Month: April 2023

The soul of the soil

There was a time when m0re of us were more in step with the soil in spring. Though I strive to be a steward of the land, I am not a planter of the land. Oh, what I miss because of that lost connection with the soil.

As a farm boy I watched my parents, our neighbors and my aunts and uncles work the land, plant seeds and wait for the magic of tiny sprouts of corn and oats. There was magic in the soil. Spring after spring.

These good people on small farms turned over the earth with small plows, only two- or three-share bottoms. Then they pulled disks and harrows over the furrows, back and forth, leveling the soil like smoothing a table cloth. The finished surface was a brown carpet ready for the oats drill or corn planter.

It was hard work, on a deadline, compounded by the lack of help since farm kids were still in school. I’d run from the bus to see a field transformed since morning. My dad, too, had changed, now focused on fields, not the milking chores.

A small wagon of seeds for corn, alfalfa and oats waited at the edge of the field while dad rushed to unhook the harrow and hook up the planter, all the time shouting out my duties over the puttering John Deere tractor.

I shuttled between the field and barn, helping dad plant, helping mom with milking the cows. Dad rolled through the fields until dusk. Dust in the dusk, and beyond.

Those farmers knew the land, loved the land, did what was best for the land. They knew when to plant each spring and recorded the dates on a wall in the granary or machine shed.

The fields were small, and sometimes so were the yields in summer and fall. But in the spring the hopes of crops wafted across the bare fields, those hopes and the earthy smell of soil settling into the souls of the stewards of the land.

The holler of spring

As I wait for spring, delayed again by yesterday’s 9-inch snowfall added to the already too-tall snowbanks, I close my eyes and see wild daffodils, bluebirds, a rushing creek, and little goats. Kids, you know.

Those images keep coming back, of my first spring this year, in the hills and hollers of northern Tennessee. On this second day of April, I drift back to a week in late February, 900 miles to the south, just across the Kentucky border. There’s no snow. It isn’t a dream.

Maple and hickory buds are swelling in soft hues of crimson and olive, feather brushing the tree-lined ridges as the transformation from stark to soft begins. From my nephew’s deck overlooking the valley of his goat ranch, I watch a bluebird pick at last fall’s crabapples. A meadowlark sings in the pasture. Remy, the old bird dog, stretches out in the morning sun, letting springtime warmth massage his tired bones.

In the valley is a narrow blacktop lane—move over and stop when meeting someone—that twists and climbs for two miles back to the main highway. Deep gullies drop away from both sides, to forests where beech trees hold their creamy leaves from last fall. Faded tobacco barns recall their past in clearings backed up against steep hills.

The sun has climbed over the tree line. From this log house, halfway up a hill of pasture and woodland, a vista stretches out in front of me of pastured goats, sheds and barns old and new, two creeks, and a few farmsteads further down the holler and up the next hill. Green branches of red cedar and wild bamboo bow over the creeks, while flocks of turkey vultures circle above.

There’s a small cemetery just up the hill from where the creek passes under a thick cement slab along the dirt driveway. The cemetery, its footprint no larger than a garage, is fenced off from seven docile, hairy Highland steers and cows. The Charlie Cothron Cemetery, with half a dozen crumbling head stones, is one of many family graveyards in Macon County.

My cemetery reverie is pierced by a juvenile bleat. The goats are kidding, I kid you not. I’ve picked out the tan 8-pounder I want to bring back to Wisconsin. Its long ears complement its long nose, with rectangular pupils cutting through marbled blue eyes. Just too cute. But then I watch the buck kid and his sister doe nursed by their protective mother, and I know the little guy needs to stay in Tennessee.

So I take photos of the kids, of the great blue heron in the creek, of the bluebirds, and of the yellow daffodils, which will run their course here before any dare show their petals in Wisconsin.

Oh, back to Wisconsin. I open my eyes, and it’s still white outside the window on the first Sunday in April. On the positive side, I’ll have two springs, the first in February in Tennessee, and then in northern Wisconsin, someday before May Day. I hope.

(Dave Greschner’s “Up North” column appears in the Friday print editions of the Eau Claire Leader-Telegram and the Ashland Daily Press, and on the Ashland newspaper’s website, normally a day or two ahead of the Friday newspaper.)