Our technological infirmity

A Broken Connection to the Land

My wife, Glenda, our two Labradors, Tok and Fundy and our third Nova Scotia garden

In 1971, after college graduation — I moved to the Nova Scotia shore and began rebuilding a 200 year old farm house still standing because of its massive hand-hewn and pegged beams. That first winter I immersed myself in gardening books and magazines, extending my limited gardening knowledge while trying to pick the right varieties that would thrive in the North Mountain’s short, cold and foggy summer. That first May on the homestead, we had a cold frame, and we started working the land as early as possible. Even with the huge, years old piles of chicken manure getting a garden going in the heavy clay sod was a real challenge for us first time serious gardeners. While we had a tractor, three furrow plow, and manure spreader, we had not gotten them early enough to plow our garden plot the previous fall before the snows came.
In spite of the challenges, it was a bountiful garden, yielding even corn and tomatoes which aren’t easy to grow in the coastal fog. My mother and her sister came up to teach us how to preserve our food for winter. Had I studied colonial American history after that first season of farming instead of before going back to the land, Jefferson’s thoughts would have meant a lot more to me.
Thomas Jefferson believed that “independent, land-owning farmers (‘yeoman farmers’)” were the bedrock of American democracy. After over fifty years of getting my hands my hands dirty, have been convinced me that a connection with the land is one of the most important spects of our lives. Being on the land was part of my consciousness well before I started gardening in the summer of 1972. I came from a long line of farmers and millers.

My powerful desire to have land and work that dirt was deeper than most topsoil.
I am certain that I will never understand how that came to be.
But the city was never for me. The strange unnatural color of the night made sleep hard to find.
The land was what gave life to us all, and where we go when our lives are gone.
The land was at the center of it all, so how could you understand anything without being on the land?
You take whatever road you can find to get to the land even if you have to build the road yourself.
Paraphrase of Page 22, paperback version, The Road to My Country —David Sobotta

That connection to the land teaches some powerful lessons. One is that you can do everything right and end up with nothing except the choice to push yourself and try again with the hope that this time you will be successful.
You learn to appreciate the unyielding will of a seed to germinate and grow sometimes only to fall victim to a crow, cutworm, or insect.
One of the most important lessons is that when you are successful, that success is directly porportional to the effort that you have expended.
Once you throw animals into the mix, it becomes clear that when you have responsibilities to animals or others, you cannot just blow them off. Your responsibility is a sacred trust.
The great lesson of all is that there are jobs that need to be done and some of them will not get done unless you take them as yours. You have grown into the role when you know that you cannot walk away.
These lessons are not easy ones, and not surprisingly they are best learned on the land.
In today’s world it seems impossible for everyone to have their own piece of land. For a young person to become a farmer requires far more resources than almost anyone has.
However, if the connection to the land is so important why not teach it in our schools. Educate the children of today about the importance of farms, especially family ones. I believe that schools in non-urban areas could add gardens to their campuses. Why not have today’s children learn about composting, building soil, planting seeds, and transplanting vegetable plants. Small orchards could be established and students could learn pruning and horticulture. Learning how their food is grown and what happens when the weather doesn’t cooperate are valuable lessons. Any food grown could be taken to food kitchens.
If it is important to teach student financial literacy, wrting, math, and computer skills, surely it is important to teach them life skills relating to growing food for themselves and other. Courses like this could be intertwined with the history of our population shifts to urban areas and the rise of factory farms. In learning about growing plants students are learning about recycling and composting required for building healthy, sustainable soils. In teaching students about the land we are creating a potential pipeline of young people interested in farming or at least cognizant of the challenges faced by farmers.
People talk about the importance of national service. What if an option for a national service program is helping family farmers for the summer. When we had our cattle herd in the seventies in New Brunswick, I got a call from a friend who asked me to take in his teenage son and teach him responsibility. He was sure his son was headed down the wrong path. He came to stay and work with us. He had a bedroom in our house and ate meals with us. We worked him pretty hard for several months. He learned to drive tractors and he made his share of mistakes.. I don’t take credit for turning him around but I do think we helped him appreciate hard work and attention to detail. He left our farm ready for college. He went on to get his doctorate and became a professor at an American university.
Even urban schools could adopt vacant lots and turn them into gardens. Failing that we could set up summer farm camps where campers efforts help grow food for food banks.
It is really time to realize the importance of giving a new generation a connection to the land which could create a generation of young farmers who care enough about the land to maybe put down their cell phones occasionally. If we don’t create farmers, at least we will have a group of much more educated young voters.

The Leap of Faith

My wife deciding what plants are needed to finish out this year’s garden

Life is full of decisions. Some of them are major ones that can change the trajectory of your life and others are seemingly small ones like trying to decide which flowers we need to fill out this year’s garden. My wife has been handling the flower beds for over fifty-three years since she planted our first flower bed in St. Croix Cove, Nova Scotia. The flowers might not always have turned out as she planned but we have always enjoyed them.
Most would agree that our country feels different today than it did thirty years ago. A lot fewer houses have flowers now. My mother would have considered no flowers a dereliction of duty and a sign that no who cares about the world beyond them lives in the flowerless homes.
Even ignoring the toxic politics, people are more cautious especially since the pandemic. Also I see far less risk taking. No longer does the decision to stay close to home raise any eyebrows. Getting out on your own is an often insurmountainable challenge without help from others. The farther you are from home the farther you are from a supporrt network you can count on when you need it.
Planning for a move, assessing the potential benefits, and taking a risk on another life in an unfamiliar area far from home drove much of the change in our country until recently. Among my generation born around 1949, we could not wait to get as far away from home as possible. In my case, I started in North Carolina’s Piedmont, went to military school in Tennessee and college in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After college I moved north to Nova Scotia. It took thirty-five years to get back to North Carolina another fifteen to get within thirty minutes of where I grew up. It was a long circuitous jouney.
Life does not come with a manual that gives us instructions on the steps we need to take for a successful existence and there are no guarantees. If you are lucky enough to have older adults in your life, you can seek their advice but with today’s speed of technological change they might be of little help.
I grew up with a single mother who was born in 1910. I was the first of our family to go to college so I was on my own at a early age with just one piece of advice from my mother ringing in my ear. That advice, be the best that you can be at whatever you choose, was great advice but only covered a few situations.
The result was that I learned to think for myself at an early age. Not all my decisions were perfect but in the grand scheme of things they were all workable. The first big decision was to not take the law boards. Instead I took a $6,000 gift from my mother and bought 160 acres with a 250 year old farmhouse and barn on the Nova Scotia shore of the Bay of Fundy. It was a leap of faith for both my mother and me.
The move turned out to be good first steps to becoming a cattleman and eventually a director at Apple Computer. Times were very different in 1971, when I graduated from college. The only ways back then to research something was in person, by mail, books, or telephone. Long distance calls were very expensive and the mail took forever it seemed. Still those were the only tools available when making the final decision to buy my Nova Scotia farm.
Over the years my wife and I faced a number of big decisions that became turning points in our lives. Ten years and 200 head of cattle into farming in New Brunswick where we found the farm of our dreams, we were faced with twenty percent interest rates. We decided to sell our cattle and I would go to work in town. We had been successful because of the support network we had built in the tiny farm village of Tay Creek, New Brunswick. Even there it was not an unusuable decision in the world of small farmers to take a job in town. It was also a time when things especially in the computer world were moving rapidly. Two years after going to work in town, I was working for Apple and we were moving to the big city of Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Eventually, we made another leap of faith and moved our family of five to the states. It was a side step on my career but we judged it better than moving to Toronto. It worked out in the end eventually landing us in Roanoke, VA where all our children graduated from high school and eventually college.
Today is a different, less friendly world with steeper entry points to good jobs. I wonder if there is too much conflicting information available. It is easy to get overwhelmed with all the online opinions, evaluations and recommendations compounded with the difficulty of getting a good job. Making a meaningful decion is hard if your brain is overloaded with information. Much of the online informaiton is something of a rat hole which sucks you into vortex with no clear answers. To effectively make a decision you need to be brutal in discarding the opinions of others. What one person loves, you might hate. My wife and I have often made lists to evalutate our moves. We have moved enough that we can focus on the things that are important to us. We have learned it is important to set goals with our moves and to hold those goals tight.
Comparing the process for my first house purchase in 1971 to our most recent one in 2020, is an interesting exercise. We were in our fifteenth year living on the North Carolina coast when we made another leap of faith. We decided to leave the coastal paradise and people that we had grown to love. We wanted to be closer to our grandchildren, our remaining relatives, and better services especially medical ones than what we had at the coast. The Internet was our primary search tool. We made only two trips before picking a home, but we had a tight list of requirements that kept us focused on our needs. Moving during a pandemic was no picnic, but with the information that we could find on the Internet and a very good real estate agent, it was much less of a risk than my original move to Nova Scotia. Hardly anyone worked from a home office in the 70’s but today it is pretty common and my home-based job gave us lots of flexibility. It also helped that I was familiar with large part of the area where we moved from living here as a teenager.
The house purchase in 1971, involved a few letters, some tourist brochures, one trip to Nova Scotia to look at the house. Another trip a couple years earlier helped me fall in love with Nova Scotia and helped kindle a flame for Nova Scotia. Still it was a lot of faith for someone only twenty-two years old to pick up and move to another country where I knew no one.
I hope the environment in our country changes so people can take more risks that have the potential to improve their lives and the lives of everyone around them. If we had healthcare for all, mobility would be easier. There is an argument for staying in one place and developing intimate knowledge of one area. I know some people who have thrived living in one area and others who have become insular and perhaps jealous of others who have seen more of the world I believe the arguments are much stronger for spreading you wings and being the new person or outsider in the area a few times in your life. Living where you are the outsider builds tolerance, patience, and acceptance, all values that are hard to find today.
Below is list of goals that we drew up in 2005 before our move from Roanoke, Virginia to Cape Carteret, North Carolina. We did pretty well on the list.

We did simplify our life and downsized to a home one half the size of the one where we raised our children. We were unable to find a home we could afford where we could walk to stores but giving up the stores gave us better access to water.

We gardened a lot more, our beds produced three crops a year. In 2017, I did over 10,000 steps a day for 365 days with many of those steps being along the beaches of Emerald Isle. I could often be found biking in our neighborhood late in the evening or in the early morning swimming a few laps in the pool that was a five minute walk from our home.

I piloted my 20 ft Sundance Skiff over 600 hours on the White Oak River, in Bogue Inlet, and the Atlantic Ocean.. I was a regular feature on the White Oak River in my kayak which I could slide into the water from my backyard. I caught more fishi in the ocean and river than I dreamed possible.

I took hundreds of thousands of pictures, and even published a Kindle picture book. I tried a couple of small businesses on my own but the real estate world was in collapse so I ended up joining a fiber network startup as a Vice President. I spent the last fourteen years there until retiring in 2025. We didn’t have much luck with younger relatives but I did write five books and a few thousand blog posts. I feel the leap of faith that led to adventure was worth the risk.

Tomatoes in the South

Twenty-one years ago in 2005, I wrote this post about growing tomatoes. At the time we were growing tomatoes on a mountain overlooking Roanoke, Virginia. I first helped my mother with her tomatoes in the fifties in Lewisville, North Carolina. We have also grown them in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and coastal North Carolina where I once harvested 100 tomatoes in a day.

For the last four years we have been growing them back in the Piedmont in Davie County, about thirty minutes from those Lewisville tomatoes. In 2024, I grew over four hundred eighty Cherokee Purple tomatoes from just six plants. This year we are planting just three or four plants. I have updated the post where necessary, but growing tomatoes doesn’t change very much. The key to get lots of tomatoes is pruning. I will cover that in another post.

Growing tomatoes is one of the great pleasures of living in the south. Most years they are easy to grow and almost every house has enough sunshine and dirt to grow a bountiful crop somewhere.

Today we planted eight plants which will give us more than we will ever be able to eat.

My goal is to have ripe tomatoes by the Fourth of July which is a little bit of a challenge up on the mountain. (We regularly have ripe tomatoes by the middle of June in Piedmont. On the coast, our first ripe tomato often came in late May.)

We have planted tomatoes many times before, and this year (2005) we have the plants in the ground about one week early and the soil seems relatively warm which is very important in getting a good start.

Assuming we have the right amount of warmth, we have a good chance of having that first tomato sandwich before the Fourth. One of my cardinal rules for growing tomatoes is that you have to get your hands dirty and feel the dirt. In fact feeling the dirt tells you if it is too cool or too wet. We have been growing tomatoes in the same spot for many years so our dirt is in great shape. It crumbles easily and we control disease by a meticulous clean-up at the end of the season.

Originally we dug out most of the dirt and replaced it. For several years we tilled it and worked it. Now we just stick a shovel in, make a hole about the size of a large coffee cup, pour a cup of water in the empty hole, once the water disappears, put in the bottom of the hole about a cup or two of very well rotted cow manure/compost and a sprinkle of Osmocote.

With a trowel I mix the dirt I have taken out of the hole with the manure and fertilizer and put the tomato plant in the hole and pat the dirt around it while making a slight depression around the plant so it will be easy to water.

You do not have to make a large hole unless you have a tomato plant that is so large that you need to put it partially in a trench. A plant twelve inches tall can easily have the branches cut off of the first six inches and the tomato planted so that only six inches is above ground. The plants done that way grow very strong, are wind resistant, and tolerate dry conditions a little better.

Just make certain that you really make a connection with the soil. It’s good for the soul and will make you appreciate all the effort that goes into growing our food. Mixing the soil with your hands is good for the soul.

After transplanting, the plants need to be well watered immediately. After a week or so, I start using Miracle-Gro soluble tomato fertilizer a couple of times a month. As the plants get bigger we stake them, but I will record that a little later just so this is complete guide to tomatoes for my kids. Sometimes you get some little flies on the plants and need to treat them with an organic spray or the plants can be so weakened that they die.

You can choose to use completely natural fertilizers if you want, we have done that many times, but find that with our well cared for soil, this compromise method works very well.

(As to varieties, the absolute tastiest is the Cherokee Purple. They grow well in North Carolina, but you will likely not have much trouble finding good varieties for your area when you go to buy plants. If you can find an old time garden store, they will have far more useful advice than Lowe’s or one of the other big box stores. I can recommend Better Girl, Mortgage Lifter, and for smaller tomatoes, Umberto or Huskies which are exceptionally hardy and easy to grow. The German pinks are good but they take a lot of space for the amount of tomatoes they produce.)

Pictures from when we built our current garden in 2023 and had a bumper crop of tomatoes. That year we grew some of our plants from seed.

Cherokee Purple Tomatoes, ready for the garden April 2026

A Place To Take Root

Our Tay Creek Farm, The Road Back From Our Cattle, Our Barn In The Distance

Just as we were getting married, my mother-in-law-to-be told my bride-to-be, “You know David (me) has a lot of miles on him.” It was a true statement but probably not a compliment. At twenty-four years old, I had driven around the country, driven to Alaska and back, plus wandered as far north as Gander, Newfoundland, and at the time was living on the Nova Scotia shore, 1,300 miles north of Mt. Airy, North Carolina. Even so I was still looking for the right place to make a home.

After we got got married, we traveled back to Nova Scotia, and we continued my search for a place to farm and make a home. In spring of 1974, we found a farm in Tay Creek, New Brunswick, twenty miles north of the provincial capital, Fredericton. The first time we looked at the farm was earlly May and there was still snow on the ground. Even with the snow, it immediately felt like home.
It was very different from where we were living in Nova Scotia. Tay Creek was an old farming community with a couple of country stores, three churches, a community hall, a saw mill, and a number of active farms. It still had a tradition of farming with horses. Where we lived in Nova Scotia was just a settlement with just a handful of houses. The Nova Scotia shore had winds that never stopped. New Brunswick had snow that only stopped long enough to give the black flies a chance to breed. There was a never-ending forest of spruce and hardwoods in New Brunswick. Nova Scotia had a rocky coast and a lot of wind-stunted spruce. New Brunswick was by far the best place to farm. It also turned out to be a great place to have our children and give them a good start in life.

For nearly a decade we put down roots and learned how to be part of a farming community. That encompassed everything from clearing snow from neighbor’s driveways with my tractor-mounted snowblower to digging a grave when someone died. We became such a part of the community that when we decided to disperse out cattle herd, many of the men pitched in to make sure our dispersal sale was successful. Even when I went to work in town, we were still a big part of the community.

One other element that I credit with building ties to the community was my haying operation. I bought standing hay off three or four old farms that were no longer being actively farmed. I got to know the older couple and most were glad for a little extra income and to have their fields cleaned up each year.

What we learned and the strong roots we developed made it much easier to live in other places. When you are twenty miles from town in area that was easily isolated, you quickly learn that you are as much your neighbor’s safety net as they are yours. Our first year in Tay Creek we had twenty-three feet of snow. My first chore every day was to shovel the sidewalk. My youngest daughter claims that the sound of snow shoveling helps her sleep. It came as no surprise when we learned that until the late fifties, the road to town was not plowed during the winter. Any winter travel was on foot or by horse-drawn sleigh. In late spring every year a bulldozer would clear the Royal Road which led to town. Some of the cohesiveness of those years was still there when we moved into the community.

At the heart of community were the country stores, the churches, and the community hall. Where we lived in Nova Scotia, neighbors rarely dropped by but it was a different story in New Brunswick. People were always stopping by to chat on the front porch and to see how things were going. Talking to each reinforced the sense of community. Not once do I ever remember anyone talking about politics.

I also learned to stand up for what was right. When the Provincial Minister of Education declared that those living in out in the country should not expect to get the same quality of education as city students, my wife and I organized our community and fought for our school with meetings and letters. I ended up in a newspaper debate with the Minister who boxed himself into a corner and ended up having to resign. I have never forgotten how it felt to win against what seemed like overwhelming odds.

Living that far from town, we also learned to be self-sufficient. We had wood heat, spring-fed water, a generator and plenty of food in the cellar and freezer from our gardens and cattle. We even had a flock of hens who never failed to give us some eggs and a Guernsey cow that provided three gallons of rich milk every day. If something broke, I fixed it unless it was a serious problem with one of the diesel tractors. We built two huge barns and I often could be seen at the far end of one barn with an electric welder or acetylene torch. I was carpenter, electrician, and plumber. We faced blizzards not with fear but with a sense of calm, ready for whatever the storm could throw at us. We were the farm that people came to if they were stuck and needed pulling out of a ditch.

What we learned from farming for a decade served me well. I used to joke with the computer sales people I was training that if you could convince someone that one of two black cows was worth a thousand dollars more than the other because of its genetics, you could sell almost anything to anyone.

By the time we moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia, the roots that we had put down in Tay Creek served us well in making a home there, and later in Columbia, Maryland, and Roanoke, Virginia. There was nothing that office politics could throw at you that came close to a blizzard at minus forty with 60 MPH winds and a cattle herd a mile away through the woods that needed to be fed.

A Measure of life we all should take

When my first grade career started under the watchful eye of my mother’s first cousin, Ms. Conrad, I was only thinking about what it would take to make it to the end of day. Then I could walk home, play a little football with friends, watch the evening news with my mother, and do my homework with some help from Whiskers, my cat. There was no thought of where the next seventy plus years would take me.
It is a lot easier to look back on seven decades than to imagine the future when you are six years old in a rapidly changing world. Now it makes sense for me to look back. I retired about a year ago when our company went out business. Our business dried up with changes in government funding. Since then I came back and worked one stray project but there haven’t been any others in eleven months. We weren’t building buggy harnesses, we were analyzing needs and designing fiber networks.
My first thought is that I am happy to have worked for the last fifty-six years in a number of productive roles. I consider myself even more fortunate to have worked from home the last fifteen years. I worked hard, maybe too hard during large parts of my life, but I do remain proud of what I have done.
Still it is important to acknowledge that your work career is not your life. How you measure your life probably says a lot more about the person you have become than almost any summary you could write.

My overall measure of life is to look and see if the places, people and organizations that I have touched are any better off for my having been there.

Digging deeper, I look at the kind of people that our children have become. Then, I look at the kind of life we have lived. Did we help others when possible, were we kind and respectful people, did we strive to give more in relationships than we took? I also look at what we learned from life, how much we enjoyed the things we have done, what kind of relationships did we build including those with our spouse, parents, children, grandparents, and friends. I don’t seek to measure anything precisely or to see how close to perfection we got, I just want to understand if our good intentions came through. To have more friends than we started with in first grade isn’t a bad accomplishment especially if you have managed to keep one of those first grade friendships going.
It is not important to me that every person I have met likes me because I have run into some not so nice people along the way. If they tried to harm me or those working for me, I hope they remember that I always stood up for what was right even if it made some people unhappy or came with a personal cost. There are also some people with extraordinarily thin skin who expect to be treated like the privileged person that they have adopted for their persona. You can never do enough for these folks because they will always be slighted by something you said or did which would not bother a normal person. I happy to let these folks stew in their own juices on the sidelines of my life. Whether they ended up liking me or hating me is irrelevant. That handful of people like that intersected my life for varying periods of time is hardly matters because they were just passing through.
Finally in measuring our lives, we have to look at the times we have lived through. I lived in Canada for sixteen years and over sixty years in the United States. I can remember things that touched me throughout life, the polio epidemic, President Kennedy’s assassination, Nixon’s election, the Watergate hearings, Vietnam demonstrations, moving to Canada, the energy crisis of the seventies, 20% interest rates in the early eighties, the Quebec separation crisis, the 9/11 attacks, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Obama’s election, COVID and Biden’s four years in office. I have lots of other memories especially of farming in Canada, my twenty years with Apple, and the fifteen years living on the North Carolina coast. For over fifty years the challenges thrown our way have been ones where we could adjust our lives and get on with it. Only recently has that changed.
Governments have come and gone, we have lived our lives. Then Trump and the MAGA movement showed up. The first four years were bad but largely erased by the peace and sanity of the Biden years. Now Trump is back and the threat to our country and the life we have lived is immeasurable. We wake every day wondering what the idiot in the White House has done overnight. If we were ten or fifteen years younger, we would move back to Canada. I don’t want the final chapters of my life written from within the confines of Trump’s world of hate and violence. I fight Trump world with the written word and my voice. The hope we nourish is that we can finally have justice in the White House. We must demonstrate to the world that no man is above the law in America.

Yards Connect Us To The Soil

Our Backyard After The First Mowing Of 2026

People outside the cities in the first half of the twentieth century likely kept their connection to the soil by gardening and small-scale farming. By the time I was growing up in the fifties in Lewisville, North Carolina, yards, flowers, and shrubs had largely replaced gardening for food as a connection. As a youngster the condition of our grassy yard often stood between me and a trip to my uncle Henry’s fishing ponds. My mother who claimed the only yard she had as a child was packed dirt swept with broom straw wanted our American-dream yard neatly clipped. In driving by our old home, I am little disappointed the town did not put in sidewalks in front of our house during my youth. It would have eliminated the slope on the front yard. It was by far the hardest part of the yard to mow as a youngster.

Going away to military school (high school) and then college got me out of mowing yards for almost a decade. My first home after graduation was a two-hundred year old farm house located in a sheep pasture on the Fundy coast of Nova Scotia. No sheep came with the old farm house but long grass around the house did not bother me as a young farmstead owner. When I first moved there in the summer of 1971, the yard was the least of my worries. Getting hot water plumbed and running so we could stop taking showers at the local campground was close to the top of the list. By the second summer I had a tractor with a nine-foot-wide bush hog which I used to mow around the house a couple of times a summer. That was all I judged it needed in my days of being single. After all, I mowed plenty of mature grass or hay, starting with the twenty acre field behind the house which served as one of the few very nice backyards in my adult life.

Then came the summer of 1973, and I married Glenda, the love of my life. She came from the world of well-manicured yards in North Carolina. Her mother often mowed their yard twice, the second time against the grain, just to catch any grass that might pop up after the first mowing. Sometime during the summer of 1974, Glenda decided the long grass had to go. She and my neat-lawn-loving mother who was visiting us formed a conspiracy. They drove down the mountain to Bridgetown ten miles away and came home with a Toro push mower. The yard became manicured soon afterwards. I spent much of the next forty-forty years sharing the task of mowing whatever yard happened to be attached to our personal home.

For the ten years or so when we lived on our farm in Tay Creek, we had a nice riding lawn mower which was adequate for much of the yard. Even Glenda did some mowing. When we lived in Halifax, our yard was postage-stamp sized. By the time we arrived on the mountain in Roanoke, Virginia, I had come to somewhat enjoy mowing. There are those times in your life when something as simple as mowing a yard can be very satisfying because you can actually see what you have done.

One of the immutable laws of mowing is that the farther south you live, the more miserable the task of mowing can be. Sometimes, even the most careful home yard person can end mowing in the oppressive heat of the day like I did more times than I want to admit after we moved to the North Carolina coast. As I wrote then, there is a true brotherhood of Southerners (both men, women, and teenagers) who have mowed yards when they never should have. I almost had a heat stroke once mowing our big yard there.

Mowing is one of those circular things in life. In your early years, you are too young to push a mower, so it seems fitting that in the later years of life, it is also okay to be too old to push a mower. You come to a point when you are faced with either hiring someone to mow the yard or buying a riding mower which I’m told requires better reflexes than we older folks have. Since I spent many years straddling a John Deere farm tractor, we chose not to revisit those days after a back problem slowed me somewhat. For a couple of years, I shared the task with our mowing service, choosing the hard spots that required a push mower for myself. However, it was an easy transition to giving it all up. When we made our 2021 move from the land of coastal centipede grass back to the fescue grasses of the Piedmont, we left our third Toro mower with the father and son team that was doing our mowing. I even gave them my gas-powered trimmer. After all by then i was over 70 years old.

When our current, very capable mowing team shows up, I know the noise will be over with in a few minutes as opposed to the hours that it would have taken me with a push mower. I still enjoy our green space especially the backyard which is the nicest we have had since that twenty-acre field that came with our first home.

We are trying to go more natural in the backyard by not using any chemicals or herbicides. I would like to see more fireflies and butterflies like I remember from my youth. No one ever worried about a little clover showing up in your yard in those days.

We continue to garden a little like old southerners are supposed to do. However, I have backed off the serious gardening that I did in 2023 and the slightly less ambitious garden of 2024. My six Cherokee Purple tomato plants produced over four hundred and eighty tomatoes in the summer of 2024. We had to sell some at a produce stand after we filled our freezer. Last summer we cut back to three tomato plants. This summer maybe we will have one or two, but I have already been out digging in the garden getting it ready. There is no danger of me losing my connection to the soil for a while longer.

Travel Enriches Life

Maine Lobsters from a 2012 Trip to Canada

I have been accused of being born with wanderlust in my soul. I suspect it is true. The urge to travel was nurtured by mother was traveler in her own right. At the age of twenty-six she went to the World’s Fair in New York City, managed a boat trip up the Hudson, a visit to Niagra Fall, and took the train to Chicago and dropped down to Kansas for a visit. She might have had someone with her on the New York part of the trip but I am pretty sure that she was alone on the Kansas leg of her journey. She was a single mother, but she would throw me into the old 1953 Ford, hand me a map, and say let’s go to the beach. Often the back seat had two or three of her neices that were ten years older than me. When she was in her late sixties, she managed a solo air trip from North Carolina to Nova Scotia by way of the ever complex Boston airport. She was never afraid to travel and once she call too old to make long drives herself, she always found a driver. I like to think she taught be how travel and enjoy it with not a lot of money
There are people who never want to leave home. I am not one of those people. Part of me wants to see what is around the next curve or over the top of the next hill. Not only do I want to see it, I want to experience it. I still remember seeing the Montana mountains towering above the plains on my first cross-country trip when I was seventeen and traveled with a nineteen year-old friend in 1966. Seeing mountains so different from those near me made me want to see more serious mountains. We briefly slid into Canada into on that first trip. In 1969, I got another opportunity when a college roommate and I drove to Alaska. We went right up the spine of the Rockies.
While some take pleasure in knowing a community intimately, I find my pleasure of living in a community is greatly enhanced by having seen and even lived in other communities. Living in a wide variety of places makes you appreciate where you live. For the most part, the communities that I have figured out have been warm welcoming places where you feel like making a home and improving your surroundings.
One rule has been my companion, always try to leave a place better than you found it. The first house I bought for six thousand dollars was pink and something of a wreck when I first found it and convinced my college roommates to help remodel it. Though it was not finished when I left three years, it had been stripped to walls, insulated and rewired. It got copper pipes, a new roof, new pine paneling, a new chimney and fireplace, a new bathroom and water supply. We also created a great organic garden and put new roofs on the barn and brought the hayfield back to life. The house looked a lot different when we left.
St. Croix Cove along the Bay of Fundy was not the right place for cattle so we found an old farm in New Brunswick. We didn’t do much to the New Brunswick farm house other than paint it and add a chimney but we built two huge barns, renewed some pasture, and turned another abandoned farm into great hay fields. We farmed until twenty-two percent interest rates pushed me into a job in the city.
By then responsibility for a family had put my wanderlust in the backseat so we went where the job took me and that was Halifax, Nova Scotia. Halifax was a wonderful place to figure out. We would still be living there but we learned most children had to go to Toronto, Alberta, or British Columbia for jobs. We fled back to the states and eventually ended up on the top of mountain overlooking Roanoke, Virginia. We were there when we took our children on their three week journey around the country. I hoped that travel might get in their blood, but perhaps home was too comfortable a place. Though they have traveled, it has never been just for the thrill of it like I have done most of my life.
When I was still living in Nova Scotia and not yet married, I ventured off to Newfoundland and dreamed of homesteading there. My new wife put an end to that but she was okay with farming in the hardwood hills of New Brunswick where we built our cattle operation. She was also okay with leaving all the friends we made during our twenty years in Roanoke for an extended adventure on the North Carolina coast which she grew to love.
We went to the coast wanting to be out on the water. At the age of fifty-seven, I began the journey of becoming a capable boater in the challenging waters of the White Oak River, Bogue Sound, and the Atlantic Ocean. I logged over 500 hours at the helm of my skiff until someone convinced me that seventy years was too old to be boating out in the Atlantic by yourself. Figuring out the coast and how to prepare a house and boat for a hurricane was a lot more complicated than I imagined, but we did it. We stayed through Category 3 Irene and in sixteen years there only evacuated for Florence. While living at the coast, we made a trip back to our Canadian stomping grounds in 2012. On that trip in Bangor, Maine, was where I found those beautiful lobsters.
You can have wanderlust but still want to enjoy and thrive where you are. We added to and improved every house where we lived. We made the places ours . Even after leaving the farm, isome places we were able to have extensive gardens. Our gardens were amazing around our coastal home and here in the Piedmont.
Perhaps the most unique change we made to a place was the small house that we built on the upper back porch of our coastal home. we created an amazing home but there too many steps for our aging knees. In 2021, we looked foreward to a move from the coast to the piedmont. Because we were old there was some exhaustion mixed with excitement, but we have enjoyed getting to learn our new area. I still miss the marsh and all the creatures there, but I have lots of pictures. The trips now are much shorter now but my mind wanders freely.

No Regrets-Years On The Land

Headed Home On The Road That Took Me To The Cattle

After I graduated from Harvard, I spent over a decade on the land. First, I was part of the early back to the land movement and then later as a cattleman with two hundred head of cattle before we sold them all in fall of 1982 after enduring 20% interest rates. It was a hard life with little room for error and no vacations but the rewards and lessons far outweighed the challenges.
My training other than my Boy Scout years involved wandering the woods shooting the odd squirrel as a teenager, fishing whenever I got a chance, lots of camping during college, and a summer traveling to Alaska in my Dodge Powerwagon. Studying colonial history during my college years had little value when I headed off the Nova Scotia and the old farmhouse on 140 acres overlooking the Bay of Fundy that I bought with my mother’s help.
Rebuilding the old two-hundred year old farm house was really where the training started. I grew up without a dad so I had no one to teach me many of the skills that I needed in 1971. It is surprising how much I could pick up from the free Sears Roebuck manuals on electrical wiring and plumbing. Carpentery I learned from friends who spent some time in Nova Scotia with me that first six months. Gardening and farming I learned from Roedale Press, Malabar Farm, Living the Good Life, Firefox, and the Whole Earth Catalog.
I learned how to do a Thanksgiving dinner when a handful of Harvard/Radcliffe graduates came to see the place that had captured my soul. It was the first turkey any of us had ever cooked but we managed even the careful negotiations on how much celery went in the stuffing. I had grown up knowing the basics of cooking since my single mother often worked late and if I wanted to eat, some knowledge of getting food on the table was essential.
Gardening while guided by the books but was heavily infludenced by having actual hands in the dirt. I was lucky the first old farm had some giant piles of ancient well-rotted chicken manure. The combination of great compost and Nova Scotia’s foggy shore was so good for growing broccoli, we often picked it in five gallon buckets. The cattle started with a few head on the Nova Scotia place, but I quickly figured out the Nova Scotia shore was a lousy place to raise cattle.
In the summer of 1973, I married a wonderful Southern lady who had grown up in the same area as me. Her mother was a part of the same growing, canning, and cooking environment that my mother had lived. By the fall of 1974, we had found our farm in the hardwood hills north of Fredericton, New Brunswick. There there was plenty of advice on how to farm. I incorporated some of those ideas with my own plans. By 1975 we were wintering our Angus herd in the woods and putting up our hay in round bales. My only help was the previous owner of the farm. He had farmed with horses and eventually a small tractor to help with the loose hay he put up annually. Even in his sixties he took to the world of big tractors like a duck to water. He also helped me build a couple of big barns, one 128 ft by 41 ft and the other 69 ft by 64 ft.
By the time the barns were done, we were putting up 200 to 300 tons of hay per year. I could build anything from kitchen cabinets with my radial arm saw to barns with a chain saw. I could use a welder and an acetelyene torch. I had survived working in over 100F temperatures to to feeding cattle in minus 40F a mile back from our farmhouse. In the dozen or so years we lived on the farm, I amassed enough stories to fill a lifetime. The experiences carried me through a coporate career and have defined my life.
My wife and I still have special friends from those years on the farm. Our lives were fundamentally different from those living off the grid today but many of the lessons we learned are the same being learned in Alaska. We heated with wood, supplied our house with running spring water, grew much of our own food including having a milk cow and chickens. The freezer was always full of beef and there was never a shortage of potatoes in the cellar or vegetables we had canned. We lived in a close-knit community where the men dug everyone’s graves and when the funeral was over, they went out and put their overalls on and gathered their shovels to fill the grave.
We battled as much as 23 feet of snow in one year. It was wild enough that we had no fences in the back of our farms. In the early years snowshoeing on six feet of snow was common. I know what it means to grow animals which you end up eating. My wife’s first lesson in local food was walking into our Nova Scotia kitchen early one morning and seeing a freshly dressed lamb that I had hung from the top of a door frame so I could cut it up. We sometimes ate salmon that the local tribles sold door to door. There were even a few meals of wild native brook trout. In the spring we gathered fiddlehead greens from the marshes. Before our cattle herd got so large we could often pick chantrelle mushroom from the edge of the forest. They were a staple when we lived in Nova Scotia.
The challenges that we faced on the edge of civilization made us stronger people. Living in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Columbia, Maryland, Roanoke, Virginia, and Cape Carteret, North Carolina ground any rough edges off of us and helped us give our three children, all born on the farm, a good start in life. Even at 77 years old, I still garden and I love the feel of rich dirt in my hands.
I have no regrets about the years that I spent living on the land.

Everyone Needs A Wild Spot

Snowy Woods Road, Tay Creek, New Brunswick, Canada

The years in Cambridge drove my need to escape to wild places, I explained.
Goose, “I was born into the wild so getting close to it makes my fur feel alive.”
Me, “Does your fur feel alive when you go out on the screened porch?”
Goose, “The outdoor air smells different. Sometimes I can smell other animals like foxes. The wildest thing I have ever smelled is that long-haired cat that sneaks around the house. That puffs up my tail.”
Me, “I have always had to travel a little to my wild places but the reward has always been far greater than the effort.”
Goose, “Going to a place where you can focus all your senses on what is around you is very rewarding. If you close your eyes, you can imagine the place you are visiting in a different light. The screened porch in the morning is not a screen porch at all. It is a hill overlooking a grass-filled meadow filled with little creatures and the occasional larger creature that causes my fur to stand on end.”
Me, “Does you mind let you wander the meadow?”
Goose, “Even better, my mind absorbs the meadow environment so when I nap, I am actually out in the meadow hunting in my dreams.”
Me, “That’s very human-like. The older I get the more my dreams try to pull together pieces of places that I have been. I often find myself in a problem-solving situation that I never quite have enough time to finish.”
Goose, “We all try to solve problems in our dreams. I am always trying to open a can of pop-top cat food. My dreams have never figured out how my two paws can do that.”
Me, “You are very talented with paws, I have seen you take your paw and wrap it around a knob on a cabinet door and pull it open.”
Goose, “Yes, my paws are big enough to do that, It is easier if one of my sisters is there to use their paw to hold the door open while I change positions.”
Me, “I haven’t been to my special place in the park here in a while. It is a bench among the tall oaks with a tiny brook nearby. I am hoping that as warm weather returns, I will get back there. I know that I need it.”
Goose, “Hopefully you still have some of those wild places stored away in your mind.”
Me, “Yes, I have written about my special wild placesmany times. Those posts and the pictures attached to them are a great help.”
Goose, “We all need to pull ourselves out of our daily live to get some perspective.”
Me, “I agree. Once I did it so successfully that in my dreams I was flying fifty feet above my life. I still remember how vivid those images were. I could see things I never imagined. This was in the eighties, well before drones. It was very different that any experience in my real life.”
Goose, “Our brains work in mysterious ways. Mine is telling me that I need a nap.”
Me, “Yeah, I think you are overdue.”

A Life of Icy Roads

An icy road in the woods, five days after our second storm of the year.

The first time that I can remember facing an icy road, it was probaby 1961. I was a twelve-year old passenger in car headed back from Camp Raven Knob, a Boy Scout camp west of Mt. Airy, North Carolina. Adults had come to rescue us from another frozen, icy night in the three-sided Adirondack lean-tos. I wasn’t particularly worried about the icy roads because I wasn’t driving.
Seven years later I am home for the holidays from college and my mother is hosting a Christmas party in Mt. Airy, NC, for her extended family which are mostly from the next country over. Mount Airy is in the transition area between the hill country and the Blue Ridge Mountains. Weather forecasting in the sixties was a little more rudimentary and a snowstorm hit early in the afternoon. Snowstorms are not every day occurences in the North Carolina foothills. Our relatives were becoming worried about getting home. I was going to school in Massachusetts so my old Bronco had snow tires on all four wheels. I offered to escort a convoy through the worst hills. It might have been the first time I had driven in North Carolina snow which isn’t anything like northern snow. It is rare when NC snow isn’t slush or packed ice. That first trip was in slush which is no problem with snow tires. Everyone drove in my tracks and I took them half way home to the point there was hardly any snow on the road. I was young and probably didn’t worry about it very much.
There were many opportunities to drive on snowy roads during college. Four of us even took a trip to Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island in November our junior year. Cape Breton welcomed us with snow, sleet and freezing rain. We faced some very cold camping and tough driving in the old Bronco.
After graduating college, I moved to eastern Canada. Over the course of the next seventeen years I owned a variety of snow worthy vehicles from Land Rovers to Land Cruisers and 4WD trucks. We even had 4WD drive tractors on our 400 acres farmland.
My wife was in her orange rear wheel drive Volvo wagon on a very snowy day coming back from the doctor with our first child who had swallowed a bunch of Flintsone vitamins. The syrup of ipecac hadn’t worked at the doctor’s office. I had just found out when I came in from barn chores and rushed to the doctor’s office in my trusty 4WD Chevy pickup. I crested a hill as I was speeding to the clinic and there was my wife’s car stopped in the middle of the road. She had stopped because our daughter had started throwing up and she was afraid she would choke in her car seat. I didn’t have time to think, I avoided hitting my wife and daughter by putting the truck into a snow filled ditch. With the big snowbanks, I ended up safe, and I rode home with my wife, grabbed a tractor and a neighbor and we retrieved the truck without any problems.
Snowbanks along the rural roads were a great safety feature. You could slide into a snowbank without worrying about damaging your car. After we quit farming, I became a sales manager for the first Apple microcomputer dealer in the area. I had to travel to three locations in New Brunswick, one in PEI and another in Halifax, Nova Scotia. At first I did it in my old front wheel drive Subaru. One time I came home from a trip and was barely able to get the Subaru far enough in the driveway so I could get our tractor and snow blower around it.
Soon after that I switched to a rear wheel drive Volvo sedan. I put snow tires on all four wheels and fifty pounds of sand over each rear wheel in the trunk. I went everywhere in it. After I joined Apple, I once drove my sales manager from Toronto from Fredericton, New Brunswick to Charlottetown, PEI in a blizzard. He was amazed what the Volvo would go through and even more surprised at the ice encrusted ferry that we took to the island.
Four years later we are living on a mountainside overlooking Roanoke, Virginia. We bought an AWD Nissan our first winter there. We had a variety of AWD vehicles there from Subarus and Grand Cherokees to my wife’s AWD Volvo wagon and my AWD Acura MDX. The little Nissan Axcess was a favorite because I could put chains on all four wheels. There were storms when Little Limo as she was fondly known was the only safe way up and down our mountain. I ferried many people with groceries up and down the mountain to their parked cars at the foot of the hill over our seventeen years there. The Acura with its locking AWD mode was the second best vehicle on the mountain. It is still with us and now 21 years old.
We lived on the NC coast for sixteen years and only had ice a few times. With no hills it is not much of challenge. Here in the Piedmont where we now live there are certainly enough hills to make things interesting but snow and ice is a rarity. Still in the last two weeks we have had two storms, one four inches of sleet and the other a foot of fluffy snow. We had no need to go out but I did go to our butcher shop located on the ice road pictured at the took. The Acura MDX never hesitated even a couple of really icy hills. It brought back some memories, even a snowy one to Newfoundland pictured below.