Rural Routes

The wind sliced from the north and pierced clothing normally worn while working around a farmyard on an early May morning; that wind’s edge honed sharp enough to make light gloves and an extra layer of jacket the preferences for any old spirit spending a decent amount of time out there.

That day was one of deceit – the azure sky fluffed with a few clouds and the sun’s spring warmth soothing. It was to be a day of some chores and then of sitting out with pen and paper to inhale the fragrance of words carried on the season.

But oh, for that wind.

All was perfect but only if there was shelter from the wind, maybe on the sun-splashed south side of one of the farm buildings, or on the base of an old oak’s south side. I didn’t have time to linger long at such places and instead went about the light work that needed to be done and then made my way to find warmth in the old farmhouse’s safety.

The old house greeted my spirit with a hug from Dee when I entered, and kissed my cheek with a warm cup of coffee in hand extended to me.

There were projects that needed to be dealt with in the house, some of them of unsavory mathematics and numbers and calculations I so abhor. Instead of turning attention to those things I allowed my eyes to drift to the beauty on the other side of the windows’ glass. My being followed and, though still sitting in the house, I still felt the wind scratching its cold fingers through my shirts.

I reached for a heavier shirt. An old photo was on the table where I’d cast the heavy shirt the previous night. After I pulled it on, I reached to pick up that photograph, a relic that I’d known for most of my life but which I’d only regained possession during more recent days.

There in the fuzzy black-and-white image I stood as a 2-year-old boy with Ring, the first dog I’d known at our family’s farm at Veefkind. My mother told me many years ago that the photo was taken on an early spring day, with snow still on the old Veefkind farmhouse’s back porch where Ring and I were standing.

Photograph and coffee in-hand, I roamed to the kitchen to continue warming myself with daydream-gazes outside through the windows and with the memories carried in that photograph.

Dee added additional warmth with her offering in a porridge of grits her southern-born brightness so taught her to master.

All was there, right then – my past and present – giving me no excuse for my body to know warmth.

I recalled that old Veefkind porch, so simple and small but to a child of young age a grand place to spend hours. It was the sort of warm place I’d been seeking while outside only moments earlier; memories of long hours of childhood daydreaming on that south-facing porch while in repose with the sun and Ring and favorite dog Laddie who followed.

That porch provided warmth when all around could seem cold. It became a sort of headquarters for me in those youngest years. And then, even during coming-of-age years it was a place where I could find the sun’s gentle embrace even when all in a boy’s life starts to become so overturned and confusing.

That porch has been considered many other times during my life. I’d often found warmth from it when the cold of confusion seemed so overwhelming.

I’ve wondered whether we’ve all needed to hang onto a place such as that rickety old porch, it gone from reality for so many years.

There always will be some warmth from a cold spring wind found on the old Veefkind porch, and I’ll always hold that in my spirit’s photographs. But I’ve found the greatest and most fulfilling warmth here at our home on the Eimon Ridge.

There’s a spot in one of our gardens that provides such protection from those cold spring winds. The protection is on the south sides of those old oak trees and around corners of the house and barn and machine shed. It’s hunkered on the south side of the small hill that rises a few feet west of our house. Those spots allow the youthful thoughts and dreams brought by the old Veefkind porch, but they also allow fulfillment of needs for more mature contemplation about life and this land.

And then, on that May spring morning, I felt the gentle touch of Dee’s hand on my shoulder as I sipped the warm coffee and spooned the hot grits she’d offered when I’d come back into our old farmhouse – that which is home as we’d never known. It brought a reminder that I’m warmed here in the present and will be until my old bones are returned to the soil.

I am warmed, then, in spirit and in body by all I know on this ridge.

— Scott Schultz

No invitation was needed to draw me from the confines of our old farmhouse during the couple hours before the May morning’s sun would light another day on our ridge. The brightness already there, reflected from the full Flower Moon, cast a spotlight across the countryside that was too appealing to ignore.

I followed the moonlight into the farmyard that morning, the moon already making its slow fall to the west horizon to allow the sun its own splendor on the opposite horizon. The moon and I stared at each other with hypnotic eyes through the light wedding veil cloud-wisps between us.

There was a connection between us that spanned all decades of my life’s many seasons. Right then, we were the long-married couple at a comforting dinner, reading each other through candlelight. We were the couple who’d come to finish each other’s sentences and even know each other’s thoughts; each other’s weakness; each other’s strengths; each other’s habits.

We breathed together, the moon and I, in a gentle visual embrace.

The decades had been long, and we had questions plenty in hopes of learning even more about each other.

The moon asked why I hadn’t arrived sooner to gaze into its beauty and fawn over its splendor.

I asked the moon why more people weren’t turning back to the land’s comfort during troubling times.

The moon asked why I wasn’t caring more for the countryside we were borrowing from the spirit.

I asked the moon if she could help with weather to bless the soil with great fertility and the waters with blessed pureness.
The moon asked what drew me to this land so sacred that even the glaciers left it untouched.

The horizon pulled more quickly at the moon, its light softening from the whiteness of higher altitude and into a gentle amber.

I asked it to not leave yet, beckoning as I has so many more questions for the moon and it hadn’t answered any – just as the moon must still have so many more questions for me and I hadn’t answered any.

That night’s full Flower Moon was giving into the restful allure offered on the horizon’s bed; I was left standing in the farmyard to consider all the questions asked and unasked, and of all the answers still left unknown.

So many questions of me.

So many questions of love.

So many questions of life.

So many questions of nature.

So many questions of spirit.

So many questions….

I wanted to know that the joys I know in connecting with this land will continue to bring joy and understanding.

But the moon kept drifting toward its resting place.

I remembered, then, how a middle-aged fellow had been running 26.2 miles the previous Saturday — the distance he’d have been running had a marathon he’d been training to run that day not been canceled. Some folks asked the fellow’s father-in-law why the guy still would go ahead and run that distance despite the marathon’s cancellation.

“If you have to ask, I doubt you’d understand the answer,” answered the old father-in-law, himself literally and figuratively the veteran of many marathons.

As with that father-in-law’s insight, it occurred to me that the questions I sought from the moon weren’t for the moon to answer, but for me to answer; perhaps the moon’s questions also were my own and only for me to answer.

Truths being sought that morning dwelled only within my spirit. I’d sought answers in the moon, until then not remembering that the moon’s very glow only is a reflection of light shining from the sun. The answers were, and will continue to be, here with me on this place of ridges and coulees. And, because I’m of the soil, the answers will be here in this wonderful dirt.

I am my own questions and answers.

The soil is my own question and answers.

I blinked away the final hints of light from the moon now slumbered on that horizon. I’d found so many answers in it, but not as I expected. I’d rest easily the next evening, knowing the full Flower Moon would greet me that night and leave me to know the answers to so many of my own questions: those the answers reflected by the moon.

The full moon, as it always does, would fade into darkness during coming nights, the cycle of lightness and darkness we all find in our own places. Blessed are those who know their own light is here on the land – for me, on this little farm’s ridge. It’s knowing place, and knowing place is knowing self.

— Scott Schultz

It took two or three plodding strides to catch my balance after catching my work-shoe’s toe on the rock barely protruding from the barnyard. The long-gone voice of my father made a small chuckle emit from my lips, his sarcastic tone saying, “pick up your goddamned feet, old man.”

His echoing words were good advice, of course, and made me hear him during his last years cursing at his own inability to pick up his feet, so he wouldn’t trip on a rug or a field stone.

Whether a soul of my autumn years should remember to pick up my feet so as to not stumble on a somewhat hidden field stone that day was important, but inconsequential. While taking a moment to catch my breath and bearings in the barnyard, I considered how field stones have been tripping me in bad ways and in good ways since the youngest of my years.

The first memories I have of tripping on those rocks are among the earliest held in my rural being. They take me to the rock pile at our family farm over at Veefkind, the first of those rocks diligently picked from the land’s heavy loam to make more room for the crops on the farm built by my great-great grandfather Henry Veefkind.

There, I rested my young bones on those rocks during a spring day, them sharing with me the warmth they’d absorbed from the May morning’s sun. Our Farmall Super M buzzed in a nearby field with spring tillage under way, and our small Ford tractor hummed under my older brother’s guidance as it pulled our old green Oliver oats drill on another nearby field. Daydreams of me someday being grown enough to drive that farm equipment ahead of the dust-puffs they left hanging in their wakes were interrupted only by my curiosity about what treasures might lie within the rocks on my comfortable rock-pile place of rest.

My muscles responded to my curiosity by pushing my tiny hands to move one stone, and then another and then another. The stones pierced the air around me with razor-sharp clacks as I moved them from place to place on the pile. My senses worked to make note of the variety in sizes, though most had a similar weather-worn smoothness born of countless centuries of being moved in the farm’s soil and in being washed by so many years of rain.

And the colors.

Some of them had bright colors streaked within, and some had speckles of reds; some were fully muted red and some were tan and other shades to offset those of the dull gray I’d noted in the cloudy sky on a previous fall day.

I dropped one of the stones, and it firecracker-clacked hard against another, shattering a piece from its potato-shaped end. That required me to pick up the same stone and smack it against the others to see whether more might be prompted to break. I enjoyed the prehistoric stone-against-stone clattered hammering – an excitement that ceased when one of my forefingers found its way between my stone hammer and its anvil.

The stone pile’s deceit throbbed in my forefinger as I headed toward the farm-buildings to see what mischief I could find among chickens, hogs or Holsteins while older family-folks’ collective attention was directed toward the fields.

I’d return to the stone pile many times during that next year or two, often with the same treasure-seeking-broken-stone-hammering-finger-smashing results.

A couple more years passed until I was a ripe old 5-or-6-year-old. Early on a spring day at that age, I heard the directive that had seemed to never come soon enough: My father told me to climb aboard the spring-supported seat of our Farmall Super M and drive the tractor while the rest of the family picked rocks from the field and tossed them onto the wagon being pulled by the tractor.

The job was to hang onto the tractor’s steering wheel to assure that it didn’t veer much to the left or to the right. The machine was creeping along at the very slowest it could move, it in low gear with the throttle fully closed down. I could have reached the throttle, but had been admonished to not touch that lever lest my ass be warmed by Dad’s wide leather belt; there would be no stopping the tractor until my father re-boarded it with me because I couldn’t reach the clutch.

I drove while the others sweat, bent, straightened, bent, straightened and sweat in a process ad nauseam. I tired of trying to turn and watch the process behind me as I’d seen the older family members turn on the tractor’s seat to watch the equipment being pulled during other field-work, it all quickly becoming too boring.

The spring sun’s warmth eventually caressed my eyelids to a drooping slumber; I was jolted awake as Dad jumped onto the tractor to stop it because we’d reached the field’s end.

“Just go back to the house,” he said with a cock of the seed cap sitting crooked on his head pointing me on my quarter-mile walk back to the farm buildings where I worked to find more of my daily mischief among the chickens, hogs and Holsteins.

The seasons of being on the other end of the rock-picking process came soon enough and, while driving the tractor seemed boring, at least it wasn’t  sweat, bend, straighten, bend, straighten and sweat in a process ad nauseam.

We managed to add a couple more generations’ worth of field stones and our own treasures onto the Veefkind farm’s rock pile during my years there, like so many farmers of that era wondering why the rocks seemed to be the best crops grown on the fields. And, while tedious, we realized the importance of that chore when we’d hear a rock clatter through the forage chopper’s blades, rendering the blades dulled and ineffective.

I’ve occasionally thought over the years about the rocks on that pile – about all the mysteries they held within themselves and within the pile. What had they experienced during the ages, and how had they formed; how did they find the surface of our farms’ fields and allow us to gather them to our barnyard pile?

I’ve occasionally thought about the stones’ individual beauty and how they could have been transformed into a beautiful wall or fireplace.

I’ve occasionally thought about how I should remember to stop at the Veefkind farm while I can, to gather one or two of the rocks to hold as a family heirloom in honor of my family’s toils on that land.

The Veefkind farm’s rock pile disappeared sometime during the last 40 years or so, bulldozed back into the soil and covered in the barnyard’s duff. Perhaps someday, though, some fellow in the autumn of life will be walking across that soil and catch his foot on one of those rocks again risen – the echo of an old man’s voice saying, “pick up your goddamned feet, old man.”

— Scott Schultz

A somewhat strange work schedule had me awake well before the sun rose on that Sunday morning in early May.

Though my schedule often has me working that time of the day, the work doesn’t normally allow me to stop and appreciate the seasons’ early mornings as I should. We should, after all, take every opportunity to pay homage to the land and all life that’s with it.

That Sunday morning, I filled a mug of coffee and went out for a seat on one of the resident Leopold benches. The countryside around our farm was still, but for a bit of breeze that would splash sounds of imagined seas through the budding leaves on the trees in the woodlots and around our farmyard. A trusting cottontail rabbit ignored my presence and then casually departed as I took my seat on the bench.

And then, a moment of hushed air followed by the songs of the peepers in our valley’s creek, and then the song of a robin and then of another robin ad then another. A cardinal joined in, followed by a mourning dove and then a wren.

Their songs built a mixed cacophony of the orchestra warming up for the symphony to greet morning. A purple grackle’s “caack-caack-caack” was the conductor’s baton tapped on the land’s music stand; the music slipped into a more organized prelude.

The curtain cracked open the slightest to the east horizon, a dull glow of light bringing hope of a show worthy of standing ovations and unending encores.

The slight breeze rejoined the performance, it carrying a beautifully subtle fragrance I knew the land was sending to calm my spirit: A neighbor had planted corn in a field across from our farm, planter-coulters having split the soil ever-so-slightly to allow perfectly measured seeds into the dirt. I’d also started work in one of our gardens the previous evening; together, they gave me the meant calm.

I closed my eyes for a few moments to listen to the symphony’s slowed second movement and to inhale the earthy perfume in the air. My mind drifted to the earliest days when I’d known such a moment – that while on a tractor pulling a three-bottom mouldboard plow through sod at our family’s old Veefkind farm, the tight soil cracking open under the old Farmall’s groans and emitting a burst of its perfume as I sat quarter-turned on that tractor’s seat.

That latest Sunday’s perfume-soil was much gentler than the beauty of those earlier times, but it reminded me how I needed to be in the theater to be part of the morning’s performance.

The light was turning the east horizon grapefruit golden as the bird-and-land symphony turned to its minuet movement, and all around me – the branches, the birds, the grass and the water on the creek in the valley below joined in dance. My pulse picked up and the pace of the rising light quickened in dance with the morning song.

And then, the symphony’s sonata with the sun having fully risen and all senses – that of mine, the land, the sky, the water, the plants and the sky – having fully opened to the day.

I took in the day’s new brightness over the small swirl of steam rising from what was left of my coffee, and then rose to track through the dew-glistened grass to check on the garden I’d tilled the previous night. My hand reflexively reached to the soil and I gathered some in my hand.

The hand rose close to my face, and I inhaled its perfume before tossing it back onto the garden.

The performance had been perfect for what I needed on that Sunday morning. The performance again helped the land’s spirit land fully onto my soul.

I stopped at our farmhouse’s front door and reflected a bit before reaching to open it. In that moment, I scolded myself for not having remembered to partake more often in such morning symphonies.

That will change, I admonished. The land won’t let me forget.

Bravo, dear land. Bravo.

— Scott Schultz

The importance of a new three-tined hay pitchfork might be lost on some, but not to most folks who’ve spent any amount of time around a farm.

We bought such a fork the other day from one of the area’s farm-supply stores; I’ve had to be reminded to leave it in the barn or machine shed since it arrived at our little farm. It’s one of the three-tined hay forks, the style used in days of yore to move loose hay or straw and certainly a staple among threshing crews.

It’s a beautiful, artistic and functional piece of equipment.

Three long and simple tines with a slight forward curve.

A good and sturdy wooden handle of good length.

Solid reinforcement at the base of the handle, metal-wrapped to assure the tine-connection doesn’t break through the wood with heavy loads.

I truthfully can’t remember ever buying a new pitchfork and can recall holding only a couple at any time in my somewhat long life around farms. There always seemed to be a well-worn pitchfork to use, and even when I’ve purchased them, they’ve been scrounged from farm-auctions or other sales of used equipment.

Perhaps my grandfather or father bought a new pitchfork or two during my first 18 years on our family’s farm over at Veefkind. I don’t remember the forks there being new, if that was the case. I recall new barn-alley scrapers, new manure shovels, new silage forks, a new haylage fork and even a new manure fork. But I simply can’t remember a new pitchfork being part of the operation.

The old-timers would be chuckling at my excitement about a new pitchfork – of that, I’m certain. Their voices, even those of the long-departed, echo in my mind about how having such a beautiful new pitchfork in my hands makes about as much sense as teats on a boar pig.

There’s no threshing in my future, they’d say; there’s no loose hay or straw to fork from a wagon and into the mow or out of the mow and into the cows; there isn’t even a need to fork chunks of small bales up and down mangers.

The truth is that there really isn’t a desperate need for a new pitchfork our little farm on Eimon Ridge, where there once had been full requirements of the oldtimers’ needs of owning a new pitchfork. But the other day I looked at the pile of long and stringy twigs piled beneath our farm’s grand old willow and realized that a pitchfork would be the best tool for managing them.

A pitchfork could be a handy tool for the willow twigs, I surmised, but there likely should be other rationale for spending the time and money on something so important as a pitchfork. Reminiscing and essays about such a tool wouldn’t suffice; more important reasons would be needed.

And then, I looked up to the shed where we store large round hay-bales for the resident beef cattle and horses. I remembered that the shed’s floor always is covered with upwards of a foot of loose hay, and that I’d long meant to get that old hay out of the way.

The new pitchfork would work grandly in removing that loose shed-hay and would add to my excuse use some of the hay as mulch for my gardens.

And then, I looked to our small barn, which for several years had housed my small herd of brood-sows and feeder-pigs. Maybe, I thought, I could convince my wife that having a new pitchfork would mean that I should build another herd of hogs – my rationale being that the fork would be used to manage the hogs’ bedding materials.

A sheep or two could possibly arrive in the barn to make that fork’s presence even more worthwhile, I thought.

However, my mind returned to the realities that I most likely would never have the barn again filled with hogs or any new sheep. I’d have to instead depend on that old tree, the old hay in the shed and the love of my gardens as the most basic reasons for having that new fork.

There’s a chance, of course, that a soul really doesn’t need too many reasons for owning a new pitchfork. It’s a tool like the jackknives so many old farm folks carry around in our pockets: Many reasons are found to have it because it’s available.

Few things are more frustrating than not having a jackknife when it’s needed; few things are more frustrating than not having a pitchfork when it’s needed.

Those truths hold true even when similar tools are at-hand. A job that calls

 for a jackknife usually can’t be done as well with a crosscut saw; a job that calls for a good three-tined hay pitchfork can’t be done as well with a manure fork.

There’s no doubt many chores will be found for my new pitchfork.

I’ll even promise to keep it in the barn or shed and not take it into the house.

— Scott Schultz