I know because I grew up in Richmond County, North Carolina. We were the second poorest county in the state, but by golly that didn’t stop us from emptying out the government coffers on what mattered most. I think it was codified somewhere in the constitution of our county that two percent of our GDP had to be spent on the defensive line.

At that time, the high school football coach was the highest paid public school employee in the whole county (I’m not making this up). Of course, this was just base salary before all the kick-backs from the booster club. Our county was built around football, the American version with thousands of adults cheering on adolescent males on Friday nights. I have nothing against this version of football, and always enjoyed playing backyard football growing up, when my bones were pliable, but eventually after a dislocated elbow and broken collarbone, I was forced to take my talents to another supposedly safer sport.

But playing soccer in the South in those days was anything but safe, as evidenced by our rural Junior High Soccer League, with its meager four teams (co-ed teams no less). Back then, it was hard to find kids who actually wanted to play soccer, so needless to say our league wasn’t overflowing with talent.

The Mill Hill Team (Rohanen) was by far the most primitive team. They resorted to face paint, bandanas, and war chants as their main defensive strategy. They had one player who had failed the seventh grade twice who never could grasp the rules of the game. He seemed to think you scored points by how many opposing players you bowled over. Beating the Mill Hill Team was never in question, but surviving them was.

The Peach Orchard Team (Ellerbe) was by far the best team in the league and made up mostly of children of hispanic farm workers. They were led by two outstanding players named Carlos and Paco, whose wizardry with the ball was wasted on most of the spectators watching our games, by which I mean humans and bovines alike. The Peach Orchard Team’s home field was a rough and tumble hayfield bordered by a cow pasture.

The main rivalry in the league was between my Small Town Team (Hamlet, population 7,000) and the Big City Team (Rockingham, population 9,000). When our two teams collided (and I mean that more literally than figuratively) it felt as if the whole world was watching, even if the only people in the stands were our blood relations, most of whom would have rather been watching the other football. “Kick the ball hard,” was the general exhortation from the parental cheering section in those days.

My soccer career peaked when I was later recruited, as a high schooler, not to play college soccer, but to referee local parks and rec games. I was given a white T-shirt that said REFEREE on the back, a whistle, and fourteen dollars in cash after the games. Apparently, in those days, finding adults in a rural county who actually knew the rules of soccer was not easy--not that you needed to know the rules to referee four-year-olds. Mostly, you just tied their shoes and pointed them in the right direction and tried to keep their parents from fist fighting in the stands.

But those were different times, back when soccer in the South was basically the Wild West. It’s good to see the game has grown in popularity, to the point where rural counties are now building parks dedicated to it, even if the game itself has taken a few steps backwards with all the theatrical flopping and corporate hydration breaks. Sigh.

But anyway, “Go U.S.A! Kick the ball hard!”

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As best I could tell, this had the effect of killing a couple of yellow jackets (possibly, they died from laughter), but a steady stream of yellow jackets still came and went, seemingly unperturbed by my attack.

So I bought a bug bomb, chucked it into the room, closed the door -- and ran prophylactically. That was two weeks ago, before we went on vacation, and when we got back, I checked and, alas, yellow jackets were still coming and going, seemingly unperturbed by my chemical bombardment.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do. At our last beekeeper’s meeting, the topic of yellow jacket traps came up. In general, beekeepers are not big fans of yellow jackets, which harass and eat our beloved honeybees, which is why we meet monthly to talk about such things as our favorite recipes for yellow jacket traps.

“I use half a cup of brown sugar and grape juice,” one beekeeper said.

“I use sugar and vinegar and a banana peel,” said another, “the banana peel keeps the bees out of the trap.” The trap in this case is a milk jug, with a little door cut into it.

To be honest, I’ve never done much yellow-jacket trapping (mostly just yellow-jacket stumbling), but you’re never too old to learn. The idea behind trapping yellow jackets is to trap them early in the season, when the queens are out house hunting for prime real estate, like paper boxes in a barn. If you can trap the queen, that is one less nest to stumble upon later. As best I can tell from the discussion, trapping yellow jackets later in the season is mostly just done for sport, to see how many yellow jacket workers you can bag. (Meanwhile, big game trappers are hunting for the ones with the biggest antennae).

I may try trapping, but this time of year it won’t catch the queen so the nest will persist. So I have spent a lot of time at night thinking about what I’m going to do to get rid of these yellow jackets in a paper box in the barn. The best I could come up with is old-timey suffocation. My idea is to get a big black contractor trash bag, carefully place it over the paper box, tie it up, (and run prophylactically).

What could go wrong?

Here is what could go wrong: The box is sitting on a shelf. I easily placed the trash bag over the top of the box to begin my murderous plot. However, whatever is in the box was heavier than I expected, so picking the box up to work the trash bag over and around and underneath the box is, let’s say, difficult and taking more time than I predicted. Meanwhile, the hundreds of yellow jackets inside the box are audibly roaring while those returning to their nest have detected my presence and seem to be generally confused, if not dismayed, that I am trying to asphyxiate their family. I look down and several yellow jackets are trying to ventilate my blue jeans by poking holes in them.

I ran.

So now on a shelf in the barn is a paper box with a trash bag over it, with yellow jackets now coming and going as pretty as the please out of the opening I left in the trash bag.

If anybody has any brilliant ideas to eradicate these yellow jackets that doesn’t involve gasoline, please let me know.

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Any goat farmer will know immediately what Tolstoy meant by this. There are a million different ways goats can escape, and only one way to keep them contained--an island. For my day job I cover 45 counties, roughly half of the state, and on multiple occasions I’ve heard tales of goat islands. Whether or not these tales are apocryphal, I can’t say, but I can say they share similar characteristics: 1) a farmer driven to madness by escaping goats 2) an ultimatum from a wife 3) a nearby lake or reservoir with a small wooded island in the middle of it 4) a rowboat or other small questionably seaworthy vessel, and 5) a midnight ferry operation.

At the end of the tale, the farmer finally sleeps soundly knowing his goats are safely contained on the island. Eventually, the farmer will return many months later to the island to find his goats have doubled or even tripled in size, and he is ecstatically happy. From this point onward, I have heard two versions of the tale, one in which the farmer successfully transports the fattened goats off the island to sell for top dollar, living happily ever after, and another in which the fattened goats swamp and sink the vessel, after which the goats swim to shore and escape while the farmer barely escapes with his life, which I find to be the more realistic version.

That cautionary version of the tale is the main reason why I haven’t transported our three goats to the island in our local reservoir. The island is about the size of two football fields, and full of briars and brambles, and I suspect it would be paradise for our three goats. But knowing my luck, if I tried something like that, the boat would sink on the way over, and somehow I would end up stranded on an island and the goats would escape.

Still, a goat farmer can dream.

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“You get used to it,” Dennis chuckled, as his brother Steve nodded solemnly in agreement.

I hid a polite smile behind my fist as I coughed. So far, I have never gotten used to standing that close to a poultry house’s fan.

In addition to their six poultry houses, they had nearly a hundred momma cows in the acreage surrounding the poultry houses on the hill. I was there to sign the brothers up for a cost-share program that helps pay for a well and watering tanks for their pastures. From what I could gather, it was Steve who had sketched out the plan for the watering tanks, but it was Dennis who was doing the communicating, waving Steve’s hand drawn map.

“Why don’t we walk through the pastures and take a look,” I said. The farm was bucolic in a visual sense, with a thick stand of fescue covering terraced hills and a willow-lined farm pond. “Beautiful place, you got here.”

“Yeah, we think so…” said Dennis. “Poultry farming ain’t a glamorous way to make a living, but it provides a steady paycheck. You can’t depend on the cattle market. In a year like this, a man can do alright on cows, but the bottom will drop out eventually.”

As part of the cost-share agreement, we required the brothers to fence the cows out of the pond, which, judging by the rutted cow trails leading down the bank, was currently their preferred spot for drinking, bathing, and general relaxation.

“How’s the fishing?” I asked.

“Couldn’t tell you,” said Dennis, “I can’t remember the last time I had a chance to get down here with a fishing pole.” Steve commiserated with a nod. We then looked back uphill toward the poultry houses.

“Why don’t we cut through the fence there,” said Dennis, suggesting a shortcut. He was already huffing and puffing from the trek downhill.

Instead of walking all the way around through the system of gates, we headed toward an interior three strand electric fence splitting the pasture. With a much slimmer frame, Steve went first, throwing one leg over the middle wire and ducking under the top wire, all in one swooping motion. He then reached in his pocket and pulled out a black plastic comb which he used to pull down the middle wire to give his bigger brother more clearance.

For a big man, Dennis swooped gracefully enough, as Steve continued to hold the wire down for me. I have never been much of a graceful fence swooper, and even with the extra clearance afforded by Steve, I somehow managed to graze my back on the top wire.

“You alright?” Dennis asked, after I recoiled down to the ground from the shock.

“Good gosh! How many volts you got running to that fence?” I asked.

“Enough to keep a two thousand pound bull away from a cow in heat,” Dennis chuckled. Steve nodded solemnly.

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“Look at these neat photos,” I said to one of my coworkers. Admittedly, she didn’t seem to share my enthusiasm.

“Wouldn’t it be great if we could create a book with these?” I continued.

“Sure, you do that,” she said. And so my moment of inspiration to clean out the closet became a two year project to create a book, the proceeds from which would benefit the Cleveland County Farmland Preservation Program.

In the process of creating the book, we had members of the general public bring in old farming photos as well, so we could document their stories about farming in the county. Meanwhile, I did my best to study up on the local farming history, digging through Census of Agriculture statistics and old newspapers articles to write the forward and captions for the book.

Dale brought in several old photos from his family’s old dairy farm. I had gotten to know Dale pretty well in my time working at the agriculture office. He was the type of farmer who would go out of his way to help somebody else, and he had helped me on several occasions, once helping chase down some loose pigs and once helping me doctor on a sick cow. The knock on Dale was that he was always two months behind, and it was easy to understand why because he was always helping other people instead of prioritizing his own crops.

“This here is on the old dairy silo on Bethlehem Rd,” Dale said. He was missing most of his pointer finger, but he used the stub to point out things nonetheless.

“This here is from our first harvest of milo,” he said. “For a few years, a lot of folks planted it instead of corn, but then the grain mill that was buying it closed up.”

“This here is our old silage cutter.”

After he got done pointing out features in his own photos, I slid the box I found in the closet across the desk. A grin spread across his face as he opened the box and started flipping through photos he had never seen before. At one point, Dale leaned back in his seat a little and looked down. He started to tear up. If you would have given a million tries to predict who would ever tear up in my office, I would have never predicted Dale.

“This here is a photo of my Uncle Randle on his old Massy. I still have that tractor,” he said, wiping the corner of one eye. Then he grinned again and started thumbing through more pictures.

“This here…” he just kept saying.

As he examined those pictures, it dawned on me that Dale was an expert in local farming knowledge, not because he had studied it, but because he had lived it. Nobody would have said he was the most successful farmer around--if anything it seemed like he was just scraping by, always two months behind--but he had somehow survived when a lot of other farms and farmers had been relegated to memories in a box. In many ways, he was a living embodiment of the past, and one of the kindest men I’ve ever met.

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“A cow is in the middle of Mawmaw’s backyard,” Natalie’s cousin Ashley called to say. Usually, weekday mornings are already chaotic getting everyone ready and out the door, but this turned the mad rush into a five alarm fire.

“A cow is out!” Natalie shouted.

“A cow is out! A cow is out!” Thomas chanted.

“Where is it?” I said.

“Mawmaw’s backyard.” Natalie relayed.

“Oh, lord,” I gulped.

Mawmaw, who lives next door to us, is 87 and nothing seems to rejuvenate her more than when one of my cows gets out and eats her shrubbery. Over the years, I’ve had to replace several high dollar Japanese maples that cows or goats have defoliated, which really eats into my already non-existent profit margins.

Sure enough, a cow was lolling underneath a dogwood tree, in the middle of her backyard. As a testament to my vast experience handling escaped livestock, I had the cow lured with a feed bucket back into the pasture within five minutes. Better yet, Mawmaw had yet to open the blinds of her windows for the day. Best yet, all her shrubbery appeared intact.

“Shew,” I thought, “she’ll never even know the cow got out.”

After a brief investigation, I quickly solved the mystery of how the cow got out. Apparently, I had forgotten to plug the energizer back up when I was working on the fence a few weeks ago. Having the cow back in and the fence back on, I then proceeded back to the mad rush that is getting Thomas and Natalie off to school and myself off to work. I thought I had escaped, unscathed.

It was not to be. Later that evening, when I got home for work and was getting ready to cut the grass, I saw Mawmaw walking determinedly through the yard, toward me. For a woman who rarely leaves her house, this could only mean one thing.

“Stephen, did a cow get out?” she asked.

“Yes, mam, it got out somehow this morning,” I said, “but I got it put right back in. I didn’t think it had a chance to eat any shrubs.”

“No, it didn’t bother the shrubs,” she said, “but I knew one had gotten out.”

“Did Ashley call you, too?” I asked, now truly curious to know how she knew the cow had gotten out.

“No,” she said. “I knew it had gotten out because there is a cow patty on my patio.”

I went to get a shovel and breathed a sigh of relief. Scooping up a cow patty was a small price to pay compared to replacing shrubbery

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When we got to the park, a bazillion people were already there. To my surprise, the park was hosting a statewide soccer tournament this week. Never have I seen so many people at the park, and it was hard for me to comprehend a rural North Carolina county hosting such a tournament. But times have changed. When I was growing up, soccer was played in cow pastures and hayfields because the good fields were devoted to football. But this whole park was now devoted solely to soccer. After Thomas played on the playground, which was swamped with kids, he wanted to go watch some soccer games.

Soon his “watching” turned into playing with other kids on the bleachers, but I took it as a chance to watch some games. I was taken aback by how good these middle school age kids were. At that age, I was obsessed with soccer, but not nearly that good, and I was considered one of the better players on my rural team. Times have changed. We departed at halftime of a 0-0 game, and secretly I wanted to stay to see who would win, but Thomas’s patience was running thin and we needed to get back home. But watching those kids, it felt like just yesterday that I was one of them, but it was nearly thirty years ago.

At a major intersection on the way home, a silver minivan pulled up beside us. A middle-age man was driving it, and emanating from the van were the most indecipherable lyrics in all of music. Instantly, it felt like just yesterday, when I was blasting Eddie Vedder singing “Yellow Ledbetter” from my own car. But it was over twenty-five years ago.

“What’s that man saying?” Thomas asked, listening to the music coming from the van.

“Good question. Nobody knows,” I said, smiling.

The next day, for Mother’s day, I helped Natalie hang her grandpa’s old porch swing. When he passed away, the family sold his house, but she saved it as a memento from all those times she used to swing on it with him. It has been sitting under a shed at our house for many years, as she waited for me to finally get around to hanging it. I finally did. Thomas then proceeded to lay down and take a nap in it.

“It seems like just yesterday that that used to be me,” she said.

“I know the feeling,” I said.

Last year, I got behind my bees and could never get caught back up. It seemed like a daily mass migration of bees left my bee yard, only stopping long enough in a tree top to say goodbye, before they sailed off into the horizon in search for a new land of nectar and honey.

So this year, I have redoubled my efforts to stay ahead of my bees and it seems to be paying dividends. Supers are filling up, despite the severe drought we’re currently in. So far, I think the drought has actually been good for the honey crop because there has been no rain or storms to wash out and demolish the fragile poplar blooms. But if the drought persists it will no doubt cut the nectar flow short, so I’m still hoping for some rain.

Here is a picture of Thomas in his bee suit. He got to be my helper on Saturday, and he did a good job working the smoker. Then he contented himself with making wax balls and wax worms out of fresh burr comb. Apparently, beeswax is nature’s Play-Doh.

Despite the drought, and the craziness of swarm season, these are good times.

“Dad, I’m going to hammer some nails.”

“Great.”

“Dad, can I play with this spark plug?”

“No.”

“Dad, we need to put some gas in the tank?

“No we don’t.”

“Dad, I’m going to pull this rope” [pulls starter rope]

“Stop!”

The good news is I got the new carburetor on and the lawnmower running again. The bad news is I apparently mixed up the two linkages on the throttle, so the lawn mower was surging. I am not sure why I was even trying to fix this old lawn mower–maybe for nostalgia’s sake?–as it had been sitting in the barn unused for ten years or more, in the same place it’s been since it quit running. When Natalie and I first started renting the old farmhouse from her grandparents, I actually pushed our yard because we couldn’t afford a riding lawn mower. Back then, Fitbits and fitness trackers weren’t really a thing yet, but I’d love to know how many steps I took on a weekly basis cutting grass. All I know is I look a lot slimmer in pictures from that time.

“Dad, why does it sound funny?”

“I don’t know. I think I did something wrong.”

“Why did you do something wrong?

“That is a good question.”

“Well, how do you fix it?”

“That’s another good question.”

Of course, I had to take the new carburetor all the way back off, but Thomas came in handy this go round as he was able to find a tiny screw I dropped in the grass. Once we got the carburetor back on with linkages connected correctly, the lawnmower revved and ran like old times.

“Dad, can I push it?

“Maybe one day,” I said, “maybe one day.”

Last year, after Hurricane Helene, I had to run the chainsaw hard. We had several massive oaks blown down, snapped like twigs by the wind, and the chainsaw, limb by limb, dismembered the oaks, slowly and steadily chewing through them. The chainsaw revved and roared until it developed a bad habit on the very last tree. It would run for about twenty minutes at a time, then reliably bog down and stall, after which you couldn’t get it to start again until you let it sit for an hour or so. And it has been that way ever since.

Thankfully, I haven’t had much need to cut up anything major since Helene, so twenty minute run-time has always been adequate for the minor jobs that have needed doing around the farm. But it has been on my to-do list to fix the chainsaw, and this past weekend I finally got around to doing it. I’m proud to say it only took me all day.

I’m no expert on small engine repair, but I know enough to know that old men who know a thing or two about engines always blame the carburetor. If you ever need a scapegoat, just blame the “carburetor.” At the very least, it makes you sound smart and mechanically inclined and is a generally plausible excuse for all sorts of predicaments.

SCENARIO 1:

COP: You were going 65 in a 55 zone.

DRIVER: Sorry, sir, I think the carburetor was running a little lean.

SCENARIO 2:

WIFE: Did you hear what I said?

HUSBAND: Sorry, I was listening to the idle. I think the carb needs adjusting.

SCENARIO 3:

ANNOYING COWORKER: You want to hang out this weekend?

EMPLOYEE: Sorry, I’ve got an appointment to get my carburetor cleaned.

Surprisingly, I was able to get the old carburetor off and the new carburetor on without too much trouble (or too many leftover pieces). Much to my surprise, the chainsaw fired right up. This time, however, it ran for about twenty seconds before stalling, which I took to mean the new carburetor needed adjusting. The idle was running lean at first and the throttle was running rich (or maybe it was vice versa—who the heck really knows what rich and lean mean anyway?). In any event, the engine kept flooding, and I’d have to remove the spark plug to unflood it, and sometimes I’d just have to let it sit for an hour before I could start it, but finally I got it running good and purring like a kitten, until it bogged down again at twenty minutes—ARRRGGGG!!!!

So after scouring YouTube, I finally figured out what was wrong with the chainsaw in the first place—the gas tank vent was completely clogged. The clog would cause some sort of vacuum in the tank to form at around the twenty-minute mark that prevented gas from flowing to the engine. The good news is it was a three-dollar plastic piece that took me all of ten minutes to switch out, and now the saw runs like a charm. The bad news is it took me all day to fix a carburetor that didn’t need fixing in the first place.

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“What is a deer doing so close to the house in the middle of the day?” I thought. Then a devilish head popped up, and I realized it was just Howie, escaping again. We stared at each other momentarily, and then he took off when he heard me coming out the door to detain him. I won’t bore you with the details of his recapture, but I will say one man trying to wrangle three goats on his lunch break is not a fair fight.

In the wrangling process, I noticed that Howie’s back hooves had gotten long, so I mentioned to Natalie that we needed to trim them. Yesterday, being a beautiful day, Natalie and I initiated the process of ruining a beautiful day by hoof trimming. The good news is that we got Howie’s hooves trimmed. The bad news is we spent most of the rest of the afternoon at the urgent care. After Howie, I was trying to hold Ross, the black goat, still against the stall wall while Natalie was trimming. However, Ross kicked and Natalie cut herself on the hand. Blood began dripping profusely, and soon we were journeying to the urgent care.

As cuts go, the doctor said it was a beautifully straight clean cut, or a two inch laceration as she officially called it. One of Natalie’s former students, who is in nursing school, got to stitch her up. Pleasant small talk was had by all. While she was stitching, the nurse trainee said the cut wasn’t nearly as bad as the cut they saw last night on the bottom of a seven-year-old boy’s foot. Unfortunately, they couldn’t get the boy to lie still enough (she said his parents and two nurses were trying to hold him down) to stitch him up, so they had to send him to the emergency room to sedate him.

“I can only imagine,” Natalie said.

“Yeah,” I said, “I bet holding a boy still while stitching his foot is even worse than holding a goat still while trimming its hoof.”

Natalie smiled. Another beautiful day at the urgent care.

A young beekeeper loaded a large rubbermaid tote full of beekeeping gear onto his truck. The tote contained a veil, beekeeping jacket, smoker, and other minor tools of the trade. He headed off to collect a swarm that another beekeeper didn’t want (or want to fool with). The old beekeeper had called the young beekeeper, who wasn’t all that young, but he was younger than the old beekeeper who wasn’t all that old, but he was old enough to know that he didn’t want to fool with this swarm.

The young beekeeper gladly accepted the opportunity to collect the swarm. The swarm looked like a basketball of bees hanging from the bottom of a swarm trap attached to a fence post. But upon closer inspection, the bees had already drawn four small combs that formed the inner framework for the ball. Instead of relocating inside the swarm trap, the bees had taken up residence underneath it. The was not a swarm but a burgeoning open-air brood nest.

“Still, should be easy enough,” the young beekeeper thought.

He put on his veil and stuffed dried grass clippings into his smoker. He rummaged for several minutes through his tote for his lighter until he remembered that he used the lighter earlier in the week to light the candles on his wife’s birthday cake and forgot to put the lighter back in the tote.

“It’s always something,” the young beekeeper thought. He thought about returning to his house to retrieve the lighter, but it was already half-dark and getting darker by the minute, and his house was ten minutes away and the bees seemed calm enough. Still, he had the good sense to switch out his veil for his beekeeping jacket and he put on his goat skin gloves.

He carefully used the tip of his hive tool to probe the mass of bees, and he started sawing through the top of one comb. A few bees took umbrage, pelting his protective gear, but he persisted. Then a piece of comb fell, and bees exploded in all directions. He did not get stung, per se, but the inside of his gloves now felt prickly.

“That didn’t work,” he thought.

He went back to his tailgate and rummaged through his box again. He didn’t know what he was searching for, but as if struck by divine inspiration, the young beekeeper grabbed a bottle of robber spray.

He spritzed air around the bees like a lady spritzing perfume. As if somebody had pulled a fire alarm, the bees started evacuating the comb in an orderly fashion, one long line pouring off the combs onto and up the side of the swarm trap. The bees made a beeline for the small circular entrance on the side of the swarm trap. Within minutes the comb was evacuated, and the beekeeper easily cut the comb from the bottom of the swarm trap and put it in a five gallon bucket on the back of his truck so he could melt it down in the future.

“Easy enough,” the young beekeeper thought proudly. He would just take the swarm trap with him, then bring it back in a few days after he moved the bees over to one of his hives. The old beekeeper wouldn’t mind. He then examined how the swarm trap was affixed to the post.

“Who uses square head screws?” he thought.

The young beekeeper went back to his truck and started rummaging through his toolbox, but he knew it was futile—he didn’t have any square head bits. Despite his best efforts, he would leave empty handed.

The next morning, the old beekeeper called; he couldn’t believe his good luck. Another swarm had already moved into his swarm trap.

The young beekeeper didn’t even try to explain.

He just said, “You keep that one.”

“Stephen, how are you?”

“Good, good.”

“This is Jeff Wilson.”

“Hey, Jeff, how ya doing?

“Well, I’ve been better, if I’m being honest—I’m about to lose a fifty acre field I’ve been renting on account of some shenanigans.” He said this like a singer warming up, his voice getting a little louder and higher with every single word uttered.

“What’s the problem?” I asked.

“Well, you know as well as I do, that this is has been one of the wettest falls we’ve ever had, and we were a little late getting the wheat planted on account of that, and then it turned bitter cold and some of the corn stalks have washed and piled up in the bottom of a terrace, and landowner acts as if his whole field is washing away.”

“I hate to hear that,” I said.

“You’re dang right, I hate it too. I tried to explain to him that the soil hadn’t washed—heck, it’s too cold for it to wash with the ground frozen, but he said I wasn’t taking proper care of his land, and that he’s already got another offer from a farmer who wants to rent it next year. And then I knew exactly what was going on.”

“Shenanigans,” I said.

“Worse than shenanigans. You’d best believe that I know exactly which farmer it is—I won’t say his name—but he does this all the time, always trying to rent tracts out from underneath people, and stirring up stuff with landowners. You’d better believe I’m gunna deal with him, but could you come out to explain to the landowner, as a neutral party, that there’s nothing more I could have done in a year like this, that there hasn’t been any real washin, not even the slightest rut started.”

“Well, I guess I can,” I said. I don’t know why I said yes. I’d like to think at that point in my career I still felt obligated to help people if I could, even if the ask was a little outside of my job description.

Despite Jeff’s reputation for being slightly excitable, everybody knew he worked hard, and I doubt I have ever met a farmer with a bigger chip on his shoulder. His father was actually a banker, but despite the apparent advantage of startup capital, Jeff’s farming pursuits seemed just about as profitable as everybody else’s, meaning hardly profitable at all. If I had to psychoanalyze him, I suspect the stubborn determination so common in young farmers trying to prove they can defy the odds (or their father’s advice) and make a living farming was amplified a thousandfold in Jeff. It wasn’t from lack of trying that Jeff failed. But in choosing farming, he had traded compound interest for compound problems.

So I felt obligated to help, and the spot in question was much as Jeff described over the phone. There was about a 3 foot by 10 foot bare strip of red soil showing, where the residue had washed down in the bottom of the terrace. No rut, just a bare spot upstream above a little dam of corn stalks. Mr. Rutherford, the landowner, seemed relieved when I told him this wasn’t anything to worry about, that all it needed was a little straw thrown on it, that it had been an awfully wet year. Jeff had seemed rather solemn as we walked through the field, but now he nodded vigorously.

“Well, I was worried my field was eroding,” said the landowner, “When that other farmer stopped by and said I ought to be concerned, I guess I jumped the gun a little bit.”

“Mr. Rutherford,” said Jeff, “I want you to know I pride myself on taking care of landowners’ fields, just as if they were my very own, and I hate to say this about another farmer but he ain’t nothing but a snake, just trying to pick up some rented land, and you better believe he’s got a thing or two coming. He ought to know better than to mess with me. Two can play at that.”

Face red, Jeff was now fully animated as he talked. He was shaking his head with emphasis, spitting a little inadvertently, and looking at us directly in the eye beneath his slightly cockeyed ball cap. Mr. Rutherford and I smiled nervously, and I suggested that it was too cold to stand around in a field.

“Don’t you worry, Mr. Rutherford. Your field is in good hands,” said Jeff, excitedly.

Later, in the spring, I was sitting in the office, when one of my coworkers brought in news of the latest rumor sweeping the countryside. At night, someone had cut all the strings on a certain farmer’s freshly rolled hay bales, in a field not too far from Mr. Rutherford’s. I just grinned—and didn’t say a word.

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I like to play it coy at first, as if I’m not even listening, which really drives her wild.

“Did you hear me?” she asked.

“I will take a look at it,” I replied nonchalantly. I call this advanced romantic repartee, “The Art of the I Will.” It is best used repeatedly, to build playful tension in the relationship, ideally to the point where your wife is teasing you about outsourcing appliance repair to another man.

“If you don’t look at it soon, I’m going to call a repairman,” she deadpanned.

“I will, I will,” I said.

It’s playing with fire, but these days appliance repairmen are a dying breed, so it’s highly unlikely there is one locally who could service the washer, but never—and I repeat never—do you want a polite, punctual, professional elderly man testing your wife’s sensors or swapping out her actuator. That is a standard you’ll never be able to live up to.

This past weekend, after a long buildup of “I wills,” I took it upon myself to plan a big romantic getaway. Really, my wife was the only one getting away, to go visit her parents. Her dad has been having some health issues, and since Thomas was sick, I stayed home with him for a guy’s weekend.

My plan was to surprise her by cleaning the house and fixing the washing machine while she was gone. I had secretly ordered the needed part for the washer earlier in the week. According to the polite, punctual, professional elderly man on YouTube, repairing the faulty door lock mechanism should only take twenty minutes.

After two hours, I gave up.

“Ugh! This stupid washer!” I said.

“You’re not supposed to say ‘stupid,”” Thomas replied. He had been acting as my assistant, mostly picking up the tiny screws I kept fumbling and dropping. I had hoped to impress him with my handyman acumen. But this was beyond my skill to diagnose and fix. It was not the door lock mechanism. It was not a clogged inlet screen. The washer just refused to switch over to the spin cycle, even after it had drained.

“Don’t tell my mom I said that,” I told Thomas. “How about we go down to the barn and get the hand truck.”

“Why?”

“Cause we’re going to get rid of this piece of junk and buy a new washer.”

Guys, let me tell you—there are few gestures more romantic than fixing a washing machine. One is buying a new washer and having it ready upon your wife’s return home.

Another, cheaper option, is doing the laundry.

Heed and remember.

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Thankfully, no one else was around or going around while I was circling, so I was just a lone man driving in circles, trying to find my way in this brave new world of self-serve traffic patterns, self-serve everything.

When Thomas fractured his arm last year, I got stuck in self-serve purgatory. I needed to get a copy of all his bills for my insurance, but his doctor’s office here no longer deals with billing, and so they gave me the number for the regional billing office. I called them and they told me I could access all his records in the client self-serve portal. Only, I couldn’t. I had already tried on my computer and on my phone and on my wife’s computer, but my entry into the portal was barred for reasons beyond anybody’s understanding—the IT department couldn’t figure it out, the billing department couldn’t figure it out. They kept ping-ponging me back and forth.

So I went back to Thomas’s doctor’s office, prepared to begin a hunger strike if they didn’t give me a copy of his records. Do you know who figured it out? The pleasant receptionist at the front desk. Somebody in billing had entered my birthday wrong. That’s why I couldn’t get into the portal. Still, she didn’t have the power to fix it. Eventually, her boss came over and, upon hearing my tale of woe, took pity on me and broke protocol. I had literally spent hours on the phone attempting to resolve this problem, mostly on hold trying not to spontaneously combust. She printed out my bills in less than a minute.

As a nation, we need to repent of this stupidity. Yesterday, I was in Lowe’s and was sad to see that the hostile takeover by self-serve registers was nearly complete. I am glad my wife’s Poppaw didn’t live long enough to see this current state of affairs. He used to be on a first name basis with all the cashiers at Lowes. Now, not a single old school register, manned by a cashier, remained in the main checkout area. I suppose the Lowes CEO thought their reputation for customer service couldn’t get any worse and just decided to get rid of customer service altogether. He should be wearing sackcloth.

At the risk of sounding like I’m turning into an old curmudgeon, I’ll admit I may feel a little lost in our brave new self-serve society. At the rate society is progressing, soon the only person I’ll have left to blame is myself, and where’s the fun in that?

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Barney first came to us at about the same time our previous barn cat, Bunty, was dying. Bunty was thirteen years old, and Barney just showed up out of nowhere, a spry and spirited juvenile. My wife believes Barney was a godsend, which is exactly what a blossoming con artist cat would want you to think. My best guess is that Barney asked around to find the barn with the oldest cat and decided to take up there in an attempt to become heir apparent.

It worked.

Now Barney has even swindled his way from the barn to our porch, and I would consider him more of a porch cat than a barn cat—though I wouldn’t consider him entirely ours. I’m pretty sure Barney scams other families during the day. I believe this because my wife bought a fancy tracker collar to put on him so she can monitor his movements and protect him from peril. Every day he makes a circuit to three other houses in our vicinity. Then, at night, he comes and sleeps on our back porch in a little cat house with a heated pad—Bunty is probably rolling over in his grave (he used to sleep on a pillow in the hayloft).

“Little Barn-Barn, do you have secret families you visit during the day?” asked my wife, interrogating him after seeing the tracker data. Barney remained silent. He does not like the tracker, and sometimes I wonder if he likes me.

“It’s under there,” my wife said, pointing to the location where Barney first lost his tracker.

The tracker is on a breakaway collar, and Barney enjoys finding new places to break free. There, in this instance, was the old corn crib, which, sitting on fieldstones piers, had about a foot and a half of ground clearance. He lost it right underneath the middle of the structure, meaning I had to dust off my claustrophobia to crawl under there and retrieve the collar. A few days later, he broke loose again.

“It’s in there,” my wife said this time.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said. There was now a tremendous blackberry thicket that I had to tunnel through on all fours. Eventually, the tracker collar became too much of a nuisance for all involved and Barney now roams unmonitored, but I still have the sneaking suspicion that he has something else up his sleeve.

During the past few weeks, due to the winter storms, my wife has broken her own protocol—no animals inside—and taken the extraordinary step of letting Barney sleep inside our house on those bitter cold nights. She put an old pillow in a cardboard box, and the first night he slept soundly in this makeshift bed. On the second night, however, I awoke in the middle of night to a cat kicking me in the head. Apparently, Barney had gotten out of his bed, jumped into our bed, and snuggled down between man and wife. When I awoke, he was asleep on his back, pummeling me with his hind legs, as if he was trying to push me off the bed.

All this is to say, I think Barney wants me out of the picture.

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“I think we need to buy a generator,” I said, sneaking the comment nonchalantly into a conversation that started as inquiry into our dinner plans for the night.

“A generator!?—where did that come from?” she asked.

“They’re calling for a big snowstorm this weekend.”

“Weren’t they calling for snow last week too—and we didn’t get anything?”

“Yeah, but this one is different. They’re saying it’s going to be bad—even catastrophic.”

“Generators are dangerous. My dad burnt up a refrigerator with a generator when I was a kid.”

“Well, how else are we going to stay warm if the power goes out?” Although our old farmhouse has three fireplaces, the unstable fieldstone chimneys have been cut down. The fireplaces are now defunct, and we have no alternate heat source if our heat pump is without power. “Remember how bad it was when we lost power during Helene, and that was when it was warm,” I continued.

“Let me think about it,” she said. At that point, I knew she would acquiesce, but the problem with our bureaucratic process is that it takes time. By the next morning, when she verbally rubber stamped my acquisition request, saying “I guess you can get a generator,” there were no generators left to acquire. I had done my research overnight and had hoped to buy a small gas generator in the $500 to $600 dollar range but Lowes was completely wiped out, not a single generator remained in the store.

I was left to hurry home and scour Amazon in search of any generator that could be delivered before the storm hit on Saturday. The cheapest one I could find was $1000, but supposedly it could be delivered by Friday afternoon. I don’t think I’ve been so nervous about a delivery since the birth of my son.

“Why are you so wound up?” my wife asked.

“I’m worried the generator won’t get here in time.”

“We’ll survive if it doesn’t.”

Sure enough, on Friday, I got a notification from UPS that my delivery was delayed. Had the original forecast proved accurate, we would have been doomed to shiver, but the storm had slowed and the generator was delivered Saturday afternoon, right before the first sleet pellets began to fall.

Sleet was actually good news. Meteorologists had been waffling back and forth on sleet versus freezing rain, warning that freezing rain would be the worst case scenario in terms of power outages. But the freezing rain held off until the tail end of the storm on Sunday evening—and, of course, the power never went out.

“I told ya we didn’t need a generator,” my wife said, though she did sprinkle her “I told you so” with some pity, “but at least we have one now if we ever need it.”

Despite being secretly disappointed the power didn’t go out so I could justify my big purchase and prevent the marital “I told you so,” I am glad it wasn’t all freezing rain. Thomas got to go sledding for the first time!

“I’m here to check in for the conference,” I said. “My name is Stephen Bishop.”

“Conference?” the front desk clerk asked. “I don’t think we have any conferences booked for this weekend.”

“This is Harrah’s Cherokee Casino, right?

“Yes, it is, but we don’t have any conferences scheduled. Do you remember the address for your conference?”

“I think it was like 777 Casino Drive.”

“I’m sorry. This happens all the time, but you’re at the wrong casino. This is Harrah’s Cherokee Casino in Murphy at 777 Casino Parkway. You need to be at Harrah’s Cherokee Casino in Cherokee, which is 777 Casino Drive. It’s about an hour away, back through the gorge.”

I can tell you as someone who has traversed the gorge, in different directions on the same evening, that nightfall imbues all the normal hazards—falling rocks, blind curves, and the raging Nantahala River running beside the road—with a slightly menacing sense of abject terror. You’d think not being able to see the hazards might reduce the sensation, but it does not.

The correct casino was many scales of magnitude larger than the incorrect casino. And, much to my surprise, my room was big and clean and nicely decorated, the service was outstanding, and the food wasn’t half bad—it’s almost as if they wanted you to stay awhile. I ate twice at Gordon Ramsay’s food court, and his fish and chips and street tacos were quite scrumptious. I doubt Gordon even knows he has a food court in Cherokee, North Carolina, but who knows, maybe he was slaving away in the back?

Admittedly, my only other point of reference for gambling facilities dates back to my childhood. Back then, video poker parlors were everywhere in South Carolina, kinda like Dollar Generals nowadays. The parlors were about the same size as Dollar Generals, but they had the eye-catching design aesthetic of a bouncy house. Parlors were often super concentrated on the state line so North Carolinians (living in an uppity state where politicians prohibited gambling) could easily cross over the line and try their luck at games of chance. Usually, right next to the parlors were fireworks stands. In South Carolina, you could buy the big stuff, like rockets with warning labels about downing satellites. If you happened to win the jackpot, you could just walk next door and spend all your winnings on an arsenal of pyrotechnics. I believe economists call this “burn-it-up economics.”

Surprisingly, most farmers seemed to be in good spirits. Nobody won the jackpot that I know of, but spring is coming. In the spring, despite the odds, farmers always think this could be the year—the year of great weather, bumper crops, and premium prices. Six months later, we all wonder if we lit our money on fire, but that’s farming.

But maybe, just maybe, this could be my lucky year. If I hit profitability, I will inevitably spend it all on more farming stuff, which is better than spending it on rockets, right?

I first met Myron years ago at an Ag Advisory Board meeting. Our county has a Farmland Preservation Ordinance, which is mostly a feel-good ordinance meant to recognize farms in the county, but the ordinance also created a seven member Ag Advisory Board whose purpose is to advise county commissioners on issues pertaining to cows and corn and such. Back then, one of my job responsibilities was to be the staff liaison for the Ag Advisory Board. Liaison is a highfalutin word for complaint herder.

Some farmers could be pretty bitter and acidic in their complaints (who can blame them), but Myron never took that approach. He was more of a positive lamenter. “It’s a comin’,” Myron would tell me, “maybe not in my lifetime, but in yours. We cain’t do nothing but try to slow it down.”

The “it” he referred to was development, the bogeyman of farmers in North Carolina. Mryon has indeed lived long enough to see another surge of widespread farmland loss and the subsequent loss of farms and farmers in the county, especially in the last five years due to our proximity to Charlotte. People are now moving to the rural ring of counties outside of Charlotte. The only thing popping up faster than housing developments here are fire ant hills, and the latter are probably better constructed.

But when agriculture depends on global markets and when rampant development is a response to a national shortage for affordable housing, what can you do at a local level to make a large scale difference, or any difference?

A lost cause has never stopped Myron. At a board meeting, Myron hatched a new idea. “I was a thinkin,” Myron said, “it’s a shame our community college doesn’t have an ag degree.”

That thought grew into a mission for our Ag Advisory Board. Three out of our four high schools in the county have ag programs, so the board got proactive and surveyed the local high school ag students to gauge interest in continuing their ag education at the community college. Armed with statistics, the board invited a college administrator to attend an Ag Advisory Board meeting, which may have been a culture shock for the ultra professional and sophisticated Dean of Academic Affairs, but she returned time and time again and helped guide the board through the process and red tape of creating a new degree and the board helped guide her on what classes might be most applicable and beneficial for students in the county.

Three years later, after many meetings, the Cleveland Community College Animal Science degree was officially hatched and the college unveiled a billboard advertising the program. One board member (there is always one) was upset because the billboard featured holstein instead of angus cows.

“Fiddle sticks,” Myron said, “I don’t care if it’s a longhorn, there’s a cow on a billboard. We ought to be happy about that.”

The college then hired a bright young go-getter to build the program, and she has done a great job of increasing enrollment every year. I’ve even adjunct taught a few classes and have enjoyed passing along my extensive knowledge of what not to do when it comes to farming. This semester, I’m teaching basic farm maintenance. My primary learning objective is for students to learn how to maintain farm stuff while also maintaining all ten fingers.

“All you can do is try,” Myron likes to say. Indeed, you never know what can happen when one person starts thinking and a group of people start trying. In the grand scheme of things, the creation of an ag degree at a community college may not seem like much, but it’s not nothing. It has already made a difference—one of the first graduates from the program now works down the hall from me in the Extension office.

Here is a great video about Myron that highlights his love of farming and farmland. I make an appearance on the tailgate.

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Earlier in the day, we had taken Thomas to the park to practice riding his bike. It was a beautiful winter day, warm enough that you didn’t need a coat, and since school was out for Christmas break, the park was full of moral support.

“You’ve got this!” said a man walking his dog, as we pleaded with Thomas to try riding his bike one more time. I’m not exactly sure to whom the man was directing his comment, but I appreciated the sentiment nonetheless.

“My helmet is too itchy! This is too hard! I don’t like bikes!” Thomas lamented.

Santa Clause brought Thomas a “big boy” bike with no training wheels, and we thought it would be the centerpiece of his Christmas, but it quickly became the centerpiece of parent-child conflict. Thomas barely showed any interest in the bike, preferring his toy monster trucks and Legos. We had hoped taking him to the park would give him a chance to focus on the bike, but mostly he just wanted to join the other kids on the playground.

“You have to make one loop around the park on your bike before you can go play on the playground,” we said, not realizing that we had just committed ourselves to a thirty minute journey that felt one second short of eternity. So it is no wonder when we got home that day, when my wife desperately challenged Thomas to run me over in the yard, that he finally straddled the seat with a sense of determination on his face–and grinned. At the very least, this was progress. An hour or so earlier at the park, he was kicking the bike in frustration and we were kicking ourselves as parents.

“Just coast down the hill, don’t even try to peddle,” my wife said, giving him a hopeful push. But in his desire to flatten his dear ole Dad, he not only coasted but naturally pedaled to pick up speed. Finally, it clicked. Thomas was not only controlling the direction of his bike but providing locomotion for it. He made it to me, I fell over for dramatic flair, and now he wanted to ride, again and again.

Here is a video of one of his subsequent rides.