LETTERS TO THE DEAD: THIRTEEN
lETTERS TO THE DEAD: THIRTEEN
6/13/2018
Dear Gordon (1918 – 2007)
I was your next-farm neighbor for only six years (1974 – 1980),
but your influence on my life remains in how I view the world,
in how I’ve come to confront my own bull-headed contrariness,
and even in the accent of my speech. (Our accent, I think, is the
very essence of how we present ourselves to the world.)
When Ellie and I and two other families bought the 120 acre
Mastin farm in the community of Stonewall on Kabler Mill Road
(which ended at the North Fork of the Licking River) we were like
fish out of water. City folk come to start a hippie commune. The
half dozen or so families who farmed the area thought the circus
had come to town. But not you, Gordon. Your interest was piqued,
and your sly smile was always a welcomed sight when we had gotten
ourselves into a jam with the tractor, runaway pigs, a failed crop
of cash peppers, the huge silver poplar that fell across our gravel
lane onto our barn. We messed up nearly everyday and kept you
highly entertained. But it didn’t take us long to realize that our
best stroke of luck was having you as our neighbor. There were
times when, for one or the other of us, you literally saved our lives.
But as important as you were for our survival, it was your
story telling skills that brought us into that time and place. We
didn’t know it then, but we were a bunch of lucky youngsters
who stumbled into the tail end of a lively and vibrant culture
that had existed there for over a hundred years – Kentucky
tobacco farming and its success when the Burley Cooperative
was established. In another two decades it would vanish as sure
as the telephone landline.
Gordon, I don’t think you’re surprised to get a letter from
me. Though I moved to town (Mt. Olivet – pop. 250) about seven
miles away, I visited occasionally and we would have us a jam
session of stories, you tellin’ & me listenin’. I’ve recounted some
of those wild escapades all the way to Paducah and back.
I have so many but the hour is growing late and I’m tuckered
out. I’ll write again real soon, maybe tomorrow, to recount
“My first chaw of baccer” or “How the pig got too fat to get out
of the barn” or ” When Stanley took the goose eggs to town” or
“Wild trip to Vegas with the Sheriff Hamer to get a prisoner”
or “Bullnozer fiasco during the Great Storm of ’78” and other
highlights from Stonewall, KY.
You were the best Gordon.
An honor to have known ya,
Jim
Epilogue:
from “What Passes, What Remains”
by Wendell Berry
This is the place in which
the living live in the absence
of all who once were here,
their stories kept a while
in memories soon to be gone
the way of the untongued stories
preceding ours, reduced
to graves mostly lost
and a few found strayed
artifacts of stone.
