Larry L. Dill's
New Hope Journal
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New Hope Journals of Yesteryear
June, 2004
A Father's Day Tribute:
(The following essay is reprinted here as it first appeared in the Nacogdoches Sentinel in February 1980. My mother had died six months earlier at the age of 58 (see Journals of Yesteryear: A Mother's day Tribute). My father who was then 62 and had been married to my mother since 1941 was trying to find himself again and had come to New Hope Farm for hope and distraction and I suppose because he felt I had no idea what I was doing. He had come of age during the depression and his family was so poor that he had to be "farmed out" as a teenager to a farm family who was in a bit better condition than his was. That is where he met my mother and that is where they fell in love and that is where they learned together the virtues and the sorrows of hard work and dirt farming. Dad died 13 years later at 75 in 1993. This is the way I remember him best.)
Panning for gold on Flower Mountain
by Larry L. Dill
When Dad comes to see us I might just as well forget about being a writer and start thinking about being a farmer…or rather a farm hand. He came rolling in the other day and informed me he had a week to stay and that before he left he was going to stack the 20 tons of green lumber I had piled out front and he was going to build the fence around the garden I’d been “crying about” for months. When he got through with it would be hog tight, goat proof and chicken resistant. Moreover, he was going out to find a Jersey heifer to buy for Camen’s birthday and then he was going to look for a good horse trailer so he could take our “ill-mannered (but lovable) mare and give her the workout she needed before he’d trust her with the children. While he was at it he might have her bred.
Since Elaine and I moved to the country, Dad has experienced a rekindling of his own rural roots. It’s a kind of time warp for him as it is for many other people who come here to New Hope to visit and look around. Our homestead, with its horse and goat, its pigs and chickens, its woodstove and outdoor plumbing, its hand-made, makeshift buildings and its antique furniture appears to those who have been away from it most of their adult lives, a refreshing remembrance of the richness and simplicity of growing up in the country.
No one ever used to be in a hurry. Time moved as slowly as a team of mules pulling a wagon. It brought forth the seasons with welcome regularity. Work was hard but taken for granted by every member of the family. Pleasures were simple and undeniably wholesome. Forty-two parties and ice cream socials, riding father’s horse to call on a lady on a Sunday afternoon, sitting on the front porch swaying to the rhythm of the swing, whispering softly so as not to be heard inside the open-windowed living room where the family talked quietly, no television or radio there to interfere with the sound of a gentle breeze.
Technology has made it possible to travel swiftly, work less, be more professionally entertained. People still live in families, they still court and marry. They still raise children. But somehow it all seems like poetry badly translated into a foreign language. Nothing means the same anymore. Much is lost and a great deal now is mourned. New Hope Farm is the search, not so much for self-sufficiency as for self-reliance. Not so much for a return to the technology of the past as for a rediscovery of the virtues and the wisdom of the ages.
My father’s generation is the first in the history of western civilization that has not relied on the horse as the cornerstone of its transportation. His generation is the first in American history in which more people live in the cities than work the land. His generation is the first on earth to have instant worldwide communication systems, instant food and the capability for instant global destruction.
It is no wonder that many of us of all ages are looking to the past as we rush headlong into the future, for the truths that have sustained us this far, for the values that have given way under the pressure of a cancerous technological apocalypse, for the wisdom of our grandfathers, and our forefathers and the American natives, and the ageless scriptures.
Dad has gotten most of the things done he promised. He works out there now, even as I write these words. The work is strenuous but it is like panning for gold, for in it he strains to see his younger days and to understand what ought to be saved. I am his colleague in that search as are growing legions of searchers I see all around me and I have hope for the future mankind.
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