Ware Farm: Bernie and Bud

Bernie watched in the background as his Dad (“you can call me Bernard, or Bud”) began to blink away the tears that came down the well worn paths of his memory of driving that bulldozer, the tears that broke from their stall when he spoke the words “the smell of death.”  He was in Frankfurt, Germany at the end of World War II, a soldier working in the reconstruction and pacification efforts there; his D4 Caterpillar Bulldozer moving the rubble created by our bombers, in the war that he just missed, the war that stopped Hitler.  “My dad was a litter carrier near there in Germany,” I told him.  “And now our son lives there.”  “He loved the beauty of Bavaria, and throughout his life he painted pictures of it.”  But for Bud, it was not the beauty of the Black Forest that remained with him, but the smell emanating from that concrete and stone and twisted metal.  He spoke of the bulldozer like an old man speaking of an old car, an extension of himself, turning him into a centaur, a Titan, half human, half god.  But in the middle of the image of strength and power, the clattering unstoppability of that D4, there was that smell, and the fresh tears with the same salt after 65 years.

Ware Farm (click for a link) brought Bernie back from wherever life had taken him until age 37.  Who are our dads to us at that age, when we are just starting to notice the flaws in our own perfect scenario, the lives we’ve made away from them, free of them?  The farm, Bud’s farm, had grown, replacing Bernie and the other grown kids with a dozen employees.  And Bud saw it as time to let Bernie take over, to be relieved of the incessant demands of nature. 

New varieties of apple are created by grafting the branch of one tree to the trunk of another.  The sap from the old tree flows through the new branch, and something is created that is something of each.  So too with Ware Farm.  Under Bernie’s husbandry, it is Certified Organic.  The dozens of employees the Bud supervised have morphed into a kaleidoscope of interns, attracted by the reputation of the farm as a dance of nature’s generosity when tended nature’s way, when served rather than manipulated, when nurtured rather than controlled.   The generation of siblings that Bud provided has been replaced by the kids of “members”, families like our daughter and son-in-law who purchase “shares” of the Ware Farm CSA, Community Supported Agriculture, turning the family farm into the families’ farm.  It was at the members’ picnic last week that Kathy and I got to meet Bud, listening to his stories while Bernie watched from a few feet away, while our granddaughters worked joyfully with one of the interns, planting the “Kids’ Garden” again this year.

Bud smiles as we ask him how he feels about what his son has done with the farm.  He blinks away tears, cleansing tears, tears of an old farmer who “missed” the killing of the war, but smelled the death buried there, and returned to conceive this son, who would grow into a pacifist, calm as a pre-dawn pond.  And that son would graft onto the dad he had left long ago, and Ware Farm would flow through his veins, and turn into the gift that it is today, to those of us who sit down at breakfast today with yesterday’s strawberries, and look at pictures of happy grandchildren, there in the dirt, the smell of basil and thyme and rosemary in our memories, and the way Bernie watched his dad telling us stories, watched him as he grew young, even as he grew old, seeing the roots, in those post-war vignettes, of his own intentional pacifism, his peacemaking with this soil.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.