Once Upon a Farm

by Rory Feek

  I am uninformed as to what happened in North Korea today, but I know that the okra plants in the garden are needing to be harvested and the baby peed five times in her potty. I know that if I get rid of half the clothes in my closet, I’ll still have plenty of stuff to wear. I know that my brother-in-law shaved his beard off for the first time in twenty-five years and he looks great (even if his wife can’t stop laughing). And I know that I love my wife, and I can feel her here even though she’s been gone for eighteen months.

  You see, I don’t know anything. But I know everything that I need to know to be happy. And I know that I don’t know what Heidi is feeling or how to fix her or even if she needs being fixed. Faith is a personal thing. At least mine was. People could pray for me and preach to me till they were blue in the face, but, in the end, I didn’t trust God until I was ready. Not a moment before.

  And so I am choosing to trust that God has this. He has her. Both of my girls and the ones they love.

  I would not be surprised a bit not only to see Heidi and Dillon in cowboy church one day soon but also to see them up on stage singing about Jesus. Now, I would probably have a heart attack and fall down dead . . . but it wouldn’t surprise me. Because that’s how God is. He does the impossible. His love changes everything and everyone if they let it. I would love to see that day. Or a day like it. When our hearts are more the same. When my girls and I can sit at the table and say, “Look what God has done with our lives . . .” And tears fall from all of our eyes, not just mine.

  That day isn’t today, but it might be tomorrow or someday. I’m just going to continue to trust God and to love my kids until then. And if it never comes to be, I’d like to think that I will love them still. No matter what.

  Here’s the last thing I’d like to say about our two fire kids. About two weeks before Joey passed away, Heidi came to see us in Indiana, and Dillon was with her. They were on their way back from playing a show somewhere and had just started dating. Joey got to meet Dillon and seemed to really like him. She knew nothing about him, only that her daughter liked, or maybe even loved, him. They all sat and talked a while, and then Joey called it a night.

  The following is the last thing I wrote in my journal that day. I love it so much. Joey couldn’t have been farther from the truth of where Dillon and Heidi were . . . but then again . . . maybe she wasn’t. Maybe she wasn’t talking about then but about someday.

  Maybe she knows something we don’t.

  I turned off her light, and Joey said, “I think he’s gonna be our next son-in-law . . . if I know Dillon’s heart like I think I do and if he loves Jesus. I think he’s gonna be the one for Heidi.”

  Teaching Me How to Love You

  I had a few great teachers when it came to learning how to love my wife. Strangely, none of them were people.

  Sarah. Jill. Carol Ann. Josephine. These were some of my teachers. They shared lessons with me on what it means to love someone. To really love them. Some taught me with a kiss and some with heartbreak and pain. One taught me how to love even after the one you love is gone.

  But none of my teachers are actual people. They are characters I made up in songs, but they are very real. Real enough, at least, to impact who I was and who I am now or who I’m trying to be.

  Most of the songs I’m talking about weren’t successful. They were financial failures as far as songs go. They’ve made little if any money, and almost no one has heard them. No one, except me. But the things that they have taught me are more valuable than had they all been sitting at number one on the Billboard top 100.

  I am who I am because of what they taught me. At least, part of me is.

  Some are based on people I’ve known. Names mostly. Sarah and Jill. Characters in the song “Teaching Me How to Love You.” It was written before Joey and I met each other, but it is about her. About us. About my crooked journey to get to her. It’s about the mistakes I made in love before I ever got it right. About the hearts I broke and the ones who broke my heart. And, in the end, the lesson is that they were part of me getting to the right person. Teaching me how to love my wife when God finally brought her into my life.

  The last verse taught me the most. It talks about how when I look back at the people in Joey’s past who loved her before I did . . . men she loved before me . . . I can’t be hurt by what I see. I should be grateful. Because they, too, were teaching her how to love me.

  That was a profound thought for me. In the past, before I met Joey, when I was with someone else . . . you had to pretend the past never happened. We would burn pictures and rewrite stories of our past just so it didn’t hurt the other. Each of us afraid of the unknown.

  But this song taught me a bigger way to look at it. That those people in my past and in hers were important. God put them in our paths, to help us become who He needed us to be when He finally brought us together. It is completely the opposite of how I had always looked at it before, and it changed everything.

  And what’s remarkable is that it’s not even true. At least the story in the song isn’t. It’s made up. A fictional story of a fictional relationship. But, strangely, whether it was true or not isn’t relevant. The only thing that matters is the impact it had on me. It was the only time I’d come across another way of looking at relationships from my past in a positive way. My father hadn’t shared that with me, not any friends or anyone else. It was a fundamental truth that was shared with me from an imaginary person. But the outcome was the same. I was inspired by it and put it into practice in my own life.

  I don’t remember a time when Joey and I argued over our pasts or brought them up and hurt the other person with them. They were what they were. Part of the incredible stories that God is writing with our lives, and we somehow managed to keep that in perspective and let it bring us closer together, not pull us apart.

  I wrote the song “Josephine” before Joey and I met. Maybe a year or two before. It was a fictional story based upon a real person, John Robison, who was writing home to his wife, Josephine, near the end of the Civil War. Some of the information in the song is from the letters, but a good bit of it just showed up in the writing of the song. There is no story of John shooting a Yankee who couldn’t have been “any older than our son’s age” in the actual letters, but that story is in the song.

  And the ending is the same way. John writes to Josephine, telling her not to grieve him if he were to die. And to go on with her life and marry another. Not to let the new man treat his babies mean, and, lastly, when he’s making love to her, think of him from time to time.

  That was crazy talk! Who would say that? No one I know. But John did. At least with my pen he said it. As the song and story unfolded, that is what he had to say to his wife, Josephine. He loved her that much.

  I wanted a love that like. One that was selfless. One that lifted the other person and her needs up, no matter what.

  Within a year or two I would get the chance to love someone like John loved Josephine. And though her name was Joey, I would call her Josephine, my nickname for her our whole marriage until the very end. When she, like John, would have to face the thought of leaving the person she loved behind.

  I always told Joey that I longed to be like him. To love her enough to say those words to her, but I never got there. I would always joke with Joey and say, “You know, you could always be like your sweet elderly friend Ms. Joan, whose husband passed away twenty years ago and she never remarried and just stays home and misses him!” She would laugh, and I would too. But still inside I knew that there was some truth in it. That if I were to pass away, my humanity wanted Joey to grieve me deeply. Forever. And maybe wear only black and come visit my grave each day with flowers. I’m exaggerating a little bit but, unfortunately, not too much. I just wasn’t there yet.

  I may have needed more time to become more like John, but Joey didn’t. She was already there.

  “You’re still young,” Joey said. “You can find someone else,” she continued, as we were sitting o
n the porch one night talking about the future.

  I told her I didn’t want to hear that. That she was gonna be fine. That everything would be okay—even though the cancer had come back stronger this time and she and I weren’t so sure anymore.

  “You’re gonna need help with the baby . . . it’s okay.”

  “No,” I said. Tears were streaming down my face and hers. “Don’t say that.”

  Joey wiped my eyes with her fingers and put her hand softly in mine. “It’s okay,” she whispered again.

  “But . . . I was supposed to say that to you . . . ,” I cried, knowing that it was too late to learn what I needed to learn from the song.

  “You would have,” Joey said with a smile. “I know you would have.”

  God, I miss her so much. And just telling the story kills me. Mostly because she’s so amazing. She took that moment that was hers—about how amazing she is—and gave it to me. To build me up.

  As much as I’ve learned about love from the songs and characters in songs I’ve written and heard, no one has taught me more about love than Joey. She taught me by living it out. Even when she stopped living.

  I am learning from her still. Each day I look back and remember something she did and smile and think, God, she was something.

  Love Does

  Love is a verb.

  I have a treasured video clip on my computer of Joey laughing hysterically reading Bob Goff’s wonderful book Love Does. She was about to spend the summer recovering from a difficult cancer surgery followed by dozens of radiation and chemo treatments. There were going to be lots of hard days and nights ahead for her, so on that day in June when I walked into the bedroom and saw her laughing so hard she was about to pee her pants telling the story she’d just read . . . it was incredible medicine for the soul. Both hers and mine.

  In the book, Bob tells lots of stories about his amazing life. And about living with whimsy and joy. But the one theme that runs through it all is that love is a verb. He doesn’t say it exactly, but it’s between every word and every line. Love doesn’t just have good intentions . . . it does. And he is oh so right.

  I first came to understand that concept from a different book that Stephen Covey wrote, which I read probably twenty years before. In it there’s a story about a couple who had come to him for marriage counseling. Actually, more like divorce counseling. The man explained how he would love to stay together with his wife, but, unfortunately, he didn’t love her anymore. Stephen told them, “It isn’t too late,” and how if he really wanted to turn it around, all he had to do was love his wife. But the man kept saying that he wished he could, but he didn’t. And Stephen kept saying, “No problem, then just love each other.” They were saying the same words, but it was almost like they were speaking completely different languages. Actually, the problem was that the husband saw love as a noun. A thing. A feeling that you have. What Stephen was explaining was that love is actually a verb. Something that you do. Not because you feel like doing it but because you choose to.

  That was a profound chapter for me. Read at the perfect chapter of my life. When I was hoping and praying for someone to love and be loved by. It helped me to understand that I had probably misunderstood what love was my whole life. It had never dawned on me that you could love someone even if you didn’t necessarily feel love for that person at the time.

  When Joey came into my life, I took that concept and put it into practice. It was difficult at first. Really, really difficult. Because I am by nature incredibly selfish and insecure, but in time—with lots of practice—it started coming more naturally to me.

  Though a lot of people know the part of our story that seems like a fairy-tale romance, the first year or so of our marriage was more like a nightmare. Joey wanting what she wanted and me wanting what I wanted. Neither of us getting anywhere. In time we would each give up our own agendas and start “loving” the other, by serving each other.

  I made a decision early on that I was going to be a “doer” when it came to loving my wife. I didn’t just want to tell her that I loved her, I wanted to show her. A hundred times a day. Sometimes it was by putting the lid down in the bathroom or the cap back on the toothpaste, and sometimes it was by spending an hour shucking corn with her or half a day harvesting chickens, when I would’ve rather been tinkering on the transmission of an old car.

  She came first and she knew it. I told her early on in our marriage that if my songwriting or music got in the way, I would do something else. And that if she ever decided that she wanted to move home to Indiana to be close to her family . . . just say the word and we would pack up and go. I meant those things. I never had to follow through on them, but I would have. For her. For love.

  Joey would’ve done the same for me. Maybe not at first, but in time, she, like me, realized that love has to come first. And since God ultimately is where that love inside us comes from, He was going to have to be first in our lives and in our marriage. And so we tried with all our hearts to love and serve Him, and the best way to do that was by loving and serving each other.

  Gentleman Farmer

  I have no idea what I’m doing. Honestly, I don’t. I’m in way over my head again.

  That’s a pretty normal feeling that I have had through the years. In a place I’ve never been before, doing something I have no expertise in or real experience doing. Sometimes I’ve felt those feelings in the early stages of a new music or film project, or writing my first book, or in the beginning of a relationship. And sometimes it’s a feeling that I have in an actual place, like here on the farm, in the garden. As I sit here looking out the window at the three dozen thirty-foot-long raised beds I’ve created, I am overwhelmed with a sense that I’m in way over my head. But the thing is, I kinda like it. I’ve always liked it. There is something magical about a decision made and a goal set in motion that takes my breath away. That inspires me instead of paralyzing me like it does with some other folks. I don’t know why—it’s just how I’m wired, I guess.

  Like now. Like it or not, a huge garden is growing, and I can jump in with both feet and learn and grow with it or shut down and learn nothing.

  And so I spent the early part of this morning the same way I’ve spent almost every sunrise for the past month or two . . . with a stirrup hoe in my dirty hands. And, strangely, it’s awesome. I guess I knew it would be. Because it was for Joey. She loved everything about gardening. The labor and the fruit of the labor were the same things for her. I saw it on her face every summer of the fourteen years we were married. She didn’t spend her mornings in the garden because she had to; she had to because the garden was inside of her.

  Last spring and summer, after Joey passed away and we came back home to Tennessee, I grew a garden then also. But it wasn’t my garden. It was still hers. She had given me gardening notes from her hospital bed, and I had done my best to make sense of what came naturally in her. But the truth is, it didn’t make any sense. They were notes on her way of growing a garden. Her mama’s way before hers and probably her Grandma Sparks’s way even before that.

  I did what she said to do last year, and some things grew. They grew a lot, actually. But I didn’t. By late summer the garden was an overgrown mess of vegetables and weeds, almost impossible to tell the two apart. I had done what Joey had said, or at least I tried to. But I had failed. The corn was inedible. By the time I harvested it, the flavor was gone, and the kernels were large and mushy. It looked good lying there in the wheelbarrow after we picked it, but lying on our plates was a different story. It was bland and didn’t taste like corn at all. My neighbor Jan Harris helped me freeze some anyway, but time couldn’t help what was wrong with it. The work was there, but the love wasn’t. There’s a big difference between the two, I think.

  And so this year I decided to do something different. To make it my own.

  It is still Joey’s garden. There’s a sign over the pergola at the entrance that says so, but this year it is mine also. It’s late July, and there’s
barely a weed between the rows to be found. And our freezer is already bursting at the seams with carrots and okra and beets and squash that not only tasted great on our plates the day we picked them, but I know for a fact, they’re going to be heavenly in the fall or winter when all those sealed freezer bags find their way to iron skillets and sauce pans.

  What’s the difference? Love, I think. I really do. You can’t just like the idea of something. You have to actually love the thing. And I’m learning to. To be honest, I don’t always love the sweat running down my face and the pain in my back after spending a long morning bent over a dozen tomato cages, but I love what it is and what it’s teaching me. And I love what it’s providing for my family. For our baby. Just like Joey did.

  I’m learning a lot about farming and gardening this year that I didn’t know. That I didn’t know that I didn’t know. And it’s amazing how much those lessons are like the lessons I’ve learned in other areas of my life. In love and dreams and family.

  Like how you have to make sure your heart is ready for the seeds of change that you’re wanting to plant. And how you can’t grow love in darkness. It needs a good amount of light to take root and become all that it’s meant to be.

  I’m still only halfway through this year’s gardening season, and I’m already thinking about the future. About what I’m gonna do next year. Hopefully, I’ll have learned something from this one. That would be helpful.

  I’m never gonna be the gardener that Joey was. And that’s okay. I don’t think I’m supposed to be. I’m trying to learn to be the best “me” that I can be. The best gentleman farmer, in bib overalls, with starched shirts and a camera in one hand and a toddler daughter in the other . . . trying to grow life and love in the soil God planted me in.