Poor Richard’s Almanac

Our friend Ben has never been formally introduced to the novelist, poet, farmer, and ethicist Wendell Berry, but he did kick me once. It was at some function Bob Rodale was hosting back in the day, and Wendell Berry was one of the speakers. As he attempted to squeeze through the aisle to his seat, he inadvertently gave the youthful Ben quite a whack in the shin. (And of course apologized immediately.)

Our friend Ben wasn’t sorry to have been kicked. But I was sorry that, instead of apologizing, Wendell Berry didn’t stare me in the eyes with dawning recognition and exclaim, “Why, aren’t you a Simms from Washington County? Your grandaddy Ben Simms was a very fine man.”

This won’t make a whole lot of sense if you’re not familiar with Mr. Berry’s Port William novels, set in a fictional, rural area of Kentucky. In the novels and short stories Wendell Berry has created around what he calls the “Port William Membership,” he has formed a cast of unforgettable characters that stretch in all their myriad connections from the Civil War through the 1970s, and maybe beyond. Some of these characters, like Ptolemy Proudfoot, Burley Coulter, and Old Jack Beechum, seem larger than life; some, like Ben Feltner, seem better than life. But they’re not.

Our friend Ben spent the happiest times of my childhood with my grandparents in Springfield, Kentucky, when it was still just a very rural part of the Bluegrass area, maybe 60 miles from Lexington and 18 from the historic and wonderful town of Bardstown. I spent a lot of time out on my grandparents’ farm, Beechland, and in the tiny town of Springfield, where everyone knew me and my whole history and I could walk as a 7-year-old into any store alone and be greeted warmly and given candy and feel looked after, and in the feed mill where I loved playing with the ears of field corn and the Indian corn while my grandaddy conducted business, and nobody minded my being there.

I loved fishing in our ponds and bringing home our catch and watching my grandaddy gut it and my grandma fry it for our supper. I loved riding over our fields, which stretched beyond my sight, in front of my grandaddy on his big horse, and admiring our mules, and picking fossils out of the river gravel, and petting the calves, and following Mary Jo, the hugely capable wife of our tenant, to admire her big vegetable and flower garden. I loved going with my grandma to her own extensive vegetable and fruit garden to see what was in bloom and what was ripening and what we needed to harvest, and going with her into the pantry and seeing the gleaming jars on the shelves and the African violets in the window.

Most of all, I loved feeling the kindness and the decency and the capability that radiated from my grandaddy like fire from a woodstove, and feeling his sense of our history and connection to the land, and how that connection ran in me and linked me to all the Simmses and the Merritts and Hankses and Montgomerys and Mattinglys and Walls and everyone else who had gone before.

Without Grandaddy, with his abundant, all-encompassing love for and connection to the land and to our people and to everyone else, our neighbors and our animals, I would never have become what I am. Without Grandma, who adored me and cosseted me and still managed to give me the freedom to wander and explore and create, I would never have found the security to rest in myself as I am and to defy and deny the conventions that would otherwise have held me in a loveless marriage of boring toil for pointless gain.

Without the two of them, my grandaddy’s wide and welcoming lap, my grandma’s perennial invitation to join her on their sturdy porch swing, to have a glass of iced tea or lemonade or to smell the nasturtiums in bloom or admire the huge green flower balls of the hydrangea hedge, or to travel in their big old navy-blue Buick Lesabre, smelling of leather and pipe tobacco and any number of other fine, comforting smells, to their favorite restaurant to enjoy our mutual favorite, lamb chops, on a Saturday night, I could never have come into myself. I could never have understood what it meant to become custodian of a piece of land and the place and people and animals that share it with you, to become part of the history of your people and your place on earth. I could never have come to be whole.

All this is something that Wendell Berry understands in his bones and makes evident in his wonderful Port William novels. He creates a host of marvelous characters and breathes authenticity into them, as he does into the places where they live. The novels are unadorned, like their characters, like the farms and stores and homesteads that populate them. People live and love and die and form connections, to each other, to the land. Things go wrong, people suffer, but on a small, believable scale. We, the readers, suffer with their sufferings, and rejoice in their triumphs, also small, but profound even as they are profoundly human.

Like any great writing, Wendell Berry’s Port William novels will change you. I suggest that you start with the first (chronologically), The Memory of Old Jack, and let them carry you on their own momentum from there. You’ll be glad you made the time for them.

Our friend Ben will leave you with a quote from Mr. Berry that I, my grandaddy, and any farmer, gardener, naturalist, or homesteader can wholeheartedly endorse: “What I stand for is what I stand on.” Amen.