Once Upon a Farm

by Rory Feek

  © 2018 Rory Feek

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by W Publishing Group, an imprint of Thomas Nelson.

  Thomas Nelson titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail SpecialMarkets@ThomasNelson.com.

  The Bible verse quoted in “Climbing Trees” is Matthew 19:26, King James Version, Public domain.

  Any Internet addresses, phone numbers, or company or product information printed in this book are offered as a resource and are not intended in any way to be or to imply an endorsement by Thomas Nelson, nor does Thomas Nelson vouch for the existence, content, or services of these sites, phone numbers, companies, or products beyond the life of this book.

  Epub Edition May 2018 9780785216742

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Feek, Rory Lee, author.

  Title: Once upon a farm : lessons on growing love, life, and hope on a new frontier / Rory Feek.

  Description: Nashville, Tennessee : W Publishing Group, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018000691 | ISBN 9780785216728 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Feek, Rory Lee. | Singers—United States—Biography. | Country musicians—United States—Biography.

  Classification: LCC ML420.F315 A3 2018 | DDC 782.421642092 [B] —dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018000691

  Printed in the United States of America

  18 19 20 21 22 LSC 5 4 3 2 1

  For our three beautiful daughters: Heidi, Hopie, and Indiana.

  Even when you have babies, you will still be my babies.

  For the blonde and the brown and the pigtails that rise

  For the blue and the green and almond-shaped eyes

  For the future and the past and the moments you’re in

  From your father, your daddy, your Papa and friend.

  For the pain and the sorrow and the empty you feel

  For the joy and the happy and the magic that’s real

  For the love and the hope that never will end

  From your father, your daddy, your Papa and friend.

  For the daughter and mother, the lover and wife

  For the questions, the answers, and the riddles of life

  For the grownup and the child that lives deep within

  From your father, your daddy, your Papa and friend.

  Contents

  Foreword

  Coming Home

  Day One

  A Bigger Love

  One Plus One

  My College Years

  Semper Fi

  Barber Shopping

  Choo-Choo Training

  Dollars and Sense

  Unwritten

  Dearly Beloved

  Fixer-Upper

  Location, Location, Location

  Three Chords and the Truth

  I Hold the Pen

  Video Rewind

  Daddy, What If?

  Monday, Monday

  Brilliant Limitations

  The Bus Stops Here

  Mayberry

  Some Barn

  Heart Break

  Farmhouse Christmas

  Bib & Buckle

  Presidential Treatment

  I Love You, I Love You, I Love You

  Modern Family

  Our Very Own

  Heartlight

  Bare-Metal Truth

  Brand-New Bus

  Speak Love

  Miss Congeniality

  Hymn and Her

  Uncle Dale

  Boy in the Mirror

  Climbing Trees

  My Worst Nightmare

  Happy Mother’s Day, Dad

  Boots and Bibles

  Fire Kids

  Teaching Me How to Love You

  Love Does

  Gentleman Farmer

  Field of Dreams

  Special Eyes

  Home School

  Unfamous

  WWJD?

  Once Upon a Farm

  Lifesteading

  Sign of the Cross

  From the Cradle to the Grave

  Always and Forever

  Last Letters

  About the Author

  Photos

  Foreword

  I’ve noticed that most books begin with an opening section called the foreword. Which is perfect for this book, too, because forward is where we must go even when we don’t want to.

  They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but for this book, I disagree. What’s on the front of the book you’re holding pretty much sums up what’s on the pages inside, not because the little girl on my shoulders is adorable and the farmhouse and barns behind it are so picturesque. But because the story of that picture is kinda like the story that is shared in the book. It was a roller-coaster ride with enthusiastic high fives and disappointing loss, the testing of our faith and the realization that everything would be okay, even when it wasn’t . . . just like the fifteen-year-plus story that has unfolded at our farm since we bought it in 1999. But for the photo, all those things happened in less than twelve hours.

  It was just before sunset about six months ago, and we were in the back field. Me and Indy, the publisher’s art director, a few friends, and our photographer buddy, Bryan Allen. BA, as his friends call him, is a world-class cameraman. Whether it’s still photography of someone’s wedding day or a major sporting event being shot on video, BA will capture what you’re looking for and then some.

  Since it was May, and the days were getting longer, and hotter, I told BA he might have a window of a half hour or so of really good light in the back field as the sun’s setting, but, unfortunately, our three-year-old daughter Indiana’s window is probably gonna be much shorter. A few minutes, max. Maybe only a few seconds. And that’s exactly what happened. Around 7:30 p.m., we found a spot in the tall grass just over the shoulder of the fenced-in cemetery, and I picked her up on my shoulders as someone told Indy to smile. As the camera aperture clicked, Indy smiled great big for a moment or two—then proceeded to fall apart.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she had seen the small wooden swing hanging from a tree in the cemetery where her mama is buried and was ready to head there and swing like we did most evenings. “Swing,” she said, and tears started streaming down her face. I pulled her down into my arms and tried to console her, but she wasn’t having it. The shoot was over. At least for her it was.

  As I held her, BA scrolled through the dozen or so pics he’d snapped in those few seconds with his camera. “Check this out!” he said, as he held the back of his Canon 5D up so Kristen from HarperCollins and the others could see. And then he walked over and showed it to me also. Somehow, he’d managed to get the absolute perfect picture in only a matter of seconds.

  “Beautiful, BA,” I said. “I’m gonna take her to swing for a while. Maybe we could try taking a few more shots there.”

  And so I pushed her on the little green swing for twenty minutes or so and then put her in her wagon and started back toward the house. BA kept shooting through it all, and Indy didn’t seem to mind. But I could tell, the “magic” had probably already happened, and though he was taking hundreds, maybe thousands more pics, we already had the one that was gonna be the cover of the book.

  About halfway back to the house, I sat down by Indiana in the wagon, and we talked and played for a few minutes in the high grass as BA changed batteries and cards in his camera. He took a f
ew more pics, and then we finished our walk home and were soon in the kitchen with Indy in her high chair eating grapes, and I was doing some dishes that had piled up in the sink from the dinner we all had enjoyed together before walking out into the field to do the photo shoot.

  By then the sun was down behind the trees, and it was nearly dark. I could see a few of the guys still standing in the field, walking around where we had last shot—looking for something. My cousin, and our manager, Aaron, came through the back door with a strange look on his face.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “Well . . . ,” he answered. “It seems that when we changed cards out in the field, the first card dropped in the grass, and we can’t find it.”

  I looked out the window again. Realizing that the grass hadn’t been mowed in weeks and it wouldn’t be long before it would be cut for hay.

  “Is that the one with the . . .” I started to ask.

  “Yep,” Aaron answered.

  Indiana was watching the whole conversation and loving it, I think.

  “More,” she said as she held her little plastic bowl up for me to refill with grapes.

  An hour later Indy was in her crib asleep, and I had joined the rest of the guys in the field with flashlights and iPhone lights, looking for a one-inch-by-one-inch piece of black plastic in fifty acres of foot-and-a-half tall grass. This is impossible, I thought. Like finding a needle in a thousand haystacks.

  “We’re never gonna find this, are we?” I asked no one in particular.

  “Nope,” BA answered.

  “Okay, so what’s our plan B?” I said, knowing that we hadn’t really thought to make one.

  “Well . . . ,” he answered, “we can look through all the other pics I took and see if there’s one that we like as much or better . . .” He was shaking his head. “I already know the answer to that.”

  “Or . . . ,” he continued, “I guess we can set up another day to get together and shoot some more.” I knew that would be tough to do anytime soon since Bryan lives in Knoxville and HarperCollins had a deadline for the cover. I had a few more months to work on the writing of the book—what it was gonna say. But what it was gonna look like—they needed for a big sales meeting in just a few days.

  We stayed out there in the pitch black, looking for another half hour or so, then headed in to the house. Ready to call it a night. “We can look again in the morning,” I said, knowing it was hopeless.

  Aaron, BA, and I, along with my wife’s best friend, Julie, stayed up for a long time talking and laughing in the living room about how ridiculous it was that we had lost the card. We’d shot countless album covers and hundreds of hours of TV shows and films together . . . not to mention what each of us had done on our own . . . and never lost an SD card before—let alone in the middle of a hayfield as the sun went down.

  It would’ve been heartbreaking if it wasn’t so comical. We all knew that in the grand scheme of things—compared to what my family had been through in the past year or so—this was nothing. But it was an interesting dilemma, if nothing else.

  As the sun came up the next morning, BA stumbled into the kitchen and casually looked out the window over the sink. “Oh no!” he said as he threw on his shoes and flew out the back door. I peeked out the window to see our horses, Moon and Ria, standing in the exact spot where we had been looking. The place where we’d changed cards or, at least, where we thought it had happened. He was soon standing right beside them, trying to shoo away a couple of thousand-pound animals from “the scene of the crime.”

  I started laughing as I watched. Pretty soon Aaron and Julie and Daniel were in the field joining him—walking in circles—as I started breakfast for the baby and myself.

  Twenty minutes later Indiana was again beside me in her high chair, finishing her oatmeal as I ate mine.

  “You’re not gonna believe this,” I heard BA say, as he walked in the back door followed by Aaron and Julie and Daniel—all with big smiles on their faces.

  “You gotta be kidding me!” I said.

  “Nope.” And in his hand was the culprit. A black 64-gigabyte SanDisk card with the magic picture inside.

  “How about that,” I said, as I turned to look at Indy. She just smiled and held up her bowl. “More, Papa.”

  •

  Ain’t that how life is? It’s never really easy. It takes twists and turns and goes in directions you don’t want it to go in. You’re hoping for smooth sailing today, and the wind suddenly kicks up and spins your boat around in a completely different direction. And all you can do is hang on and try not to capsize.

  It used to disappoint me, that life couldn’t be simpler. But I’ve learned to embrace it. To do more than embrace it. To love that life is that way. That the crazy ride is what life actually is, when it is at its best.

  We could’ve walked into the back field and took pics for an hour, then gone inside and looked through what we’d shot and picked our favorite for the cover and e-mailed it to the publisher. That would’ve been easy. But it wouldn’t have been much of a story. Not a great story anyway.

  Stories are always better when they are filled with conflict and your character is tested. When your character’s character is tested. Looking back at all the movies I love or stories I’ve heard that moved me . . . none of them are simple journeys where someone wants something and then gets what they wanted. They are stories filled with drama and heartbreak. With joy and suffering and lots and lots of time spent overcoming obstacles. Someone wants something but can’t seem to get it. And so they go in a different direction. And that leads to something they didn’t expect. They think they are lost. And they are. Until they realize that the wrong path has led them to the place they were trying to get to in the first place. And on and on. It isn’t simple, but it’s gripping, with a hint of the kind of mystery in a Stephen King story and the magical romance of a Nicholas Sparks novel, all rolled into one.

  Like the story of the photo on the cover of this book, our story is not simple. My story. And my wife’s and my family’s. It is complicated. Very complicated. I spent 240 pages telling a lot of it in my first book, This Life I Live. And I loved telling it, but there’s more. So, so much more.

  The story of the writing of this book has also been much more complicated than I thought it’d be. And a lot harder. I had thought I knew what it was going to be about, and then, all of a sudden, I realized that I didn’t. It was like the picture I had in my mind had gotten lost in a hayfield and I was stuck with no plan B. Not sure what I was going to do. But I kept looking. Staying up late at night with the lamp beside my desk on, typing on my laptop, searching in the weeds of doubt that can fill our minds at times for what it was supposed to be . . . supposed to say. And just when I was about to lose hope and give up . . . there it was. And here it is.

  It turns out that the answer was actually right in front of me all along.

  The beginning is the end.

  To tell the story of how we are moving forward and of the hope that is unfolding now, I have to go backward and start with the end of another great story of hope. Because this one couldn’t be told if that one didn’t happen. One cannot be without the other. We couldn’t have this life we’re learning to live on our own if we didn’t have the life we lived with my wife, Joey, before it.

  And so I will begin with where our story starts . . . at the end of another story.

  Coming Home

  Home is where the heart wants to be.

  From my wife’s hometown of Alexandria, Indiana, to our farmhouse in Tennessee is 388 miles. About a six-hour drive if you don’t find yourself stopped for construction or the half dozen or so Starbucks signs that call out your name along the way. All interstate, except the first couple of miles; it’s not a bad drive really. I’ve always kinda enjoyed it. The endless Indiana corn and soybean fields on both sides of the blacktop, the big iron bridge that crosses the river into Louisville and, ultimately, drops into the Cumberland Plateau, and seeing the lit
-up cityscape of Nashville. Home. Or, at least, we knew home was not far away.

  My first time to make the drive was in the spring of 2002, when my two teenage daughters climbed into my Ford Expedition with me and the girl I was dating named Joey; we headed north to meet her parents and sisters and see the home and community where she grew up. And now . . . here it was early March 2016, a lifetime later . . . and we were driving back. This time without Joey.

  The morning had started like most of the mornings had over the past few months. I felt the soft vibration of the alarm I’d set on my iPhone that was lying on the bed beside me and saw the amber numbers 4:45 a.m. blinking at me. I slipped out of bed and quietly opened the door so as not to wake the baby who was sleeping in a Pack ’n Play a few feet away. Rubbing my eyes, I headed for the kitchen and started some water boiling to make a French press. While the water heated up, I made my way across the living room and into the big room on the other side of the house. As I rounded the corner, I could hear the beeping sound of the IV that had been attached to my wife for nearly four months now. And I could see her in the moonlight.

  Her hospital bed was positioned next to a large picture window with a view of the Gaithers’ pond, and the reflection of a half-moon silhouetted my beautiful bride as she slept. Her oldest sister, Jody, a registered nurse on a leave of absence, was in the large bed across the room sleeping, too, if you can call it that. Always rising and jumping up to take care of her little sister at the slightest unusual sound. I stood in the doorway and just listened for a long time, thinking to myself, How much more, Lord, does Joey have to go through?

  By 1 p.m., God had answered that question. Her breathing became irregular and a rattling sound in her chest filled the room. “It’s happening,” Jody said. And I found myself kneeling by my wife’s bedside talking to her as her breathing became slower and slower. Some of Joey’s family were there. Jody, her father, Jack, and younger sister Jessie—the ones who could drop what they were doing and get there fast enough—along with our bus driver, Russell, and our oldest daughter, Heidi, who had arrived the night before and was thankful, though a bit nervous, to be here when her mother was passing from this world into the next.