more fully arrived, and the trees are awash with sound, the soloists having stepped back and joined the chorus. The air is thick with music from all directions. I don’t make an effort to distinguish the cardinal from the field sparrow, nor the mockingbird from the bluebird. There are dozens of species who make a home on our farm at different times of the year. On this morning they all have partnered in a joy-filled choral display of chirps, whistles, trills, twitters, squawks, and clicks—together leaving me dazzled and gently moved at their bringing an ordered beauty out of this potential cacophony.

Minutes later, down on the highway, there sounds an early discordant note from a logging truck that winds its way first past Johnson Valley and then Cook’s Mill, the farm, Possum Hollow, and finally Ross Road, competing to be heard before its low rumble fades away. The birds sing on with their melody of creation, and the light reveals more trees farther down the drive.

I sit with my coffee, as I have so many mornings on this same porch for the past quarter-century, and try not to think but simply take pleasure in being part of this small world. Then, like in a gradual awakening in bed when you wonder if it is time to get up, the material mind stirs. I shake the dream away and begin to review what needs to be done on the farm. A few minutes later a fox barks its weird cry, and I think I should both count chickens and get my shotgun. The connection is broken. Now it is only me, while the sounds out on the highway grow as more of my disconnected kind do what they do, voicing their own mechanical chorus, unlovely, unwanted, into this, another new day.

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Reading: The Leopard (G. di Lampedusa), Gone to Texas (F. Carter), and Angels in the Cellar, notes from a French vineyard (P. Hahn).

Popular culture has primed us to expect civilizational collapse. Endless movies and books depict with grim relish the various modes and methods by which our society has ground to an ignominious end. And then there is the cottage industry of serious history scholarship devoted to examining the tea leaves left behind in the broken crockery of dead empires and seeking the how, why, and exact when the cracks began, ultimately causing the teapot to shatter.
Consider playing this twist on a popular “what if” parlor game. The question to be posed: What if collapse has already happened and we are simply late for the party?
Each of us has a similar picture in our family archive. It’s the one of parents or grandparents, nicely dressed (and of modest weight), sitting at a dinner table. Or maybe it’s of a dapper young uncle standing at the entrance of a storefront on Main Street, a street of neat brick buildings fully occupied by local businesses selling actual needed goods. I cherish those pictures. I see in them those who gave me life, a place to belong, and an understanding within and of this land. Seeing them frozen in time helps me recall our world before the fall.
I often wonder what someone from, say, the late 1940s would think if he were dropped into the present in the same small town where he had grown up. The ugliness of today’s built environment, degradation of the farm land; the astounding physical changes to the inhabitants, insolent manners in the street, ubiquity of the slovenly dressed; the loss of local business—this overwhelmingly abysmal setting would surely cause its 1940s visitor to suspect that the world he had known had collapsed completely. He would, I believe, be correct.
Perhaps this was the mission of modernity all long (in any case, it was the inevitable result): to set in motion a plan to destroy our ability to find anything of beauty in the place where we live; to create in us a readiness, an eagerness, to leave Somewhere for Anywhere, move to Mars, or perhaps retreat inward, try on a new gender, upload our consciousness into a computer, LARP a “found” family. Is it any wonder that so many of us prefer the flickering screen to the strip-mall hell or home cluttered with the plastic, the unneeded, and the unwanted?
As our bewildered time traveler walks through his small town—past everything he formerly cherished that has now been paved over and repackaged with the unlovely, where all the churches have grown quiet on Sundays, down the roads in and out of town that are now filled with prefabricated buildings with a ten-year lifespan—should we be surprised that he can only conclude that a great calamity has occurred in the land?
For those of us left living in the debris of modernity, we do still have choices to make. We could make like Wile E. Coyote, feet churning past the edge, afraid to look down for fear of falling, and keep on running … for just a bit.
Or we could choose this path, whose sentiment is expressed by both Wendell Berry and in a poignant newspaper photograph. We could pursue Berry’s vision, that “we must achieve the character and acquire the skills to live much poorer than we do.” Or we could follow the lead of the man in China (below) who carefully tends a garden amidst the rubble of an uncompleted overpass.
If our time traveler were in the position to advise, I believe he would say that the better path is in the “less is more,” the “less is abundance,” direction. And I would nod in agreement.

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To see the pictures mentioned, visit: https://brian941.substack.com/p/what-if-collapse-has-already-happened

The world at the edges of the farm disappears in a conjuring act as spring fully buds in the forest. Trees leaf out in their hundreds of varieties of green. And while, unlike the Inuit, I do not have a corresponding number of words to describe them, my eye certainly recognizes the differences. All manner of oak, gum, maple, elm, and poplar, and dozens of others, contribute distinctive shades and colorations on the hillsides and in the woods, focusing my sight closer to where it is needed in the growing season.

On the land, in frenzies of activity the lambs leap about with clear joy in the corrals and pastures. On the large round hay bales they play king of the hill; in idle moments they balance precariously on the backs of dozing ewes. They call loudly, impatiently, when they discover they are hungry. A small one resting in the shade of the hazelnuts awakens alone to find the flock has moved on and out of sight. Its plaintive call of “Mom!” is finally answered by what can only be described as a liquid response, when one of the ewes, mouth full of grass, gurgles a reassuring reply. Following the call, the lamb races to her side and begins to pummel the udder.

On this late afternoon, the glory of spring is found on Cindy’s face when she spots a bird in the Rose of Sharon in front of the porch. “It’s a blue-gray gnatcatcher,” she says with surprise. Moments later, spotted in the same bush, “a Carolina chickadee!” For the next half-hour we marvel at the density and beauty of the fluttering bird life around the house and farmyard. A pair of bluebirds, nesting at the end of the porch in a birdhouse Cindy made, make endless trips to feed their young. Farther out, past the orchards and muscadine vines, at woods’ edge, a pileated woodpecker taps, its red-crested head cocked to the side, listening for the hollow sound of bugs feasting within a dying maple. Even the buzzards soaring high on their endless funereal quest are granted temporary spring admission into this avian fellowship of loveliness.

It’s late afternoon now, and I begin to tackle the evening chores. Along my route I pause to examine the wood chips, courtesy of the recently restored chipper and a particularly strenuous day of work, piled in front of the potting shed. Two newly planted fig trees are in the ground, just behind the chips, on either side of the steps. I take all of this in and proceed to the barn. The sun is above the tree line at six o’clock. In the brooder the week-old chicks are spread across their pen in the barn breezeway, practicing their scratch and peck routine. It looks to me like they have it down pretty good, but I guess it doesn’t hurt to start honing early the skills of one’s life’s work.

I peer over the fence at the empty hog lot. Silence. Beyond the paddock, in the holler, a lawnmower comes to life. In an odd way its roar is a sound I find soothing, nostalgic, the familiar background hum from the years of childhood, announcing the glad news of warm spring and the free summer days to come. I can say with no shame that the sound also puts me in the mood for a late nap.

Instead, I head to the hoop house and turn off the water running through the drip hoses. The greens and cabbages are now more than a foot tall; the tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants were planted only this morning. A movement catches my attention as a rabbit makes an appearance at the other entrance. It sees me and wisely hops out of sight. I head back to the house, for it’s now dinnertime. Later, when the sun has set and the waning moon is rising, we sit in the backyard and talk over the day.

Peeps and pips emanating from the living room make the presence of chicks hatching in our Brinsea incubator there known. We have been hatching replacements for our flock for many years now, and those sounds, signifying that life is emerging, never get old. Outside it is finally raining hard, thunder echoing down the valley. This is a good morning to write. I have been quiet for a bit. Let’s blame it on lambing season, which is where I’ll start and end these observations.
Just after midnight, in the middle of March, the next to last pregnant ewe lambed triplets. By eight the next morning the final holdout, a hefty Dorset/Hamp, followed by lambing a big singleton. And then, just like that, having lived for six weeks with lots of anticipation and little sleep, we found that lambing for the year had come to a close. It is not that the other life on the farm ever stops, but during the throes of lambing season it surely does seem like it. The cattle, hogs, chickens, and geese still get fed; chicks are hatched both artificially and the old-fashioned way. Repairs are undertaken and plans are made. Cole crops are planted. But the collective breath we have been holding since the end of January is finally exhaled. And when it is, I sleep until six o’clock the next morning.
The week after lambing season ends we cull two maiden ewes who did not conceive in spite of the fact that both were exposed to the Cheviot ram for nearly three months. They won’t get another chance at breeding, at least on this farm. We also cull from the flock a favorite maiden ewe, a large Polypay who sadly gave birth to two stillborn lambs. (Always look for a reason to cull, as they say.) In the isolation paddock near the hogs resides a Dorper ewe with an always complaining voice, and a February ram lamb by her side. Once he is weaned, she too will be gone: she has been treated once too often for chronic, contagious hoof issues … and then there’s that incessant whingeing. There is one in every flock.
While we’re still keeping the ewes and their lambs mainly in the corrals next to the barn, we have begun to let them out briefly into the farmyards, the orchards, and the smaller paddocks to graze the newly emerging spring grass. (Our off-and-on-again yearlong drought has persisted—the catastrophic bands of heavy rain and wind this week have fallen to our north and west—and, knowing that sheep will clip the grass to the root if you’ll let them, we try to practice the recommendation to “shut your gates to your fields when the rains stop.”)
Because what is to come in the year ahead remains unseen—whether or not the rain will fall and the grass will grow, what the hay harvest if any will be—we recently took advantage of a great deal and bought fifty-four round mixed-grass hay bales. The hay was in very good condition, at an excellent price, and delivered to the farm. It took the seller, whose fields were just a mile down the road, three trips to deliver eighteen bales on each load.
The following morning I spent time doing maintenance on two of my gas-powered chainsaws. I have a big project coming up this weekend or next—anyone want to volunteer to assist?—depending on the weather and my willingness to do the work. Over the past year we have accumulated three very large brush piles that really, really need to be chipped. Currently the brush is perfect for providing refuge for the rabbits who eat my cole crops. This needs to change, truly.
Now we have a good chipper of our own for tackling a modest brush pile, but for work of this magnitude we’ll rent a large industrial chipper. The advantage of the rental is that it will take almost any size branch and pull it in and spew it out in chips, all in a few seconds. Of course, it will also do the same with an arm if you’re not paying attention.
For the past two months the chipper we own hadn’t been working. It had stopped running one morning at the start of lambing season, when my nephew Owen, our farm kid Tyler, and I were using it in the orchard. I devoted the next few weeks off and on, when not observing lambing, doing chores, and napping or otherwise catching rare moments of sleep, trying to get it started. I sprayed carb cleaner in the carburetor, checked the fuel lines, cleaned the spark plug, took the carburetor off and cleaned it, sprayed Master Blaster in the engine, cranked and pulled the rope until my shoulder hurt. It wouldn’t fire, much less run.
Then, one day after a nap, in yet another effort at willing the chipper to start, I examined the wiring. Why, I asked myself, is a cable running up to the maw of the chipper? And what is that key hidden under the lip of the maw actually for? With nothing to lose I turned the key, which turned off the emergency kill switch (my guess is some brush must have accidentally turned it on back on that early February day), and pulled the starter rope. The chipper started immediately. The “repair” only took me two months, the entire duration of lambing season.
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I recently finished writing an essay for Local Culture, the print journal of the Front Porch Republic. It should be out in the spring issue. I’ll post it here after the copy arrives in the mailbox.
Also, those six weeks of lambing season surprisingly provided lots of opportunities to sit in my reading chair and just read, like a man nervously waiting outside a delivery room (do they still do that?), two related titles: Believe (R. Douthat) and Wendell Berry and the Given Life (R. Sutterfield). The first was more than a little too rah-rah Team Humanity for my taste. The Sutterfield book was more to my liking. I think if I was the observant type, I would be of Berry-ite convictions, with an emphasis on the inter-connectedness of all life, which considering the arc of my last six weeks seems more fitting for this farmer. I’m still reading P.G. Wodehouse, of course. This round, it’s Meet Mr. Mulliner, Mr. Mulliner Speaking, Mulliner Nights, and the Girl on the Boat.

(This essay of mine just ran in Plough Quarterly, the spring “Why We Work” issue. My thanks to their team for allowing me to reprint. If you haven’t checked out their lovely and thoughtful magazine, please do.)

Forget taking the magazine quiz “Are you and your mate a good match?” I suggest instead that you and your beloved go outside and build a sow shed together in the freezing rain, as it coats the tools, the wood, the metal roofing, and both of you in a thin layer of ice. That should determine pretty quickly your compatibility and the mettle of your relationship. Trust me, I know.

A blowing, biting, freezing rain is what we’re working in on this particular day. A real Alberta Clipper, the system arrived with full force right off the northern plains into our small East Tennessee valley. It’s midmorning, two hours since we headed outside to work, and the mercury has not budged from the 28 degrees Fahrenheit of sunrise. Squalls of horizontal icy rain alternate with spitting snow, ripping across the pastures and our faces at stinging speeds. The sun makes a brief appearance before wisely ducking for cover.

My beloved suggests we do the same, so we break for the house and a cup of hot tea. We are under a tight deadline, hustling to finish building a three-sided shelter before a new, very pregnant sow is delivered tomorrow. Much as we might prefer it, this is one project that cannot be put off for a sunny day.

When we moved to our fifty-acre farm a quarter-century ago, I set for myself a personal work goal: Find joy in doing the everyday. I jotted the goal down on a scrap of paper and taped it above my desk. It is a written injunction whose achievement at times has felt idealistic – especially on mornings like this, as we find ourselves together at the top of a wind-pummeled hill pasture, trying desperately to keep our fingers and toes and faces from freezing in our scramble to erect the farrowing hut before the sow decides to give birth.

The tea break has come at a good time. The mood out in the field had been quickly deteriorating into one of sullen irritation. (This can happen, of course, even in the strongest of relationships.) Truth be told, though we both love being outdoors and working hard, even in inclement weather, this morning’s ice and wind have been particularly wearing on the spirit. Break over, we leave the comfort of our home and return once more to the pasture, where it is now, thankfully, snowing … for a moment anyway, before the freezing rain starts again. At this point we begin to laugh, giddy almost, at the work still to be completed amid these uncooperative elements.

When you take up farming, the work – both the doing and the thinking about it – has a way of seeping into every aspect of the idyllic rural life you might have imagined yourself leading. It occupies most waking moments, every day, week, month, and year. Sitting in your easy chair dreaming about the “simple life,” warm and comfortable with a book and a glass of whiskey is one thing. It is altogether something else to be coated in ice, getting on with the job at hand because you have no other choice.

To be clear, all of us nestled in the bosom of twenty-first-century modernity do have some choice in how our years get spent, and my beloved and I wholeheartedly chose this work, this farming life. To the man with the “finding joy” reminder scribbled above his desk, that means that if one day he finds himself with an ice-coated hammer in one hand and a clutch of 10d nails in the other while his partner waits with the next rough-cut oak board to be nailed and another angry squall rains frozen misery down on their heads, he should try, as hard as it may seem in the moment, to factor a little enjoyment and satisfaction into the work. He has been able to do so on most days, and today will be no different.

We continue working throughout the day on the solid eight-by-ten-foot structure, breaking only for lunch (a quick bowl of tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich) and the occasional dash to the barn. Though the wind is still coming hard from the northwest, by afternoon the freezing rain of the morning has turned into a more acceptable steady snowfall. Come late afternoon, we hammer the last nail and pronounce the shelter complete. Satisfied with a job well done and in good spirits, we collect our tools and head to the house. (The sow, by the way, arrived at the farm on schedule the following day. Her newly completed shelter was full of dry bedding, which she apparently took as a sign: she farrowed eight piglets that night.)

In the evening we stoke the fire in the woodstove and relax in our armchairs, I with my whiskey, she with her hot tea, and talk over the day. We exchange apologies for any earlier irritability, share laughs as we commiserate about the miserable weather, and acknowledge our relief at having finished the farrowing hut. This talking over the day has served us well for the past twenty-five years. It is a ritual both morning and evening that gives us a structured chance to discuss joint efforts and individual projects.

The work carried out on a farm – the outbuildings and fences erected, the crops grown and harvested, the livestock raised and sold, birthed and butchered – accretes in layers that eventually become evidence of how a life has been spent. Like a faded trailblaze on an oak, there are telltale signs – additions on a barn or peculiar jogs in a fence – that speak in a coded language a careful observer can decipher. A tight fence line, a solidly built farrowing hut, or an evenly sown field is likely to go unnoticed by anyone but a fellow farmer, who will know what has gone into those tasks and will appreciate their execution when they are done well.

In his 1819 book The American Gardener, William Cobbett writes something to the effect that the state of a man’s moral life is reflected in the care he shows his gardens and his farm. On my more ambitious days I like to think that the old curmudgeon would grant me membership among the elect, or at least allow that I am on the right path. (Although, of course, there are also those dreary winter days when the energy to be a good steward is in as short supply as the daylight.)

Occasionally we host couples who have requested a tour of the farm. Typically, they are starting or planning to start their own farm or homestead. Showing them the hogs is always one of my favorite parts of the visit, and when I do I inevitably recount that memorable day of ice, snow, wind, and the building of the sow shelter. I’ll say that how two people work together on such a challenging task will define their future and their farm’s success. I’ll say that, for us, the work we’ve done together is the glue that has bound us to the land and to each other – and that satisfaction in working well together and completing a job we are both proud of has naturally followed.

I guess I’m a slow learner: it has taken me all these years to realize that the note above my desk, Find joy in doing the everyday, has it backward. As it turns out, I do not need to go looking for joy. If the farm work is done well, whether alone or with companionable help, joy will seek me out.

Today the sow shelter we constructed on that frigid winter’s day some fifteen years ago continues to serve its purpose. It still hosts the occasional sow and piglets. These days, a family of skunks has found it convenient to den seasonally under the floor. But the time has come that it needs a new workday. A corner post has weakened, and the floor boards have begun to sag. I am sure we will get around to the repairs eventually, squeezing them in among the endless other projects on the farm. This time, hopefully, the work will be done on a sunny spring day.

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Reading this week, The Complete Far Side (G. Larson). If you hear someone laughing, it is me.

The curious thing about mud is that it is only dirt pending the addition of water. Mud is all around us, waiting patiently to show itself for much of the year. It is to be found beneath the grass under your feet as you walk through the rounds of chores during the day. It is in the dry corrals of compacted clay and mixed in with the desiccated fecal matter from cattle and sheep. In the hog paddocks and woodland enclosures all tidy and dry, mud lies unnoticed, unborn, and unappreciated, until … you add a freeze or three and water, lots of water.

Farm mud in true, full glory is a seasonal creature. You may catch glimpses of it during the spring, summer, and fall, but it doesn’t really come to life—a thriving, mischievous entity—until the arrival of winter. With mud’s appearance I am the reminded of the lines from Hemingway about bankruptcy: “’How did you go bankrupt?’ ‘Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly.’” It rains, freezes, snows, melts, and repeats for a few weeks, and the grass still seems firm under the boot, albeit just a bit squishy. Then, one day the pasture releases its grasp on the earth, and each footstep taken thereafter may possibly be your last in the vertical. Mud returns. Gradually and then suddenly.

Mud can provide at these times a species of spiritual instruction if one knows how to properly decipher the language. I personally have found it useful in helping me understand the slim lease on mortality. On those days when a sense of my imminent demise causes me sadness at what has not yet been accomplished, the slurry that waits below acts as a catalyst to greater understanding.

To illustrate: Many years ago I was on my tractor, an old blue Ford 4000 without power steering. On the front hay spear was a 4×5 round bale; another was on the back spear. I left the barn, thus weighted, and drove down a moderately sloping hill on the way to feed the cattle in a lower field. As I approached the bottom pasture, I began to apply the brakes in preparation for navigating a narrow gate. At first I applied modest pressure. Nothing. I then tromped on the brakes with greater, desperate force. Nothing. Mud had intervened on the normal laws of frictional relationships, and tires and earth filed for temporary separation.

Below, in the field, my brother-in-law was holding the gate open wide. As I slid this way and that on the downhill, his eyes opened equally wide. At some juncture, as I contemplated what was left undone in this world, I took my foot off the brake, hoping to coast through to safety. Unfortunately, Old Blue had the nasty habit of popping out of gear without warning. This was one of those moments. With foot off the brake, I found the tractor gathering increasing speed in neutral, both it and the driver in full freefall mode.

That I am here relating this story means that all ended well enough, albeit with deep ruts down the field marking my path. (I managed to make it through the gate intact and rolled to a stop once the ground leveled. I traded Old Blue for a newer model with a reliable transmission the next week.) My misadventure did leave me with a healthy respect for the power of mud to bring deeper understanding regarding the meaning of life. It’s a power that should not be underestimated or go unacknowledged. Like life, mud is both temporary and eternal. The ruts from the tractor tires, the sludge throughout the barnyard—they may seem permanent on the farm in February. Yet, as May arrives, by the mutual efforts of time and warm spring weather, ruts now covered over by grass, mud shape-shifts and is once again hidden from view. By June it is a fading memory from the childhood of the year, soon to be forgotten. But it is waiting.

Like most things on a farm, the slurry, the muck, that frictionless engagement with the physical earth, these are cyclical experiences of the past, present, and future. Mud reminds us to slow down, tread carefully, drive only when needed, pull the livestock off the quiescent fields, and keep an ample supply of gravel. Mud is nature’s reminder of our limits, the seasonality of our work on the land, and the promise of renewal after the dormancy. All that is required to unleash its power is to add water.

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Reading this week: Philandering Angler (A. Applin), an inter-war years memoir of life and fly fishing.

It’s 5 a.m. when I step out into the cold morning. Lambing season is nearly upon us, and late night and early morning welfare checks on the flock are now the norm. Once lambing gets into full swing, midnight and 3 a.m. visits to the barn and paddocks will be added. But that is still perhaps a few days away. Some of the girls—the smaller-framed Dorpers in particular—already look like WWI dreadnoughts, each a battleship low and wide, waiting to unload its contents.

I let the dogs off the back porch for an early morning run. Both charge out the door in a skittering rush. They are on the trail of a skunk, whose presence in the chill air is made immediately and effectively known. Farther away in the dark, a coyote yips its unworldly cry. It is answered by others of its kind, first on the opposing ridge, then down in the creek bottom across the road, and finally, above me in the distant woods. In response, dogs throughout the valley erupt in a howling, barking, mad rejoinder, a chorus to the perceived threat. This goes on for the next twenty minutes, before, and almost altogether, quiet descends again in the predawn.

In the barn, I turn on the lights and enter the adjoining feeding corral through a side gate. The squeak of the gate hinge will on occasion bring the entire flock of sheep to its feet, ready to storm the feed troughs. Mercifully, this morning, the mob seems to understand that it is not yet feeding time and remains resting peacefully in the barn. (Whether the sheep are to be found in the barn or out in the corral depends on the weather and dryness of the ground. Today, after the heavy rains of the previous week, they are all inside on the fresh bedding.)

I shine my light around the outer corral. I need to make sure that there are no ewes outside in the cold and damp. None stands off to herself, pawing or sniffing at the ground for a yet-nonexistent lamb, and I hear no tiny bleats from afar, so I choose not to linger and risk further disturbance by my presence. The sheep will be up and about soon enough to let me know in their own insistent ways that they want attention.

I stop once more in the barn to admire the replacement headgate that my great-nephew and I have installed the day before. He and I have been rebuilding the old cattle chute that Cindy and I constructed some twenty-five years ago. A few posts were rotten and had to be dug out of the tightly packed dirt, one jarring slam of the post hole digger at a time, before new posts were set and anchored in concrete. All that remains to be done is to cut and attach new wooden railings, a job we will tackle in a few days.

I turn off the barn lights and head toward the house. Buster and Max are down in the ravine barking, having cornered an unknown quarry. I call them off and they return, exhilarated by their early morning run. I am relieved to note that neither has been sprayed by a skunk in their encounter. We three walk back to the house. A light is on in the popup trailer where my nephew camps out during his visit. All is quiet in the valley, giving the roosters an opportunity to make their presence known this late winter’s morning. I close the dogs on the back porch, pour myself a cup of coffee, and settle into my chair to read a book for a bit before the day properly begins.
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Reading this week: The long essay “The Presence of Nature” from A Small Porch (W. Berry) and Cocktail Time (P.G. Wodehouse, of course). Just starting Red Hills and Cotton, an upcountry memory (B. Robertson).

There are moments during winter (and this is promising to be a real old-fashioned one) when running a farm can seem at its best a poorly thought-out choice for a way of life. And at its worst? Well, there is the cold, mud, snow, windy cold, mud, ice, frigid cold, mud, more mud, and knee-deep mud, and the ongoing necessity to be out in it—breaking frozen-over drinking water in the troughs, prepping for the impending onset of lambing season, watering veggies in the hoop house by hand (done by filling buckets with icy water and lugging them some distance), trying to start chainsaws, and, always, the lovely promise of dealing with it all for more weeks upon miserable weeks. And to cap off the joy, there are the endless leg-breaking opportunities afforded by mud, be it sloppy or slushy or frozen.

It was on the tail end of one recent day of the above, just after I’d finally snuggled down under the covers in my boxers and T-shirt and was drifting off into a well-deserved seven to eight of the soundest, that my beloved nudged me awake and said, “Hear it? It’s raining really hard.” I responded with a helpful and most sincere, “Uh-huh.” Nudging me again, she said, “Should ‘we’ (meaning me, dear reader) go out and let the sheep into the barn?” Being the kind and compassionate husbandman of our stock that I am, I surfaced long enough to parrot the forecast in my best Phil Connors assurance: “The rain is not going to last. It is 33 degrees, but the temperature is going to rise all night to 50 degrees. They’ll be fine,” I said as I fell back into the deep sleep of the just.

Around 3 a.m. I awakened to the sound of rain beating on the tin roof above the bedroom … and to the stirrings of guilt. I thought about getting up, and for a good minute resisted. Then, resigning myself, I emerged from under the toasty covers and shuffled out of the bedroom, trying to avoid that one squeaky floor board, and went downstairs to dress. The temperature gauge in the house registered the outside temp at a balmy 34. WTF! I pulled on my barn jacket and scrunched a wool beanie on my head before stepping out onto the porch. Heading off into the unwelcoming night, I glanced at the rain gauge. It showed that two inches of rain had fallen in the past few hours. (Double WTF!)

In most weather we leave the cattle in the field, where they can shelter under the trees, and the hogs in a paddock with a stall; livestock of all sorts are pretty resilient and can shift for themselves in our moderate Tennessee climate. For safety’s sake, though, we bring the sheep into the corral each night and the chickens into their fenced run. The only real exception to leaving anyone outside is when it is very cold and raining. This particular night it was both.

I had spent the previous day “winterizing” the barnyard, including placing heaters in all the watering troughs for the cattle, sheep, and hogs, and even a heated pad under the chicken waterer. (A frozen fifty-gallon water trough creates a 425-pound block of ice, perfect for a large party but useless for thirsty livestock.) The prep work I’d done left a dangerous spaghetti string of long extension cords winding through the doorways and over the rafters of the barn and out into the now wet and muddy paddocks, each providing ample opportunity for man or beast to trip or get tangled. But everything was taken care of except bringing our pregnant ewes in from the drenching rain.

In the wee hours before dawn, with the rain, fat and just shy of snow, streaming from my wool cap, I squished and slid my way through the mud to the barn. As part of the winterizing process, I had spread gravel on all the paths most traveled by the cattle and sheep. A truck with twenty-one tons of No. 4 had been delivered earlier in the week. Using the bucket on the small Kubota, I had moved several tons already, filling in areas around gates and creating new pads for water and feed troughs, all so the sheep in particular wouldn’t have to stand in muck. Yet it is no surprise as I rounded the corner of the barn that I found the entire flock standing in the mud instead of on the gravel. All began to holler the moment they saw the flashlight’s beam.

I walked down the narrow work alley that is part of the covered chute system attached to the barn and opened the walk-through gate for the flock. They flooded (right word, that) around me into the dry overhang, each woolly beast as it passed using me as a human squeegee to remove a few gallons of water from its coat. I guess turnabout is fair play, for I was now as wet as they were. From the chute system, I swung open the barn door to let the sheep into the warmer interior … except that the cattle had beat me to the punch. They had taken advantage of an unlocked gate on the far side of the barn and now lay placidly chewing their cud and looking at me with their best “Whuht?” expression.

What was expected to be a simple visit to the barn to right a problem that could have been taken care of earlier in the night continued to go from bad to worse. Leaving the problem of sorting out the barn‘s living quarters for the daylight hours, I went back out into the pouring rain, only to find that the water troughs were already forming a crust of ice. Two breakers in the fuse box had tripped, indicating that apparently I was running too many heaters off the same circuits. It might have been cold, but at least my temper was warming up. I made a couple of adjustments (although it actually took me another day to find the right electrical load balance) and walked back out of the barn, where it was still pouring rain and still a miserable night, and slogged through the mud up to the house around 4:30. Thoughts of sleep long past, I started a pot of coffee—not that at that point I needed waking up.
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Reading: The new Hearth & Field print journal (H&F delivers a lovely read that is good company for a snowy evening) and The Code of the Woosters, plus Carry on, Jeeves (the latter two both by Wodehouse). Is there such a thing as too much P. G. Wodehouse? I’m apparently on a mission to find out. Also, I’ve returned to a reading of Tom Holland’s Dominion.
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Housekeeping: A reminder that the full archive of my posts (dating back to 2011) is available here and that my book can be purchased here.

The view from the top of the hill on our farm the evening of December 31, 1999, was much as it is today, though certainly with fewer lights from fewer neighbors or the industrial halogen glow of nearby towns. Below, no lights shone from the windows of our house … because there was not yet a house to light. Our “home,” that year and the following two, was the semi-converted bays of a concrete-floored garage. A light was mounted over the side door, but all else was dark and still.

The valley on that night was quiet. Traffic on the curvy two-lane state highway, almost non-existent at most times, was even less so on New Year’s Eve. Our small flock of Rhode Island Reds were long asleep, safe in the new chicken coop. We had built the coop four months earlier, working into the late night after coming home from full-time jobs in Knoxville, 50 minutes away.

That night on the hill, we sat on the tailgate and shared a glass of cheap champagne to toast the year to come and the year just leaving. No worries for us of a Y2K technology crash: there was nothing much in the bank to be lost. With the purchase of the farm and the remains of a mortgage on our house in Knoxville, ours was now a money-in, money-out world.

A dozen yards away from us, resting in their great bovine bulk of contentment, lay our herd of strawberry-roan Shorthorn cattle. Our first cattle on the farm, we would keep them until the arrival a year later of a larger herd of Milking Devons.

Snorting from time to time, down the hill and on the far side of the barn in the corral, was Cindy’s horse, Paint, her gangly-legged filly no doubt trying to nurse. Cindy had purchased the pregnant mare a week before we closed on the farm. It was for Paint that we had hastily built our first fence. The clumsily constructed wooden corral, erected in a stiflingly hot late summer drought, provided us a hard and humbling lesson in just how much we needed to learn. Cindy was told by the seller that he expected Paint to foal in the fall. Instead, she had given birth two weeks after arriving at the farm and days after the corral was completed. This evening, on the top of the hill, the story was still fresh and new to us. We laughed (as we still do a quarter-century later) at the experience. Already we felt a tiny bit more confidence that we could pull this change off, to live from our land and our work and pay off any debts.

Today, as the year 2024 closes, our immediate neighbors from those early days in the valley—Lowell Raby, Joe Kyle, Rex Ensley, James and Marie Moore, Alex and Sissy Bettis—have all passed away. In those first years Cindy would saddle her horse and set off to deliver them eggs. It’s an idea that now seems as unbelievably quaint, as it does dangerous, because today our small-highway traffic has increased eightfold courtesy of mostly neighbors from out of state seeking their Tennessee “4ever” homes.

While there are many more lights to be seen from the top of the hill at night, ours is still a reasonably quiet rural valley. Many sights and sounds remain familiar. Cattle still ruminate contentedly, chickens wheeze from their coop, traffic can be heard approaching from miles away … and now lights shine a welcome from the windows of our home below.