Farm Life: Tryptic

I wasn't sure what I'd do with these three photos, but I had a good feeling about them as a set when I took them.

Probably goes without saying, but view the image above at the widest size you can.

A few days ago, I spent an evening out in farm country a few miles from where I live. I like going to these particular fields because they have a very nice view of Mt. Rainier; but on this night, I looked the other way because earlier that day, the fields had been planted by a hard-working migrant crew riding on the back of a large carriage. The young plants had been watered just before I got there, and the soil was deep, dark, inviting (if you like planting, I suppose; it might just be dirt, for some).

Listening to the men planting, shouting instructions, all the preconceptions I had about migrant workers faded away; these were guys, guys who know what they are doing, doing it with purpose like it’s been done for thousands of years: reaching your hand down, pushing a living little thing into the soil so it can grow and feed someone.

That’s there, beside all the rest of it: the long days, the burning sun, the travel, the dashed hopes, family maybe very far away. I remembered times when I did things I didn’t really want to do, or didn’t understand, when I was young and had to do what I was told. How, now, seven decades on, the meaning of so many of those things are clearer than I could have imagined they would grow to be. Experience is all about seeds, and putting your dreams into soil—even if they are someone else’s dreams, they have weight, along side the pains, the misses, the ugly days. If a life is a sum, then the number calculated isn’t what’s meaningful; it is the making of sums, the starting of little things, the observation of what works, what fails, what hurts, what makes you happy.

If you are lucky, one day you realize that the weight of everything is in your heart. The good, the bad, the pretty, the ugly, the dreams and the realities blur enough to understand why we are. There is nothing you can say to teach it; it is made of bruises and parties, obligations and trust, loss and mourning. It’s funny: you can think when you’re young that all of this matters, or that it must matter; or fear that it never will. At my age, what matters is just being here to observe little things, strong hands, ragged desire.

That’s my story of the pictures; they don’t mean anything, except that someone worked damn hard to put every single one of those little plants out there to grow into food. How fortunate it is, that the world still works, however cruelly or stupidly or forgetfully; I hope we can keep that, at least that, going.