Sometimes sights around the farm include luscious fields with green vegetables growing. Other times, the sights include people and community.
As I was running this past time, a three man crew was cruising through the cabbage fields with a tractor and trailer doing a little clean up. Awkward Spanglish greetings were exchanged and we each went on our separate ways – they to more clean up, me to more huffing and puffing.
Later, as I was finishing up a less than successful run (Read: I was walking), I was met with a recently-returned-to-his-hometown-doctor driving through the field. I grew up going to high school with this guy. He grew up as a friend of the Hamilton family out near the farm. As we met in between rows of cabbage – him in his truck with his two boys, me mid-stride and sweaty – we chatted and caught up on life for a minute. Turns out, he had just paid a visit to the Hamilton family bartering peaches for produce, so he was now headed to the fields to get dinner. When I asked if the two boys in his back seat were going to be helping him pick today, he replied with a chuckle that they were, they just didn’t know it yet.
Mid-conversation, Presley Hamilton pulls up on his way to fill the four-wheeler up with gas and later head out to pick some squash for the family’s dinner. A dinner that included grilled hamburgers by him and fried potatoes by his mother. Somehow I didn’t get an invite. Haven’t figured that one out yet.
Whether or not I got an invite to dinner, this week’s run did include an invite into the farming community around here. Sometimes that community includes field workers, sometimes country boys turned townies returning back to their roots, sometimes farmer’s kids just being kids on a farm.