When I was in high school, my English teacher Mr. Binkney had us read The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck. Over the course of a few weeks, I learned about the importance of the land and our dependence on it. In looking at 1940 census records, everyone around here listed farming as their occupation. By the time I was born in 1960, almost everyone had other jobs, and if they farmed at all, it was part-time. My father and his father were still farming on the side, so I was exposed to it. The field across the street from my childhood home was planted in wheat when I was young. I have ridden with my daddy on the tractor, and the combine as the grain was harvested. I remember the sounds of the machinery and the whoosh of the grain pouring into sacks. I remember the smell of the fresh wheat and burlap. The harvest was never just the end of a season of hard work, but also a recognition of blessings from God.
In today’s world, there is no need for farming in our area. Anything you need can be bought at Kroger, probably for less money than you can grow it yourself. Dependence on the land and God for “our daily bread” is easier to miss. It is never that way for farmers. They know.
That wheat field I mentioned earlier is where my home sits today. I have a small garden to get a sense of farming and even it is a lot of work. Behind my house, where wheat once grew, nature has reclaimed the land, and it is surprisingly wooded. The photo above shows a walking track we have through the woods. Sometimes when I’m walking out there alone, I visualize what it might have looked like when Papa (Howard Chaffin) first farmed here. The mules pulling the plows and how tough a man had to be to do the work. And here I am, just getting enough exercise to be healthy, enjoying the easiest kind of life. In those moments, I get a sense that I am not entirely alone. As Georgia poet and author Brenda Sutton Rose wrote: “This land pulses with life. It breathes in me; it breathes around me; it breathes in spite of me. When I walk on this land, I am walking on the heartbeat of the past and the future.”
A few days before Papa died, he got on his tractor and plowed the field for what I believe he knew was one last time. The world would not understand it, but I did. As it said in The Good Earth, “He belonged to the land, and he could not live with any fullness until he felt the land under his feet and followed a plow in the springtime and bore a scythen in his hand at harvest.”