I look at these pictures and they pluck a string of intense familiarity in me. It makes me sad, in some ways, that I won’t be raising my family on a farm. I got just a taste of it as a kid and turned out to be more of a city gal, so I guess if I had stuck around (and my own family hadn’t majorly downsized our farming efforts due to a variety of reasons, many of them economic) I would have been the one to insist that Triple T Farms have a website and get on Facebook. Maybe I would have had to slop hogs too. But there is something so honest about farming. Something so real about it. It’s not all flash and pretense, branding and focus groups. It’s just dirt under your fingernails and long, hot days, and the smell of diesel following you everywhere you go. A challenge to make the land do your bidding but to be its steward and protector too. It’s intense. It’s humble.
I miss it.
I think you would really enjoy this blog by a girl who gave up the corporate life for farming: http://longestacres.blogspot.com/2012/02/let-us-farm-with-peace.html
She takes a lot of great photos also.
Ooh, totally checking out that^^ link.
Linds, I love that site. It’s been on my GR for years. It does to me exactly what it does to you. Even though I didn’t “technically” grow up on a farm, I grew up on a farm. (You know what I mean.) It is everything that you said, especially honest. I think that lifestyle is part of what I see when I look at Pa and Granny in awe, and wonder how such selfless, humble, hardworking, happy-spirited, quick-to-laugh, eager-to-share, amazing, overly-hyphenated people even still exist on this planet. FARMING, DUDE! I was thinking last night of ditching everything and moving back there. I was only 9% serious.
Maybe someday you’ll move back to Triple T and I’ll move back to the Davis Farm and we can reinstate the Ferry and putt our pickup trucks across the Tennessee River on a tiny boat in order to trade goods – sacks of feed corn and frozen deer meat in exchange for shots for the mules.