RECCE ROOM

  Standing on that land, I realized something. My father didn’t just give me memories. He created the conditions for them. And now, whether my children ever connect to this farm the way I do or not… I carry that same responsibility. They will have their own places. Their own “farms,” whatever those may be. Places that mean something to them in ways I may never fully understand. And that’s okay. Because this isn’t about recreating the past. It’s about providing the present. One day, I hope I get to ask them the kinds of questions I’ve been forced to ask myself. I want to know what matters to them. What places shaped them. What memories stayed. Because the truth is, the things I remember from this farm… I am the only one who will ever remember them exactly this way. And maybe that’s reason enough to write them down. Not to preserve the land. But to preserve what it meant. This is the final post of a multi part series, reflections on the farm owned by my father and my gra...

  The farm is 18 acres, split into two main sections—east and west. At one point, even the town’s water tower stood on this land. Eventually, my father sold one acre to Madison County so they could officially own the ground beneath it. That’s how time works in places like this. Lines shift. Ownership changes in small ways. Pieces get carved out, repurposed, formalized. But the core remains. For decades, the same man has rented this land for pasture. He rented it from my grandfather. Then from my father. Now from me. Three generations of us. One continuous thread. The cows don’t know any of that. The land doesn’t care about names or titles. But there is something steady in that continuity. Something that says not everything resets when a life ends. Some things just… continue. Quietly. This is post seven of a multi part series, reflections on the farm owned by my father and my grandfather. This is written for me and my siblings. 

  There was a tree behind the house. Not directly between the house and the shed, but close—just offset enough to stand on its own. Maybe 8 or 10 feet in each direction from those structures. When I was a boy, my grandfather hung a tire swing from one of its branches. That tree felt big back then. It is massive now. More than 40 years have passed since I last swung from that tire. My grandfather has been gone since 1985. My father since 2018. The swing itself is long gone. But the tree remains. And it grew. Standing there today, looking at it, I didn’t just see a tree. I saw a connection. A living thing that existed then and still exists now. A witness to everything that has changed and everything that has been lost. It’s an old friend. One that doesn’t speak, but somehow still communicates. And for the first time in a long time, standing there… I felt it. This is post six of a multi part series, reflections on the farm owned by my father and my grandfather. This is writ...

There’s a corner on the property where two fields meet. It forms a clean 90-degree angle—an L-shaped boundary marked by barbed wire fencing. To the west lies the larger field. To the north, the eastern field stretches out. To anyone else, it’s just a corner. To me, it was a battlefield. My brother and I spent hours there with GI Joes and Transformers, turning that patch of ground into something far bigger than it actually was. The terrain mattered. The angles mattered. The fence line became cover, the dips in the earth became strategic positions. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were learning how to see space—not just as it is, but as it could be used. We lost things there. Accessories, probably a figure or two. Small plastic pieces that slipped into the dirt and never came back. And there’s a good chance they’re still there. Buried just beneath the surface, waiting for someone who doesn’t know what they’ve found. But I do. Because I remember not just the place… …but wh...

  Behind where the house once stood, there is still something left. We called it a barn, but that’s not quite right. It was more of a shed—high-ceilinged, open, covered with a mix of tin and plastic roofing that had seen better days even back then. It extended forward and to the right, creating additional covered space. It wasn’t pretty, but it was useful. Vehicles, equipment, whatever needed shelter found its way under that roof at one point or another. Today, it still stands… barely. Time has not been kind to it. The structure leans into its own age. The roof looks like it could give up the ghost with the next strong wind. And yet, it remains. The man who rents the pasture keeps a piece of farm equipment under it. There was also an old Mitsubishi Mirage sitting there, its license plate years out of date, like it had been forgotten mid-sentence. That shed is the last physical connection to what this place used to be. Everything else is memory. But that one structure… it st...

About 30 to 40 feet west of the house stood a two-car garage. It wasn’t tall—maybe ten feet at most. Low enough that my grandfather’s 1985 Dodge Ram barely cleared the opening by a couple of inches. Pulling into that space required attention. You didn’t just drive in. You placed the vehicle there. The driveway in front of it still exists. Concrete doesn’t forget as easily as wood does. Inside the garage, the front half was for vehicles. Functional, straightforward. But behind that, partitioned off, were two smaller rooms. Storage rooms. The kind of spaces where things went when they were no longer needed daily, but not yet ready to be discarded. You could access those rooms from the main garage or through a side door on the east. They weren’t glamorous. They weren’t organized in any modern sense. But they served a purpose. Like everything else out there. The garage, the shed, the grain bin—these weren’t aesthetic choices. They were solutions. Each one answered a question: Where...

  The house is gone now, but I can still walk through it. It faced south, like it was meant to greet the day head-on. There was a front porch that wrapped across the front and leaned slightly toward the west, as if it wanted a better look at the setting sun. A side door sat on the west wall, and a back door on the east—each one used for a different purpose, each one part of the rhythm of daily life. Inside, everything revolved around a central fireplace. Not tucked away on a wall, but planted right in the middle like a heartbeat. The rooms spread out from it—bedrooms, bathrooms, the kitchen off to one side. It wasn’t fancy. It wasn’t modern. But it worked. There was a small room near the kitchen, something like a utility space. My grandfather used it as a laundry room. It also served as a kind of back entry—one of those in-between spaces where outside life met inside life. Upstairs, there was an unfinished attic. No insulation. No drywall. Just exposed structure and stored item...

  It was 65 degrees when I stepped out onto the farm in Mercer, Tennessee. Not a cloud in the sky. The kind of late afternoon where the sun lingers just long enough to remind you it won’t be here forever. Birds were calling to one another across the open land, and for a moment, it felt like nothing had changed. But everything had. It was a little after 5 p.m., and the quiet hit differently than I remembered. Not empty. Not lonely. Just… still. The kind of stillness that doesn’t ask anything from you, but quietly invites you to notice it. There was no movement from the neighboring property. No distant machinery. No voices. Just the land, breathing slowly under a soft sky. I didn’t walk the whole 18 acres. I didn’t need to. My feet carried me toward what used to be the center of everything—the place where a house once stood, where a garage once echoed with the sounds of work, where life once gathered in predictable, meaningful patterns. That’s the thing about land like this. You...

Some people, when describing their luck in life, use the phrase: "If it weren't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all." Upon observing my personal luck being orders of magnitudes worse than even that, my brother nicknamed me "Lemonade Stand" when I was in high school. The logic goes like this: 1. "If life hands you lemons, then make lemonade!" 2. Well, you've been handed so many lemons, you've got the whole lemonade stand! Hence this new entry in the blog. First up - just a few weeks ago, I replaced a couple of leaky faucets in the house. This, I've done before. But a few weeks ago, we got the opportunity for lemonade! The new faucet in the kitchen broke within a week! Sadly, I didn't have the box or receipt, as I've never seen this happen before. Fortunately, the retailer allowed me to return it as hey had logged the purchase and I could identify it. A new faucet, and I was set. Except the new one broke within moments of...