The image above is a photo of my Great Grandfather’s farm house adjacent to my Grandfather’s house on the farm that shaped my young life.

Sometimes I feel like I grew up on a farm but I didn’t. My grandparents had a farm in Stokes County N.C. where my mom and her brother grew up. It may be universally true that kids grow up wanting to be anywhere else but where they spent their formative years. I understand that. I got just a taste of what farm life was like. I spent a week our two a year helping out on the farm and visiting my grandparents. To me the farm was a kids paradise and a real schoolroom.

Papa (my Grand father) lived on land that had been in his family for 150 years. He grew tobacco and raised cattle and an occasional hog. He had a pack of beagles some times and bird dogs at other times that he hunted wild game with. He had a very large vegetable garden. He grew corn, about dozen types of beans, potatoes, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, okra, squash, turnips, and cucumbers.

He had peach trees, apple trees, cherry trees in the yard around his house. He grew strawberries(oh, my aching back) and melons. My grandmother would gather wild blackberries and make preserves. She canned peaches and dried apples.

His sister owned a dairy cow that she milked daily and shared with her neighboring family. We had raw milk, sweet butter and buttermilk.

A neighbor had some bottom land near a river and grew sugar cane. He made molasses that he sold to his neighbors.

Momma would have a corn day every year where she invited the relatives to harvest the corn, and freeze it for the winter. She also canned beans and other vegetables. Papa built two ponds in his cow pastures so that the cattle could water themselves and he stocked them with fish.

Can you imagine what a boy can learn in that environment? That I took it for granted is sad. You might think my grandparents were some sort of unusual, rough hewn salt of the earth exceptions up there in Stokes County. You’d be wrong. Many neighbors specialized in certain things. There were farmers wives that were hairdressers, there were farmers that were mechanics, there were farmers that were electricians. But they all got part of their living from the earth.

Growing up in a city like Greensboro, it never occurred to me that my heart was divided by what I was experiencing. My Mom hated the farm. The hard endless work, the inability to ever get beyond a middling income and traditional life full of hard striving. She had a point. But as a kid, man what a life. The farm represented independence, closeness to the land and its history, and seeing a result form the hard work you put in.

To this day, when I think of home, I think of the farm. It is so responsible for who I am. My grandparents farm matured me. It exposed me to life better than any other experience. I was taught about life and death, danger and the need to meet it head on to survive. I witnessed cruelty on its grittiest level. And I saw grace, unbelievable grace in the midst of tragedy.

I learned how to grow things, how to harvest them, how to nurture them. I learned about hunting with dogs. I learned bout raising cattle, electric fences (ouch), driving tractors, . It introduced me to one of the chief meanings of life, cultivation.

Cultivation is the act of improving the condition of something. You cultivate the land to help it produce healthy and nourishing food. You cultivate yourself to make yourself a better person. You cultivate friendships and other relationships to build a community of mutual support and love. Because only a loving community is sustainable.

Underneath the selfishness of self-preservation there needs to be a genuine love for your neighbor. I saw that on the farm too. A lot of love, a lot of sharing and mutual support. It took a lot of forgiveness for that to take place. Because that community was so incredibly connected, it was unlike anything I have ever experienced. It was about families living close to one another, generations upon generations engaged in the same struggle but not just making it, finding some joy along with sadness. To me it was life at its fullest.