Knolltop Farm Wife

It’s an October morning and harvest continues to roll on throughout the country.   I’ve seen reports of happy farmers finishing beans and moving on to corn. I’ve seen reports of neighboring farmers harvesting 450 acres of corn for their cancer-stricken neighboring farmer and last night lying in bed, I received a text from my son who was still in the field harvesting beans well after dark. It’s that time of year when passion and tenacity are at their highest and work ethics are driving men and women to stay in the field until the job is done.   Combines hardly get a chance to cool down, grain trucks comb the roads and full fields begin to take on their flat, brown wardrobe of winter. It’s time to fill up the bins, to convert feed to food and feed the world.   Farmers will trade in their sit down dinners at noon with family for solo sandwiches on the tailgate. They will swap time spent in the bleachers for time in the tractor cab. They will stay up late, rise up e...

Enjoying a morning of freedom from having to go anywhere or pack to go anywhere, I sat down to hammer out some more work for a project that was taking longer than I ever thought it would. Email notifications started going off on my phone, this isn't unusual but when I looked to see who they were from, my heart began to race and that old familiar friend began to creep into my mind. Fear. Fear likes me. He likes to control me because I've been easy to control. When he enters,  I bow down and serve him whatever he wants.  Condemning thoughts or destructive self talk, whatever fear wants, I hand control over to him.  He can have my self confidence, my thought life, my intelligence, my responses, my future, he gets it all, I give it all up to him. But today was different. Today I went to war with fear. Instead of trying to brush past fear and pretend he wasn't the elephant in the room, I stood up to him. Today, I took my Bible, flipped it open and began to re...

When you were younger did you ever say, “I will never…….”    Fill in the blank—drive a minivan, let my children have a motorcycle, allow my kids to play video games, sit and watch dirt track racing…. Last weekend I found myself doing something I thought I would never do.   Racing of any kind was not on the radar in my family. My parents never took us to any kind of car race, motorcycle racing, nothing of the sort.   The closest we ever got to racing was the Standardbred racing at the county fair. So when my husband said, “Hey, you wanna go to Butler?” I said, “uhm….sure.” Growing up in the south, dirt track racing was his the thing to do on Saturday night.   He watched it on TV, he went to the track, he loved every minute of it.   I have never known this side of my spouse, we never had the time or the energy to take four kids to the dirt track on a Saturday night so this part of his personality has been muted….until now. Sitting in the dirt ...

It's a cold and windy day on the Knolltop. The cows have had their lunch and now it's time to head into town for a few supplies. I miss writing on this blog. It's a freeing place to be for me because no one pays me for it and I can write whatever I want and if you don't like it, you can click exit.  But I hope you don't, it's not my desire to offend anyone. It's also been a great timeline for our family. A place where I have documented so much of our lives for a few short years and I believe that is such a valuable piece of our history. While none of my children will read this today my hope is that when they are 50 or 60 they will come back and look it over and savor the memories from their childhood on the Knolltop. One thing...among many things....that I did not do when our children were young was the annual family photo.  I've seen countless other families who have had breathtaking photos of their families and yet we have nothing but church dire...

There’s nothing like the smell of shavings when you walk into a barn at a livestock show. In one breathe sweet memories sweep across your mind like a movie on the big screen and you instantly feel at home. I had that sensation as I walked into Freedom Hall at the recent North American International Livestock Exposition in Louisville, Kentucky. It was late one night and I had posted the last picture of the day’s show, slung my camera over my shoulder and   spent a little time just walking the aisles of cattle.   Several scenes played across the screen in front of me as I strolled around clipping chutes, feed pans and straw packs.   On my left, two older men were swapping stories of days gone by while across the aisle a young fitter covered in cow hair and adhesive was winding up his cords and oiling his clipper blades. I glanced straight ahead into the milking parlor and saw a man milking a cow and chatting with his buddy who sat on a bucket nearby. I turned down...

Growing up 19 months apart, they were close.   As toddlers many thought they were twins as their mom dressed them in similar outfits.   They were inseparable.   Whatever the oldest one did, the second one copied. When the older brother stepped on a stone, the younger one stepped on the same stone.   When the older brother played baseball, the younger one found a mitt and played along. When the older one got a tractor, the younger one made his purchase. When the older one went to college, the younger one went to college.  While their personalities were polar opposites, they got along like two peas on a pod. After a long, busy day having gone their separate ways, they would convene in the kitchen late at night and talk in hushed voices about their day as if debriefing from a top secret mission.  The older brother was a wanderer wanting to see the world, the younger one was content staying within a 20 mile radius of home. The older brother travele...

At a spring band concert at our small high school gymnasium I held my camera trying to video the last concert of my daughter's high school career.  Probably her final concert ever. It was her senior night and I wanted to capture the entire event.   Jake and Sarah   I sat in the bleachers with my parents as we listened and I try to hold the camera steady. I couldn't help but be distracted by the children in front of us. They were about 9 or 10 years old and were very active and very loud. They crawled under the chairs, over the chairs, pulled each other's hair, cried to their parents and as their parents made a poor attempt at keeping them settled, these three kids paid no attention, they just kept squirming and giggling.  I was disgusted at the parents lack of respect to not only the students performing but also for the parents surrounding them.  If they had any clue at all they would keep their children quiet or take them out.  Why couldn't they ...