Sunday, June 5, 2016




Jeff Cullen, guest writer for today’s post, was a dear friend who left us, all too soon, in May this year, a month before his sixty-fifth birthday. Before I knew him, Jeff was my husband’s college friend, a funny, bright, surprising guy. He grew up on a farm in southeastern Pennsylvania, went to college in Maine, and over his lifetime, maintained a love of the sea as well as a love for the farm. He was a hard-working man, generally holding one or more – up to three – other jobs while also working on the farm. Jeff was a prodigious reader who loved history and literature, and who could launch into the most surprising discussions at any moment. No matter if his subject was the Civil War, the battle of Agincourt in 1415, or the conversation he had with a dissatisfied customer in the supermarket a week ago, Jeff was a gifted storyteller. And funny – oh, he could bring the house down sometimes. He was a beloved uncle to our children, a dear, dear friend, a curmudgeon with a heart of gold. Today, on Jeff’s birthday, I am honored to present “Farmers’ Time,” the eulogy he wrote for his own father.



FARMERS’ TIME

Guess maybe it’s how you look at things – the face or the edifice of a coin, the dawn and the sunset – you know, how life meets death and shudders and emerges as life again.

My father, a farmer, died in early June, unloading hay in the top of his barn in the cool evening quiet that comes after a hot day of toil and deadlines. Sudden, final, the last worst thought of our minds, like an awful aberration, a crushing grievous jolt to the rhythm of his family’s lives that had seen the best spring start in years.

Yet I wonder at this tragedy, and somehow see it as part of a grand puzzle come together to form an unforgettable memory that will warm and comfort his survivors as the years move on.

It looked like he had just lain down; his color was still robust; there were no signs of a struggle. Only our dog saw it, and ran to show us. Dad was kneeling against a bale on a wagon bed he’d built, in his barn, back lit by a 150 watt bulb overhead, with the fresh perfume of beautiful hay in the cool even darkness that comes only on a cloudy night.

I rushed out, hoping to breathe life into he who had given us our lives and everything good in life. Oh, I knew when I saw him, but it could not make me quit trying. There, for a precious few minutes, we lay with him, trying to kiss life back into him until the paramedics could get there with the proper tools. Too late, and how cruel it seemed. Two hours in the emergency room, and a restless tearful night of organizing – planning for the events of the coming days.


His children and his dearest neighbors were all there before dawn, forming a grieving wall for his shaken wife, who loved him utterly, totally, without constraints. Three acres of his hay, his final windrows, lay in the heat under a cloudy threatening sky. A chance for one last challenge that would have made him proud, something to do when we all felt so helpless and missed him so much. We turned it twice and baled it up, unloading, even selling it, before it got cool and the showers came.

Then, a quiet sleepless night while the news filtered through all its passage ways to our community and our extended family. Two days of unseasonably cold weather, clouded, sunless, and drizzling, gave us time to tie things up, for our friends and neighbors to put aside their labors and send their sympathies, pay their respects, and comfort us with their kind words and support.

We found a place to lay him to rest, near enough to visit at a whim, overlooking another farm, its pond and cows, and in sight of where he had, himself, torn down and saved two barns last fall to rebuild on our place.

The day of his funeral was cool and rainy, rain coming as we stood at his grave, hurrying us away to our friends, and away from any morbid contemplation. And it rained all day, a good sign, for we needed rain, and as Dad would say, a good day for a funeral, for a farmer couldn’t do much in such weather. A day to finish his work, and three days to rest and plan and remember him, without the sunshine to give us guilt or make us look beyond his memory.

And that night, as the front pushed through, a rainbow at sunset, there just long enough for Mother to see and know it was God’s benediction.

A series of little weather events, all entered into my father’s daily weather diary – all rare and deliberate and unforgettable, reminding us of the rhythm of the earth that is part of us and to which we belong. This was a farmer’s time, the puzzle pieces all falling into place – in respect for my father, who was a steward of the land and a flower on this earth.


Jeff Cullen 
June 13, 1995

4 comments:

  1. Thank you, Kate. You are right, I am the better for having read it.

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  2. This is lovely, Kate. I'm sorry for your loss; I'm sure you will miss Jeff. He seems to have been a remarkable man and a gifted writer.
    Thank you.
    Donna

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  3. So beautiful. He must have been a wonderful man.

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  4. A warm and loving memory. A joy to hear from you. Thanks. Len

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