Blue Shadows Farm: A Novel

61. Holding On—June 1980

355 Emma June 1980 Emma loved the late weeks in May and the early weeks of June. Each year around her birthday (May 15) she looked forward to the lupines; she now had an entire hillside of them leading up to the cemetery on top of the hill above the old cabin. Almost every evening during these first weeks of spring, when the chores were done, she and Jim walked up to the little cemetery among the lush blue flowers. Jim had come to love the lupines as much as she. Neither of them was so young anymore—Emma had turned fifty-four on her birthday, and Jim had turned sixty-four back in February. So they took advantage of the evening hours to relax after the hard days of preparing the soil and planting crops—potatoes, oats, corn. Jim never ceased to amaze Emma. One evening she remembered so well, he had along with him his copy of Emerson’s Nature. What surprised her—she didn’t know why it should—was how much Jim read and, perhaps even more surprising, what he read. “Do you mind . . . if I read a few lines?” he asked. “What Mr. 61 Holding On Emerson said . . . seems to fit this place.” Jim turned a few pages in the book he held and began, “The health of the eye . . . seems to demand . . . a horizon.” He paused before continuing. Emma had been looking to the far reaches of the farm, to where a row of oaks lined the wire fence that Grandpa Starkweather had built. The trees formed the horizon, with a cloudless sky meeting the green treetops. Jim continued, “We are never tired . . . as long as we can see far enough.” “Oh, Jim,” Emma said. “That so fits this day, when the sky is so blue and the air is so clear.” They both sat, neither saying anything, as the first hatch of Karner blue butterflies flitted about, one landing on Jim’s finger for both of them to watch. So tiny, yet so beautiful, this little creature with its blue wings and orange spots. When the sun began slipping below the line of trees to the west and streaks of red and pink stretched overhead, they slowly walked down the hill, Jim going to the log cabin that he had come to love so well, and Emma to the old house, empty and silent. She’d purchased a television set some years ago, but she watched nothing except the news and the weather. She’d offered to buy one for Jim, as a present, but he said, “No, I wouldn’t know . . . what to do with it.” Jim did have a radio to keep him up with what was happening in the world. He had lined the walls of the cabin with books. “These are . . . my friends,” Jim said one day when Emma stopped by to bring him a special apple pie. “What’s the pie . . . for?” he asked. “I just wanted to do it,” Emma said. She hadn’t stepped into the old cabin for some time and was not surprised at how neat and clean it was—or how many books he had. The same week that Jim had read from Emerson, the Link Lake Gazette carried this front-page article: 356 Holding On—June 1980 357 Holding On—June 1980 U A E C  S F F I Chicago, Illinois June 12, 1980 At a national meeting of farm experts in Chicago today, Professor Sidney Wilson Golightly IV declared the end to the mythic family farm, as he described the institution. “All that remains is the burial,” this noted agricultural economist , who teaches at Wisconsin State University, said in his keynote address to 500 agricultural leaders from across the United States. “We’ve held onto this icon of American agriculture far too long,” he said.“The small family farm, as a viable producer of food and fiber, died a couple of decades ago, and we just didn’t notice .” Golightly wrote the bestselling book Family Farms: It’s Time to Forget Them. “The industrial model that has been extremely successful in every other part of our economy fits agriculture like a glove,” he said. “The sooner we in agriculture adopt the industrial model, the better off we all will be.” Golightly went on to compare the manufacture of an automobile to the operation of a factory farm...