Circle M Farm

This being my first official day of winter (the final work of fall feels to us as though it rolls on, building in intensity, until the tremendous release of Christmas Day – meat harvested, meat delivered, presents made, presents finally opened ), I’ve just woken up, made the fire and thrown myself onto a couch nearby to snuggle up for a delicious read. The book I’ve chosen for this special morning is, finally, Michael Perry’s Truck: A Love Story. This book has been so often recommended to me over the past few years, I feel like I’m in the closing scene of a romantic comedy with the boy next door I stubbornly ignored but everyone knew was perfect for me.

Perry pretty much is the boy next door, having been raised and been writing for at least a decade in a tiny rural Wisconsin town quite like mine. He’s done readings in nearby Mineral Point, Spring Green and Madison and I’ve had him on the calendar several times. Apparently he often brings along the members of his folk-bluegrass band and puts on a terrific show. Yet with one thing and another I’ve never managed to make it.

And so at last we meet on my couch. Initially I find the writing too masculine for my taste – full of hunting, building and truck-restoring stories that are ostensibly self-deprecating, but vaguely boastful at the same time. He has a guy voice, to be sure, yet the book is shot throughout with surprising moments of great tenderness. I’m gradually won over as he touches gently – and repeatedy, in a circular, musing pattern – on the death of his brother’s young wife, the genocide in Rwanda and falling in love with a woman and her daughter. He rather incongruously writes about cooking, and cooking well – a lot! I copied out his recipe for roasted tomato sauce.

But I connect most to his fumbling attempts at becoming a gardener. Perry seems to be on balance unsuccessful, yet his appreciation for the art and joy of planting and harvesting and eating and putting up is infectious – and much welcome here in December.

In the preface to The New Seed Starters Handbook, the poet-farmer Wendell Berry says that growing your own food is a sacrament. A visible form of an invisible grace. It is certainly an act of faith. When you tuck that seed in the dirt, you are drawing on the past to bank on the future.

I sigh and smile and settle a little deeper into the couch when Perry quotes Bruce Taylor on planting: “to bring us to our knees/to bring us back to quiet.”

In fact, Perry quotes and reference so many authors, many I’ve read but just as many I haven’t, that I find myself taking notes. John Hildebrand is one name I’ve jotted down. Perry mentions Hildebrand in the context of pondering a move out of his home town:

... I am grateful that John Hildebrand recently passed me an essay of his in which he proposes that “sense of place” is not predicated on extended residence but rather is based on our own projections: this story we tell ourselves about where we belong.

As a transplant from Chicago to a farm in Blanchardville, WI, population 806, I’ve immersed myself in writers who love rural agricultural communities, as I love mine. But most of these folks, like Perry and Wendell Berry, claim a deep and ancient historical connection to their places. My lack of history here is a daily reality, but my love and connection is nevertheless real. I resolve to look up Hildebrand’s essay.

My love story is definitely not with a truck and by the end of the book I remain a bit alienated by Perry’s in-joke, man’s man posture, though I appreciate the glimpse into his country boy world so similar to that of my neighbors. (And I appreciate that when he extols the value of Farm and Fleet Wintergreen Lozenges I can run right out and get some!) My love story is with a boy who longed to be in the country, and with the farm we adopted and the community that’s adopting us. But I trust both stories will end well – knees to the dirt, seeds planted in faith, and the rest left to “invisible grace.”