The Promise

“They’ll take the farm. You’ve got to keep them from taking it all.”
As long as my father, who had been condemned to his own circular prison was alive, I heard his woe-filled voice repeat those words. I knew from an early age I never wanted to be a farmer, marry a farmer or have any association with agriculture. There were too many variables, the weather, the prices, the government, the broken equipment, and the inconsistant laborers. Time was always the most vicious terrorist. My father could only farm part-time. He spent his days with the sounds of the refrigerator factory taunting him, plotting to fulfill his own prophecy of failure. .
Life on the farm was a roller coaster controlled by my father’s emotional state. He left the world with his farm still firmly planted in the souls of his eight children. I did not know if it was a curse or a gift. Before my mother’s death we made the farm a small corporation owned by, his mostly dysfunctional dynasty. I did keep my promise ill- advised or not. And in return I became the reluctant manager.
I walk the fields with my dogs giddy with their leashless freedom. In the summer I pick baskets of black-purple elderberries. My sister and I plant a garden of heirloom tomatoes and neon leaved kale. Whatever grows is because of the rich soil and its steely determination. We did not learn how to garden as children, but how to avoid the servitude of field work. The rows of sunflowers are brilliant, living bird feeders. The bee man leaves his hives. In the heat of summer the intoxicating aroma of sweet, clover honey hangs in the air.
I know I am falling in love, futily resisting my cruel suitor. When spring arrives I am resigned to this unsolicited love. The hunt for morels consumes me, addicted to the search and the exhilaration of the find. The woods are a fluorescent green, carpeted with purple and yellow violets, trilliums shaded by umbrella plants and amongst the fallen trees perhaps a mushroom jewel, its brainy cap, a beacon of gourmet riches.
I raise my head and arms to the sky, standing on the family dirt. I'm king of the world! Thank you dad.