Tools from My Father
A question I’m occasionally asked at the market is on what kind of farm did I grow up or if my parents were farmers. They are surprised when I tell them my father was a machinist and my mother stayed home with their three kids until I went to college and my siblings were well into high school. Home was a quintessential small town of light industry over the mountain from the rural orchards of Adams County, Pennsylvania where Dad’s family had raised fruits and crops for generations before his parents made good by escaping to steady factory work starting in the 1940’s. Their children followed in their footsteps as did my siblings in their choice of careers.But I’m the black sheep, the one that was bitten by the bug of agriculture and it is all Dad’s fault. Trips to Uncle Orrie’s orchards where we would pick buckets full of sweet cherries from the trees in the hot July sun, eat peaches so ripe and sweet you simply squeezed them from their fuzzy skins into our mouths, the juice running all over our hands and arms and take Sunday drives visiting rural cousins, aunts and uncles who would load us with bounties from their vegetable gardens. Great grandma lived on a farm with a bank barn complete with a spring house near a creek. I loved how the barn smelled of cut hay and livestock, the lower level built of limestone into the side of hill always a cool hideaway in the heat of summer. As a child, I knew this was the life I would someday live.While all attempts at corporate life yielded some degrees of success, my heart wasn’t in any of those careers. The idea of working for the same company until what society considers retirement age was not my calling. Instead, I bought a farm.Anyone who has ever farmed can tell you that something is always needing built or fixed. Over the years, I turned to Dad when I needed help. He’d been walking me through assorted repairs since the purchase of my first car, giving me a nice set of Craftsman tools one year for Christmas. Every time he’d visit the farm he’d come with a tool for me—a vice, a locking block & tackle, an industrial extension cord, a die tapping kit, a cutting torch and my favorite, an immaculate vintage SkilSaw complete with carrying case and extra blades he picked up at a sale. When the local lawnmower repair shop tried to sell me new blades instead of sharpening mine, he gave me a bench grinder and taught me to do it myself.The week my father was diagnosed with a terminal illness I showed up to market to be repeatedly bombarded with the question, “What’s wrong?” from fellow vendors and customers alike. When you see the same people week after week it’s not hard to pick up when something’s amiss. I warned everyone that if I failed to show up, the inevitable had happened. In kind, everyone responded with understanding, going out of their way to comfort me through the difficult time.During one of my visits with Dad in the final weeks of his life, he joked that when he died, he would do it at the beginning of the week. He knew how important my market days were—not only for income, but for emotional support. True to his word, the Monday after his 73rd birthday my father passed away in the home he shared with his wife of 53 years and where he had raised his family.The following Sunday was Fathers Day. As much as I wanted to have a good cry, it just wasn’t in me yet and much to my own surprise would take years to arrive.Grief can be like a tsunami where all the water gets sucked off the beach, exposing a calm rawness that lulls one into a sense of strange security before inundating with unexpected force. Tightening up the battery terminals on the diesel runabout at the farm a few years after his passing, I noticed there was something etched on the wrench in my hand...Dad's name. He engraved all his tools, many of which where given to me after he retired.It is often said that the greatest gift a father can give to his children are the proper tools to become productive adults. Mine did in a literal sense, I thought to myself as the once dead engine roared to life and I sat in the grass having the big ugly cry I held back at his memorial service, at market the week after his death, on the first day of trout season the year after he passed, when we spread his ashes a year later in Adams County in the creek by the house where he was born. It was a matter of when, not if.I’d give anything to have another day with my father, but realize now that each day I farm, each Sunday I go to market, I carry with me so much of him who has made me the person I am.Happy Fathers Day to all the dads this Sunday.