At 63 I Faced Losing My Farm Until An Unexpected Delivery Changed Everything

That was the year I learned the particular quality of fear that comes from farming, which is different from other fears because the threat is never abstract. The land is real and the debt on it is real and the weather is indifferent and the margins are thin enough that one bad season can begin a slide that takes three or four good years to stop. My father had grown up in the Depression and had a farmer’s fatalism about the whole enterprise, which was less despair than practical adaptation, the understanding that you could do everything right and still lose what you’d worked for, and that the only sensible response was to keep working.

He had passed that philosophy to me along with the land, and I was trying to live by it in 1982, but some days the philosophy and the bank balance were in direct conflict. The foreclosure notice that had arrived seventeen days ago was not, in that sense, a surprise. It was the destination of a road I had been on for two years.

A drought, then a machinery failure that cost forty thousand I didn’t have, then an interest rate that moved when I had assumed it was fixed. I had talked to the bank four times. I had talked to a lawyer once.