Tomorrow morning comes early, that’s what The Farmer says every night by nine o’clock, every night like clock work.
The Farmer feeds animals to feed the world and he works the earth to feed the earth.
And I’ve lived all my life on gravel roads with working men in pick-up trucks, men with grease-lined hands and broad shoulders and steel-toed boots and it’s hard to say for certain but I don’t think I’ve yet known hands that work harder than his and he flicks lights off early because he rises before first light and he wakes children too.
Because our own farming daddys knew it and they gave it to us and they told us that we must pass it on, always pass it on:
If you give a child life, you need to give him a way to make a living and one of the greatest gifts you can give a child is the gift of work.
The sun rises and we rise and our hands find our herd and our earth.
This is the inheritance of Eden.
And when the kids have worked hours and hard and heaped the rocks high and sun’s beating right straight down on the skin dirty and sweaty and not ashamed, the Farmer, he nods and says let’s go, and they grab trunks and towels and head to town and Gram’s big hole of clean, cool water.
Because even farmers know how to have high-riding, big splashing fun.
Farm kids laugh and I smile and he grins, the biggest, happiest kid of all.
And after kids find pillows and we pray and they pull up quilts and stretch right out in the long and earned sleep, The Farmer calls for me to come ride the fields with him, just before the sun sets, before the day’s last light.
I slip an arm around his waist. He throttles it high. The wind blows the hair and we are young.
The Farmer idles, stops still in the back fifty of the farm. The woods sing quiet. He leans off the side of the four-wheeler over to point out to me the leaves of these thousands, millions, of beans he has planted in this soil.
He points out how the whole field tilts. He points out how every leaf on every stalk stretches towards the Light.
This too is our inheritance of Eden.
Tomorrow morning comes early and we have the gift of work.
He and I ride across fields to home.
So I saw that there is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in his work
Photos: a day in the life of farmers here
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