“If you don’t quit your bitchin’, I’m going to come over there and cut your tongue out!”

It isn’t that my Aunt Deb was a mean person, she was just a simple woman living the simple life of a farmer’s wife with her farming kids and her farming family. I, on the other hand, was more of a “city slicker” who preferred using his mind and imagination for productivity over his hands and feet. It also didn’t help that it was late in the summer, what felt like a 150-degrees outside and we were doing one of my least favorite things on the planet: harvesting tobacco.

My dad’s family had been farmers for more generations than I could count. In the spring, we’d harvest sugar cane and my job was walking through the cane patch picking up the litter passersby would dump on that windy back road – mostly empty beer cans, Mountain Dew bottles and cigarette packs. I was too young to use the machete my cousins used to cut the stalks and I also hated knowing that sugar cane harvesting meant molasses making was on the horizon. That process takes forever, I thought it smelled horrible and the family would stay up all night playing Old Time music around a bonfire (which I would think was cool now but I hated it then).

Throughout the year we’d raise and butcher our own cattle. And while I didn’t play much of a role in the raising, I was very hands-on during the butchering process. Aunt Deb and her husband Mike had a full processing plant in their basement with all the saws, walk-in coolers and bone grinders you could ever need. My job as a child was to sit in a basket full of discarded bones and clean off the blood clots so the bone grinder wouldn’t get gummed up. True story.

Then in the summertime, of course, we’d harvest tobacco. While my cousins got to use hatchets and machetes to cut the stalks, then spear the stalks over a wooden stake, my job was to follow along behind and pick up the leaves that had fallen off. Many of them couldn’t be dried and taken to market, but several could be salvaged. Once a stake was filled with tobacco stalks, I’d help load them onto the truck, then unload them into the barn where they’d hang to dry. I always hated working in the tobacco patch, hated how hot it was outside and hated how my older cousins got what I deemed the “cool” jobs while I carried out the menial tasks.

So yeah. I was bitching.

Staying out in the country was torture for me as a child. My other relatives would always ask if I was going to be a farmer when I grew up with the same inflection as an adult asking a toddler how old they are. I would get angry and always reply with a firm no, which they thought was adorable. I was interested in technology and knew I was creative. I didn’t know where my career was going to take me but I knew I was going to be creating art in some way; I may be a filmmaker, a writer, a musician or an illustrator but I sure as hell wasn’t going to be a farmer.

I recently told a coworker about how my Papaw chewed me out one day while I was sitting at the kitchen counter drawing cartoons and writing silly little poems. He encouraged me to learn some kind of trade so that I could earn a decent wage as an adult and I told him that wasn’t part of my plan. I informed him that I was either going to go into an IT field or I was going into a creative industry. He knocked the pencil out of my hand, slammed his pointer finger down onto my paper and told me with a booming voice, “Computers and art are never going to get you anywhere in life!”

Until the day he died, he never knew just what an impact that statement made on me. Not because it made me want to pursue a blue-collar career, but because almost every decision I made after that point was done in direct defiance. I would go on to take every computer and art class I could in high school and was a part of the theater club my last two years. In college, I did much the same with my passions being computer programming, digital design, filmmaking, photography, writing and theater. I graduated (with honors!) from ETSU with a degree in Digital Media – Interaction, and immediately began working in the entertainment industry where I have been in various capacities for the last 17 years.

Papaw never saw much of this, but I have to think somewhere in the afterlife he’s smacking himself on the head over what has become reality — me living almost four decades without becoming a farmer.

And while that remains true, something very strange has happened this year.  Shortly after Katie moved in with me, she began planting things. I think the first year was a few herbs and a couple of tomatoes that mostly were all eaten by birds before we could get ahold of them. The next year, she built a simple raised garden bed where she’d plant squash, zucchini and more tomatoes. That year saw our first strawberries and more herbs among other things. The next year we added multiple types of tomatoes, pink okra, various edible (and inedible) flowers and blueberries. And while the garden was growing and getting healthier each year, one thing that remained the same was my distaste for participating.

I hated being hot, hated feeling gross outside, had no interest in how these plants were growing and absolutely hated how much hard work was involved with getting new beds started. Katie would always get a strange fulfilling pleasure from going outside in the morning in her robe with a cup of coffee, just talking to the plants while I sat inside completely indifferent to whether they all lived or died. To care about such thing was a step closer to becoming a farmer and I wasn’t about to let that happen.

But now as I’m quickly approaching the end of my 40th year, I’ve noticed a change. Katie had discussed wanting to grow sweet potatoes and pumpkins, which would necessitate the building of a new raised garden bed. We had unofficially decided over the winter that we’d start building a new bed late-winter/early-spring so we could get the hard part done before it got hot out, which I was a fan of. But then, it’s almost like Papaw visited me and allowed me to let go of that grudge. For some reason, I was overwhelmed with the urge to build Katie a custom raised garden bed.

And I would do it all by myself. Which is hilarious because I have never done this, nor anything like it, before in my life. This was either going to be awesome or a colossal embarrassment.

I took inspiration from a design I found online, did some research on what kind of lumber I’d need to use, determined that I had the right tools to give it a go and willingly did something I would have normally considered a nightmare any other time – arrive at Home Depot at 6:30am. An hour later, I had bought $400 worth of lumber and would spend the next 45 minutes unloading it and securing it to my truck. Again, I’d never done this before and I’m pretty sure the 12’ boards in my 6’ bed constituted an illegal load in the state of Tennessee. Thankfully we don’t live far.

I spent the rest of the day catching a nice sunburn while constructing what is ultimately a U-shaped 12’x10’ box with a 7’ wooden trellis up the back. The entire thing is constructed with 2x10s, 2x2s, 1x3s and 1x2s. Before we installed the ground cover, I also drove in four six-foot t-posts with a makeshift t-post driver (I’m not paying $60 for a one-use device) that would eventually hold a cattle-panel trellis I’d planned to run across the inner part of the U shape.

The next Saturday, I spent the day laying down the ground cover, filling in the bed with some branches we’d saved from various downed trees over the years, installing the cattle panel and manually shoveling in six scoops of fill dirt. It was about 90% humidity that day and I was ready to bury myself in the garden when it got super cloudy and started storming. I had a little less than a scoop of dirt left, so I braved the elements and finished the shoveling in the middle of a thunderstorm, which wasn’t smart at all but I wasn’t about to finish this little bit “tomorrow.”

The next day, I took some of the scrap wood that was leftover and made a small, square raised bed that’s perfect for this year’s strawberries. Bonus husband points!

The next week, I picked up some top soil, mushroom compost and mulch for the top layer. Katie has now popped in some cucumbers, squash and four different types of pumpkins, which we’re very excited about. I’m proud of the work I did out there and Katie is over the moon excited about the possibilities for our harvest this year. But I think what surprises me most is I planned this thing, built it and filled it with a thousand shovelfuls of dirt, yet I never once started bitching. In fact, I kinda enjoyed the entire process, am currently excited about our harvest and love walking around the yard when I get home after the gym in the morning to see how our plants are doing. The best part is I still have my tongue.

I’m still not a farmer and don’t ever intend to be, but I’ve at least let go of that silly grudge and that feels pretty good. It will feel even better when I’m eating that homemade pumpkin pie later this year! And it’s going to feel even better when I’m eating homemade pumpkin pie while wearing my Black Kow “The Mature Manure” t-shirt because I couldn’t resist ordering some merch from our favorite mushroom compost company.

Oh, god, I have a favorite mushroom compost company.