December 14, 1933-August 3, 2022
Dad, this is a perfect time to thank you for always being there for us. You showed us by your fine example, how to live life well. You have given us a confidence that has helped to shape us into the people we are today. We will always be grateful for your love, guiding influence and hand in our lives. Sadly missed by your family. From family and grandchildren.
And on the 8th day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, I need a caretaker. So God make a Farmer.
God said, I need someone ready to get up before dawn and milk the cows, till the fields, milk the cows again and then go to town and stay past midnight at the meeting of the school board. So God made a Farmer. God said, I need somebody to sit up all night with a newborn colt and watch it die, then dry his eyes and say maybe next year. I need somebody who can shape an axe handle from a Persimmon sprout, shoe a horse with a hunk of tire, make a harness out of hay wire, feedsacks and shoe scraps. Who, at planting time and harvest season, will finish his forty hour week by Tuesday noon. Then, with the pain from tractor back, put in another seventy-two hours. So God made a Farmer.
God said I need somebody strong enough to clear trees and heave bales, yet gentle enough to tame lambs and wean pigs and tend the pink combed pullets, who will stop his mower for an hour to splint the broken leg of a Meadow Lark. So God made a Farmer.
It had to be somebody who’d plow deep and straight and not cut corners, somebody to seed and weed, feed and breed, rake and disc, plow and plant, tie the fleece and strain the milk. Somebody who’d bale a family together with the soft, strong bonds of sharing, who’d laugh and then sigh, and then reply with smiling eyes when his son says he wants to spend his life doing what Dad does. So God made a Farmer.