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Browsing Tag: #johndeere
I hope that my words never seem disrespectful. I usually feel the need to purge and sometimes it’s about sensitive subjects. I have been labeled a sensitive soul, because I tend to cry at the drop of a hat. But in the meantime, my smart mouth is forever earning me the label of…well, you know. You’ve heard. I AM strong-willed, I have no lies to tell. I say all this because I didn’t take a picture today. It would have been disrespectful to take out my phone and snap one, no matter how badly I wanted to remember the beauty of it. I have only my words. I go to a ton of funerals. I don’t see it as morbid. I was raised up in funeral homes like some kids are raised in church. Seems like somebody all the time was dying. Holly Hills, Berry’s, Atchley’s, Rawlings, McCammon-Ammons were the ones locally that we frequented. Once I started working at the Co-op, we occasionally branched out to Newport and Morristown. College friends laying their parents to rest were sometimes surprised to see me turn up, not understanding that I was raised to comfortably attend these events. It doesn’t matter if it’s Greeneville or Cookeville or Murfreesboro. I will come. People don’t seem to understand that you don’t have to know the person who passed, you…
I have a friend who is married to a farmer. They are raising their boys among the cows & corn. The boys have calves they bottle feed & sell, they have horses they check fences astride. They enjoy the day to day life of being outside, helping their daddy tend to the newly born, the ailing, the healthy. One day, I was disheartened to read on Facebook about how one of their sons was being ridiculed at school. A schoolmate called him poor because he lives on a farm. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Trust me, farmers aren’t poor. They meet struggle every day of their life. They are up against it at least fifty percent of the time. Imagine if your livelihood was dependent upon the weather. If it doesn’t rain one day & the sun shine the next, you might be looking for a job in town. And then when hay is ready to cut to feed the cows all winter, you pray for three straight days hot & clear. To get your hay to grow, it must be fertilized. Fertilizer runs around $500 a ton. One ton will fertilize roughly seven acres. If your fields yield well, seven acres of hay will produce maybe 100 rolls of hay. A cow will eat half a roll a day in the wintertime if their pasture is thin. You figure four months of winter, which is 120 days. If you have thirty cows, that…
