Spring is part of farmer’s heart

By Alan Linda | The Daily Journal

Published Tuesday, March 11, 2008

From his easy chair, he heard the wild geese calling as they winged over the farmstead. He heard them, and thought of many things.

He thought about his age, mostly, because it seemed to be at the center of many of his concerns. He ran his fingers through thick straight white hair, and took that moment to wonder why it was still growing. Nothing else seemed to be, now that he was coming up on his 82nd birthday.

He thought of all the springs when, at this time of the year, he would have been getting the corn planter and grain drill ready, ready for the fields that were now rented out to a young neighbor.

He thought about his father, dead and gone these 20-plus years, and of how adept his father had been with horses, and of how inept his father had been with the first gasoline powered tractors. He smiled as he remembered his father’s embarrassment at having to get help to untangle the tractor from the fence at the end of the field.

“I kept shouting ‘Whoa!’ but it wouldn’t listen,” his father had said, with a smile on his face that had said: “Just you wait. Someday you’ll be an old fogey too.”

Again, his dad’s barn popped into his mind, and he rested his head back against his chair, and closed his eyes.

What to do with that barn occupied his thinking more than any other single thing. Even with his eyes closed and his head back against the chair, he could see the numbers “1929,” painted high on the gable end, in big proud numbers. He himself had been 13 the summer that his dad and grandpa — with the help of the best carpenter around — had put it up.

He remembered the hustle and bustle in the barnyard as they had tackled the countless jobs that had to be done to build a barn. He saw again grandpa’s effortless swings of a 12-pound sledgehammer as he broke rocks for the foundation, rocks that he and dad had stoneboated into the yard with horses from the big pile west of the grove.

He saw his dad and his grandpa as they had taken turns at the end of a bucksaw, cutting rafters, something they had jokingly said he was “too wet behind the ears to do.”

He smelled the pungent, fresh, pitchy aroma of the white pine rafters as the carpenters formed them into roof ribs that seemed to arch clear to the sky, higher than any of the neighbors’ barns, grandpa had proudly said.

He remembered standing enviously on the ground as everyone but him nailed new cedar shingles on the roof.

Then he and dad and grandpa were milking cows by hand in the barn for the first time. The three of them. Too proud to speak.

“This’ll be yours someday,” they had said to him as he cranked the cream separator. He thought his shirt buttons might pop, he was so thrilled.

He opened his eyes, and saw this month’s small Social Security check lying on the TV table beside his chair.

He wondered about the wisdom of using his small savings to reroof the barn. He thought about his two sons, who had got jobs in town. He thought about how it might have been different if one or both of them had wanted to farm.

His wife entered the room. “You’re thinking about that old barn again, aren’t you?” She straightened the farm magazines on his table, patted him on the head, and left the room.

He leaned back his head once again. What a wonderful barn that had been, the talk of the neighborhood. Those three, the neighbors had said, had the best barn. Yours someday, grandpa had said. “Whoa, I kept saying whoa!” his dad had said.

Overhead, on springtime wings, the geese called to each other.

It was another spring.

Alan Linda writes from his home in New York Mills.