Uncrowded

Everybody else wore a Buck knife. I wore a Case. That seemed to be the way it was in the Navy. Everybody else in the whole electronics school had on a T shirt under the hot wool dress shirt that winter when we were told to line up for shots. Not me. I was bare breasted. It branded me anti military. According to the military.

It’s not like it was any different in high school. I don’t know if I was branded. All my frens drove a car. I drove a GMC truck. The rest of the football team wore black football spikes. Mine were white. Other guys were taking chicks to the concerts. I rode the stag car and let any and all chicks up on my shoulders for the better view.

Farming the same thing. Everybody else was going broke and quitting back in 1984. I decided to try it. When I overheard two old guys saying nobody in their right minds would own hogs I went out and bought some. I seldom joined everybody else at the farm auctions. I only went to buy ,usually off the iron pile, and then I would leave.

Even though I have never wanted anything more than to be average I have never felt comfortable in a crowd. Not if I was part of the crowd. I just never have wanted to draw attention and nothing draws attention like a crowd. Not to mention there is nothing worse than drawing the crowd’s attention whether you’re in it or not.

I hope you’re not crowded. In it or not.

Then, there.

Cocreator

Don Din Dun

Dam’s down. Den.s done. So are the stalks it was built out of. So are a lot of the poor little critters that helped build it. I think there were more beaver hunters than there were beavers. I counted seven pickups and a Jeep parked across the creek and more people than that.

I was busy shagging wagons and filling semi trucks with some of what was the last corn to be picked around Hancock Iowa. The same corn in the field the beaver dam was centered in. I was done after dark but before dawn the next day. Before midnight actually.

The posse was waiting on me to get the corn along the creek so they could get a backhoe in to remove the dam. When the water drained out of the half mile backed up creek the beavers come out to fix it and the beaver hunt had begun.

The fur is worthless but there may be a bounty of each one killed by the county. So it wasn’t Fursday but the next day was Friday.

That day, December 7th 2023, will live in infamy for those pounced upon critters, defenders of the pond as it were. It will live in infamy for this farmer too. For that day, December 7th 2023 was the last day I harvested the crop on this farm I’ve been farming for the last forty years. I’m done.

Those dice can be rolled by another hopeful contender for the farming success crown. I will say as a warning after forty years rolling them the same thing my father told me 37 years ago when I brought up return on investment. “Return on investment!” he boomed, “Son you are farming, you need to worry about the return OF your investment before you plan on a return ON your investment.”

Truer words cannot be said.

Needless to say my younger brother who ducked out after two years made the right decision. I’m still looking for that pony in there. I still don’t like the smell.

Den, Dare.

Cc.

Post Script, Last farm Last field Last time.

Silt Clay Loam

That muddy water

Heres where ya got er

Up in the hills of Farming Town

Brought to a boil

Just like hells oil

Buckets of rain are baring down

Dawn in the delta

The heat will melt ya

That muddy waters nice n brown

Hard work an toil

Life from the soil

The bottoms wear it like a gown

So glad ya sent her

Goes to the renter

To hand out candy like a clown

Soup Can Road

(s)

We would carve them out of the dirt lane with Campbell”s Soup cans. We had two lanes. A gravel one where the cars would drive and a dirt one beside it for whatever reason. The grass would be dead there from traffic and we could play in the nice clean dirt. Clean to us not Mother. We had cars we had invented out of specially shaped wood knots that had fallen (or been knocked) out of barn boards. We called them jalopies. Aw the imaginations of youth. Anything for fun.

That evolved over time to building a mountain road across the face of the now abandoned silage pit a few yards away. That’s yards as a measurement not yards as in barnyards. The mountain road was perilously crossed with farm machinery toys we had received from Santa at Christmas. We could play tractors without crawling around or even bending over. When the old worn out tractors evaporated we moved on down the hill a few more yards to roll the rear tires up and down the barn roof.

Anything for fun.

Then, there.

Cc

Top Stop

Not full stop. Rain stop on the hill top. By the bin by the town. The township’s cemetery would be closer but the town’s built out to it. Turn northwest and I farm the three forties around that one. The Stay At Gone Mom helped me finish up moving there this morning from north of the interstate two miles away on my northernmost quarter section.

Headed back home on the corn run. One done and a farm a brother harvested the corn on with three more to go. All five farm’s beans were cut by me on the bean run north. Augured once and out of here. The world gets them after Bunge of north America crushes them. They get the oil too. Fly on that you greedy bastards.

I’ll fly when I fall out of my next whatever. Any landing you walk away from, eventually. Falling seems to be what we are here to do. Falling into whomsoever’s warm embrace when we first push our way and get pushed out of the home we’ve so quickly outgrown for only the first of many times. Falling in love with the mother of the children we fall in love with. Falling for all the bait and switch schemes that follow. Falling …….

But ’tis the season. Trees need company

Then, there.

Cc