Growing Up Southern: September 9, 2017

 A good man died this week, not a close friend, but a good one, and he liked my first book. Fussed about my taking so long on the second. That was when I saw him for the last time. I’ll not finish it in time for him. Too bad.

He was of the class “Southern Farmer.” He worked all his life and was still working until just before he took sick for the last time. Robert Cole was his name, and he was Brenda’s cousin. He leaves behind his childhood sweetheart, Betty, whom he married in 1957.

He and Betty lived down the road, Cole Road they named it later, a few houses from where Brenda and her parents lived. When we first married, there were maybe a dozen families living on that road. Now there may be three. Many were related and they all shared memories, sadness, joy, and at times, farming equipment.

Before crops were laid by, you couldn’t travel the road without seeing men out on their tractors working the fields. At days end, some would simply stop the tractors and walk home. There were even enough families to support a small Methodist church where the gravel roads intersected back in the day.

The roads are paved now, but the church disappeared decades ago. As I say, few people live in the community anymore. The fields are empty most of the time, worked sporadically by corporate crews who come en masse, work for day or two, then move to another field. You don’t see men driving around on Sunday afternoons, as my daddy used to, just to see how the crops are doing.

And these days,  nobody parks equipment in the fields of an evening. They don’t always steal the whole tractor, sometimes they just steal the most hard-to-find parts, which is worse in some ways. Times have changed, many for the worse.

They won’t make men like Robert Cole anymore, men who lived in a square plot carved from their fields so they often looked out on them while they ate breakfast. That sort of connection between the land that gives us food and the men and women who bring it forth doesn’t exist around here anymore. Farming is just another corporate enterprise.

Robert and Betty loved life and I’m glad for the good times they had together. The hard times they lived through justified them. They even took up snow-skiing later in life. They left a good lesson for us all: work hard, but, as Robert would have said, “Dadgummit, stop and play every once in a while.”

So, I think I'll just do that.

Just thinking.