Bringing it to the table— in all weathers

The elements have smiled on us the past week. Chances are you looked outside and smiled back. This weather brings out the best in my snooze button.

The cooler temps and rains have given us a brief reprieve from the hot, dry summer that overcooked our yards, farms, and ranches. Agriculture-based work requires a stamina that some of us cannot fully relate. Unlike most professions, farming especially is a career-choice at the mercy of something beyond control.

Pilots can use their skills to maneuver around or even through turbulence. A rancher may have the means to relocate cattle to better places to graze. A teacherknowshowtoadapt to different learning styles.

Broadway stars have understudies, should they wake up unable to perform.

But a farmer can do everything right 364 days in a year or season only to see it ruined in one day by an uncontrollable force.

All of my grandparents were tied to farming from the 1910s to the 1950s. From dryland cotton farming in Fisher County to working in peach orchards in southwestern Arkansas, the people from whom I descend watched the skies. Porch prayers, as my mother called them, were frequent and unspoken.

Hail, straight-line winds, wildfires, too much rain, a lack of rain, the timing of the rain. These elements stalked my grandparents. A century later, no modern technological advancement has changed the fact that Mother Nature still gets the final say.

Here on the Rolling Plains this week, the sound of thunder and rain woke me. All I had to do was hit snooze, stretch, yawn, and smile. It’s a luxury most farming families don’t get.

The small family farm is one of the last places — they are getting rarer every day — where men and women (and girls and boys, too) can answer that call to be an artist, to learn to give love to the work of their hands. It is one of the last places where the maker — and some farmers still do talk about “making the crops” — is responsible, from start to finish, for the thing made.

– Farmer, novelist, poet, environmental activist Wendell Berry, “Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food”

Snyder, Texas, native Sue Jane Sullivan is a retired schoolteacher whose thought-provoking commentary appears occasionally in several West Texas newspapers, including The Texas Spur and The Caprock Courier.