Memories in a Box

Cleaning out the storage closet at the office seemed to be a task that generations of government employees had somehow managed to avoid, meaning obsolete equipment and general GSA junk had metastasized. So one morning, I made it my task to declutter the closet, and despite my best intentions, it was a task I also managed not to accomplish because I got distracted when I found a box of old farming photos on a shelf.

“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.