The Heritage Tour -- Berclair, part 2

We were struck by the precarious nature of farming. Talking with Troy, the peer who farms our land and much more, he recounted the experience of recent years that included two floods and an extended draught. Miserable crops bookending no crop -- the vagaries and vulnerabilities of tending the soil. He deals the cards -- fertilizing the soil, planting the best seed he can buy, working the soil when rain surfaces the sand -- but ultimately the game is beyond his control. He may or may not have a crop to harvest, depending on the rain that may or may not come, or come too early or too late or two fast.

"It takes a special kind of person to be a farmer," we agreed as we drove back down the road; someone who can deal with the ambiguities and disappointments, the hard work and and often futile expense.

Is it optimism that keeps him going -- or a quieter kind of hope? Is it a simple passion for the effort regardless of result? Or is it what it is for all of us -- albeit on a more dramatic scale -- who enjoy no guarantees about the fruitfulness of our efforts? Exactly what, for example, is the reliable harvest of any one of my sermons into which I have invested the most fertile hours of a week?

I have no idea the emotions Troy feels when he lays his head on the pillow each night, and I wouldn't presume to romanticize them. But to us he betrayed no despair. Rather, what he put forward was a good-natured, philosophical peacefulness reflecting the conviction that he has done what is his to do, and prepared for the worst, he hopes for the best. It is, I think, something like the scriptures describe as "casting bread upon the waters..."

Finally, it is the best that any of us can do.

The Heritage Tour -- Berclair, part 1

The dark clouds seem to jump out from hiding places like mischievous children. Nothing seems to come of them, though thunder occasionally rumbles like those same children trying to be noticed. It's not that it never rains -- plant debris caught in the branches of bushes well-beyond the creeks, and washed out corn rows bear evidence to the contrary, and recently. It's just that so far the skies have threatened more than they have imposed. We have walked the country -- parked the car at one end of the property and surveyed on foot the water tanks and their depth, the feeders and the blinds, the wells and the curious but largely aloof longhorns. The wind blows a constant cool, and the wildflowers -- just beginning to bloom -- delight us first to this patch and then to that one. A few isolated bluebonnets rear their honorific heads; a handful of Indian Paintbrushes offer their salmon-colored blooms, amidst the carpet of yellow and purple and pink blossoms whose names someone more familiar will need to identify.

It is Berclair -- South Texas -- in its emergent spring; mild and sometimes sweater-cool, newly greening and full of buds. We'll not be here long enough for the full exhibition, but the foretaste is a delight to savor.

So far I have remembered my way around -- the lanes and the locks, the country roads and cattle gates, the nearby grocery store and the planted fields in which I take particular interest. And the memories -- some simple images; others narrative tales -- begin to emerge, like films retrieved from a back closet and threaded onto mental reels. People. Relations. Events. Tales. Smells and tastes and injuries and exhilarations. Dominoes in the gas station, Sunday School at the church, watermelon on the front porch, and stories -- a steady breeze of rocking chair and porch swing stories -- late into the night. Fireflies and horned toads and jackrabbits and coyotes; that special pomegranate bush and the cattle answering Grandad's car horn.

Rocking here on this afternoon's front porch, the steady wind keeping the afternoon heat at bay, I'm both then and now, and strangely grateful for them both.