I get it now.

Today was a day where I felt like I am exactly right where I am supposed to be and doing what I am supposed to be doing. I spent 8 hours of the day outside on the farm working and hanging out with my dog Rudy. This morning I sawed, split and stacked the locust Curt and I cut yesterday. Then I took a break, ate lunch and drove my truck up over the mountain with Rudy riding shotgun. I bought 3 gallons of gasoline, some tobacco, coca-cola and four 25cent slim jims for me and Rudy to split. Back on the farm I fueled up the 4wheeler and went down through the fields to the river. Rudy ran alongside the whole way with her tongue hanging out, ears flopping and I swear to God a smile on her face.

I’ve been visiting this place my entire life. Some of my fondest and earliest memories from childhood are of me and my family picnicking here during long blue summers in the 1970’s. My grandfather used to throw some amazing family reunion picnics back then. All of my extended family would come out, sit around in lawn chairs, talk and eat. The women would fuss over the food in the kitchen of the cabin. The men would play horseshoes and fish. My sisters and I were usually the only kids and we would run around outside, play in the woods, fish, throw horseshoes, go on long walks and take naps inside the cabin in the afternoon. One of the highlights of these long summer days with my family on the farm was when my grandfather would fire up his old John Deere farm tractor and ride us kids down to the river. He’d follow a road he cut himself and take us up the hillside along the riverbank to a high bluff looking down on the island in the middle of the river he owned. Except he never said “he” owned it. It was always “we.” At the end of the road high on the bluff my sisters and I would hop off and carefully climb down the hillside to the fabled and mysterious “big rock”, a slab of granite on the riverbank twice the size of an automobile. I remember feeling adventurous and daring climbing down the steep mountainside and crawling out into the enormous stone monolith. We’d swim in the river, skip rocks and lay in the sun. At night we’d roast weenies over a crackling fire and toast marshmallows. Often we’d play cards or a board game until we got sleepy. There was no tv, only a radio that was always set to the local NPR station out of Roanoke. We laid in bed before falling asleep listening to the crickets and bull frogs serenade the Appalachian night.

And now, after all these years, after madness and uncertainty, after travelling the highways of America, after marriage and divorce, after decades of career work as a chef and cook, after the passing of my grandfather, my grandmother and my dear departed father, after a lifetime of GOING the road ends here and now I stay. When I am out in the fields and forests caretaking the land my soul is filled with joy and peace. My mind is calm. I take deep strong inhalations of pure mountain air as I work. The only sounds I hear are the rushing of the river and my own breath. Often during these tender moments of living I think of my father and my grandfather. Both men loved to work outdoors. It’s pretty funny that I now enjoy these same past times. When I was a teenager growing up in the suburbs I hated yard work, despised it in fact. But I did it and I did a lot of it. My dad always had me out there doing something in the yard: mowing, weed eating, pruning shrubs, raking leaves, picking up sticks and pinecones, hauling rock, splitting wood…the list goes on and on. I fucking hated every minute of it. And sometimes I hated him too. I wanted to be out with my friends or running around with girls. My dad and I would have passionate arguments on the necessity and utility of yard work. I don’t know who aggravated who more….most likely it was me.. And now all these years later I’m out on the land with my chainsaw, weed eater, branch lopper, etc. and tending to the land the same way my dad taught me to. I laugh out loud at myself when I think of all my idiotic adolescent protestations to “working in the yard”, saying aloud, “I get it now dad. I get it.”