By Troy Bishopp
My Grandpa Steele used to say, “Sometimes I sits and thinks: sometimes I just sits.”
In this wee hour I sits. In this wee hour I process. In this wee hour I cry. In this wee hour I am tortured. In this wee hour I purge. In this wee hour I write. In this wee hour I heal a little bit.
In the wee hours I have heard the fireman’s siren, a bellowing cow, the sound of milking machines and the silence of an empty barn. In the wee hours, I plow snow in solitude. In the wee hours I got the 3am phone call that my only brother had died on the Carolina shore. In the wee hours I fret about financials, workload and my family’s well-being. I fret about things I can’t control especially around the yearly memorial days. What is the purpose for all this useless toil?
How must I go on? How may I shoulder the grief, the failures, and the animosity? How do I put on the “good” face? It plagues me like a disease, a cruel joke, a silent mind game. What is it that makes me weak? What is it that creates this negativity over positivity? What is it that makes me scream inside? What is it, and why does it seem to burden just me? What is it that makes me weep so?
“In the Lakota/Sioux tradition, a person who is grieving is considered most waken, most holy. There’s a sense that when someone is struck by the sudden lightning of loss, he or she stands on the threshold of the spirit world. You might recall what it’s like to be with someone who has grieved deeply. The person has no layer of protection, nothing left to defend. The mystery is looking out through that person’s eyes. For the time being, he or she has accepted the reality of loss and has stopped clinging to the past or grasping at the future.” ― Tara Brach.
In the wee hours I wonder if Fred Provenza was right: Is this all there is?
What is my why? Where am I going? What’s my legacy? What’s wrong with my head? Why can’t I focus? Am I damaged goods? Why can’t I become truly happy? What is the roadmap? What more do I have to do? What is God’s plan? Can I be loved? Who will listen? Who will understand the emotional pain? Who will help me? Who will be my savior? Is there relief in my future?
As I listen to Chester, Danny, Brent, Alexandria and Shaman’s Harvest “Dragonfly”, the wee hours become lighter as dawn arrives and the internal turmoil subsides for now. I have become part of agriculture’s walking wounded. I look at what I’ve written so far. The stark words and the 10 waded-up Kleenexes are my therapy for the day. On this morning another milestone birthday of my brother Scott passes. He would have been 56 years old. It’s my coping mechanism system.
I must cry to purge. It’s my emotional medication. I hope the words relate and allow those who are afraid, to show such vulnerabilities and unload too—if they need to in the wee hours.
Society expects their farmers to be strong not vulnerable. It’s a fallacy in an underappreciated cheap food system that we can survive unscathed. How many more harvests before our land and human resources are used up? Is there even a land ethic anymore or are we going to keep treating Mother Earth like shit? Things that make me thinks and sits.
In our communities, in the wee hours, many farmers and their families are still working while hurting and trying to survive. Most of us are trying in earnest to find what “it” is and move to a better place in our lives, all the while grieving for those missed opportunities in life. That’s what it feels like to me even though I am truly blessed. In the wee hours, I struggle to make sense of it all, and find relevance on another Memorial day, February 21st, 2021.
Writing out my demons help in the wee hours but now I must RISE!! For my brother’s sake.
John Marble
Brother Troy:
Three hours before dawn, far too soon to be awake, I must have heard something. Perhaps it was you. I had to read your piece here twice, trying to make sure you were writing about your own experience and not mine. You and I, it seems, have some wee-hour conversations ahead of us.
This business of loss- yours, mine, all of ours- is difficult to untangle. All of these various threads wind up like a pile of discarded baling twine. Pull a free end here and there and the knots grow tighter. I have no solution in hand, and worst of all, I begin to doubt that there is one at all.
I wrote a note to a friend last night, lamenting the long list of my troubles, begging for his patience. Today, after reading your thoughts, I think I’ll stop by the graveyard. It’s convenient, after all, just one driveway off to the west. On a sunny winter day, those stones really shine.
John
Ellen Klein Posa
Troy, your words really touch home. I sits and thinks and remembering our adventures sliding on “Bishopp’s Hill”. Scott was a great kid. I wish I could have known him as an adult. Be happy knowing that he lived a good life and was a great human being.
Your words are therapeutic to many. I truly respect and admire the man you have become….a long way from the kid who rode in the Pinto with Joy and me.🤣 Love you.