One Piece Of Land

My journey to Hey Y’all Farm began long ago…

My grandparents lived on a homestead just off isolated State Highway 51 through the foothills of the Ozarks. My grandfather, Aubrey, was a state park superintendent who loved to set up a lawn chair in the front yard and “stare at the highway,” That was what we called it when we mocked him, especially when we would drive past their house fresh from whatever modern amusement we had taken in, and spot him sitting out there, silent and alone. If you were lucky he would recognize the car and give you a two-finger wave.

The road to my grandparent’s homestead off State Highway 51

It wouldn’t be until my first year working my own homestead, Hey Y’all Farm, that I would realize how wrong we were. He wasn’t staring at the highway at all. He was taking in full the joy of knowing one piece of land, of watching its million tiny changes, shifts, and movements. Aubrey was perhaps a master of an art form that much of the world thinks they’ve lost all use for, but they would be sorely mistaken. 

I spent my first several summers with my grandparents on their homestead, watching my grandmother, Naomi, waterbath can all day in her hot, steam-filled kitchen, and snapping beans with her on the back porch. As a child, Naomi was a city girl, raised by her father who ran a boarding house in St. Louis. Her summers were spent roller skating on sidewalks outside her home with all the modern conveniences. When her older sister married Aubrey’s cousin, Naomi went for a visit to her sister’s new home and corner store in Lowndes, Missouri, where she was introduced to my dark-eyed grandfather. She fell hard for Aubrey despite other suitors, and gave up everything she knew to try her hand at being a country housewife. 

They say she struggled in the early years, but by the time I knew her the ways of preserving and maintaining a life mostly off the grid seemed like her truest nature. Perhaps the only signs I saw of her previous life was her affection for reading, particularly her monthly Guideposts or books with pictures of far-off wonders. She kept a small, immaculate library her entire life, and when I would travel as an adult I would always try to add another book I thought she would enjoy.

She had a rich spiritual life, albeit a very quiet one. She wasn’t a preachy person, preferring to live by example. I believe she came to love the frugality of a homestead in a spiritual way. She enjoyed–no–was liberated by the lack of waste and want. What spare time she had was spent knitting hats for poor children in countries she would never see, or making baby blankets for whichever one of my many cousins was having a baby they had neither the means or the raising to support. She would make enough grape jam each summer for every one of her children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren to receive a jar, writing our names on a small piece of masking tape stuck to the outside so we could find ours amongst the many in the pantry when we came for a visit. 

On those summer days together, however, she was all business, knowing that time was of the essence in getting the crops put up. When my “help” became a hindrance she would shoo me out of the kitchen to bang away on the old rickety piano in the garage, a behemoth of a thing painted an odd mud brown that  I never thought to ask where it came from and would eventually learn to play enough to occupy myself writing songs. 

They had converted their garage into a music room where Aubrey’s cast of ne’er-do-well friends would gather for picking on Friday and Saturday nights, much to Naomi’s godly chagrin. Aubrey was a well-known fiddle player in the region who had never read a lick of music from paper in his life. With his oversized ears he listened his way into the music, and everyone wanted to play with him. I grew up spellbound by the way his normally stoic face would transform against that fiddle, like the rapture had come for him alone and only existed inside his soul.

In the evenings during the week, when my grandfather returned home from work, he and I would load up in his rusty brown Ford truck and dig for nightcrawlers on low side riverbanks. During all those hours together I don’t remember so much as a word passing between us. He had a scowling sound similar to the cartoon sound of a bullet from a gun he would make that I understood as the signal it was time to load up and go. He would make the same noise when he wanted me to know I was doing something particularly well, and again once the job was complete. 

He would take five-gallon buckets with us to the river and fill them with the rich soil he overturned with his digging fork as I tossed as many worms into the buckets as I could before they wiggled back into the earth, requiring another turn of the fork. Most of the full bucket contents got packed into empty plastic milk jugs with the tops cut back into a lip so that you could still use the handle to carry the jug with you for freshwater fishing. A few would get pulled out and tossed into the large garden behind the shed. 

Aubrey maintained the vegetable garden using techniques he learned from his father, Oscar, who had been widowed at a young age with six children. Oscar, a dark and broody man, had retreated into the woods with his children to live off the land. “He never used paper money for anything,” was the story I was often told about my great-grandfather. 

Despite what Oscar lacked in ability to provide, he must’ve been fairly genius at setting his hands to work because Aubrey’s garden was one of the most beautiful homestead gardens I’ve seen in my life. The soil was black and rich, the rows straight as grocery-store aisles, and the plants, including beans, beets, tomatoes, and squash,  always seemed abundant. 

He also grew a flower garden for Naomi, which she tended and adored. I realize now that her flower garden, directly adjacent to the vegetable garden, was more than just a loving gesture. It was a pollinator garden that served its many purposes with color and scent beyond compare. Walking those rows of the vegetable garden, obsessing over the colors and shapes in the flower beds, and watching decomp in real time in the compost pile was enough to ignite my childhood imagination. It took a long journey and a thousand life experiences before I realized I never really left that garden, or any part of Aubrey and Naomi’s homestead for that matter. 

Today I hang Naomi’s hand-crank food mill and her blue ribbon from the Ozark Heritage Festival next to my stove. The blue ribbon was found tucked in the very back of her jewelry box after she crossed over, as if she was both proud and ashamed of her pride at the same time. While I respect the deep humility my grandmother displayed in all things, enough is enough. She put so much love and sweat equity into everything she created, she deserves the praise, and so I had the ribbon framed for display. 

Naomi’s food mill and blue ribbon watching over me while making peach jam

When the women of my extended family would gather around Naomi’s dining table for coffee and gossip after the kitchen was cleaned on holidays, they would talk about her life in terms of hardship, how no one would want it. Naomi, for her part, would shush them or roll her eyes. They didn’t realize the service to the land and to others was what shaped her life and gave it meaning. The only part she agreed with them on was the distribution of birth control, so that, unlike her, women could have a say in how many children they chose to have. 

Growing up, and as a young adult, I thought I had to assimilate to the modern world and want all the things the modern world wants if I was ever going to be happy. I left those summers catching fireflies just off the highway in the dust, and set my sights for bigger and presumably better things. I traded in the clunky old piano for the sophistication of a bassoon. I cleaned the dirt out from under my nails and learned my Shakespeare.

For a time I had all the things, but in truth that was the emptiest time of my life. At some point I just couldn’t pretend. And, of course, as soon as I stopped fighting who I am–where and what I come from–homesteading found a resurgence in popular culture. Living like my grandparents stopped being a stigma and became a status symbol. Young people from large cities give up everything and move to nowhere while they struggle on YouTube channels to grasp the miracle of seeding your own vegetable plants. Aubrey and Naomi would laugh all day to see it. 

I am proud of my heritage, and the useful skills I learned from my grandparents. They allow me to live a simple but rich life that asks an equal amount from me to what it gives. An honest exchange. Make no mistake, none of my life on Hey Y’all Farm would be possible, from the vegetables to the idea to share our bounty as a free, fresh food bank, without their influence. When you’re in my kitchen, or sitting in my dining room, I want you to know exactly how that delicious, farm to table food got to your plate.