Episode Details

A quick note: This will be the final post for 2022. Our next post will be January 4. Please use the “time off” to enjoy your loved ones. If you are curious what lessons or guests you missed in 2022, please enjoy some past episodes.

If you’d like to skip to the “Big News for 2023” scroll ahead. Anyone who takes time to read this entire post or listen to the audio version, you are a really good friend! 😉 

Let’s begin this lengthy post with a story. 

When I was five years old, my family moved to West Tennessee from San Diego, California. My father had had a long career in the Navy, and he decided it was time to move his wife and five children back home. During his years in the Navy, my dad had bought 120 acres adjacent to the farmland of my grandfather back in Tennessee. 

The first time we saw the property, I remember large oak and walnut trees surrounding an empty space that held the remains of the foundation where an old farmhouse had burned years before. This would become the spot where my dad and his brother would dig a 50×30 foot hole for a basement lined with cinderblock walls, including a single entry with ground-level side windows, a chimney in the middle of the structure, and covered with a flat roof. Someday, a two story home would be built on the structure, but for six years, that basement would become our home.

The same day we visited the property for the first time, my dad took all five of us children for a walk across the land. A forty acre field carved out the northern point of the farm, which touched the gravel road that divided our land from my grandfather’s. The southern half of the farm was another eighty acres of field that could be used for crops or grazing pasture. The rest of the land was woods, creeks, and gulleys.

We walked with my dad to the farthest end and through some wooded areas where an old field road lined its way through a tunnel of trees. We stepped out of this enclosure into knee high sage brush. Woods of pines and oaks walled us in from both sides of the large pasture. 

I was only five years old, and my goal was simply to keep up with my dad, my three older brothers and younger sister. 

Suddenly, my dad stopped. 

“Listen,” he said, “We’ve walked a long way from the road, and I’ve been leading the whole way. I’d like you all to find our way back without my help.” 

We looked at each other puzzled and curious. 

“Well,” said my oldest brother, Harvey. “I think we came from that way.” 

He pointed in the direction he thought we should go. 

“Are you sure?” asked my second brother Jesse. “I think we’re supposed to look at the sun and figure out which way to go.” 

The arguing continued until one of us suggested we walk in the field until we saw something familiar.

So we walked. My dad kept his place behind us so that we were forced to discuss our progress and choose our way forward without his help. Before long, we came to a bend in the field, and ahead of us, we could see where the field led to a familiar space. Not long afterwards, we found the old homeplace. 

It is one of my first memories there, and I still remember the sense of relief and joy in knowing we had found our way home – even though we hadn’t yet built the one we would live in.

Lessons in Learning

I think a lot of my life has been inspired by moments like that walk in the field. Although my father never earned much money in part-time farming, he also worked as an electrician and later started his own marine salvage business. Whatever his work, he was always interested in learning. 

For years, he owned beehives where he taught us how to retrieve golden honey and combs we would jar and enjoy all year long. We kept two milk cows that had be tended morning