"Just Farmering": Remembrances of an Extraordinary Ordinary Man

Every year during the first week of November memories of my father dominate my thoughts. I write on November 2, 2019, the nineteenth anniversary of the day he passed away. As seems to happen with many people, the date of his death was very close to the date of his birth; he was born on November 5. He was a Good Man, well-liked and well-respected by all who knew him. He is with me every day of my life; I'm sure my siblings would say the same thing. 

When it came time to plan his memorial service I volunteered to write the eulogy. This was simultaneously one of the most difficult things I've ever done, and one of the most rewarding. Writing it gave me the opportunity to collect my thoughts about the man, and to reflect on both his life and my own. I shall be forever grateful to my siblings for affording me this privilege. I offer the eulogy here, with the addition of a few photos to illustrate a bit of Frannie's long and rich life. (In the piece I refer to two of the other readings that were part of the service: the famous lines from Ecclesiastes about seasons, and a light-hearted poem that Dick Wilbur wrote for my father and read at the reception given for him the first time he retired from the town Board of Selectmen.)

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Francis Richard Wells

November 5, 1911 – November 2, 2000

How well do we ever really know our fathers? The person who is one of the central figures in our lives, who is responsible for giving us life, often remains a figure defined by role rather than by his own qualities as a person. Over the course of our lives, how much time do we really spend in the company of our fathers, especially in this era of increased mobility, when few people live their lives in the same community in which they were raised, surrounded by family? We grow up and leave home just when we’re getting to the age when we can begin to appreciate our fathers.

It was only after I had been away from my hometown of Cummington, Massachusetts, for many years and had completed my education, gotten married, and had a child—in short, had gotten a good dose of life on my own—that it finally dawned on me what an extraordinary man my father was. He never had a lot of the things that so many people quest for in life—no power, wealth, or fame—yet I have never known anyone who was more content with his life. He was a man who knew himself, knew the world he lived in, and who spent his life surrounded by family and friends.

After my siblings and I left home—and long before the days of e-mail!—our mother faithfully wrote to us at least once, often twice a week.  Letters from our father, though, were a much rarer commodity. I think I received three. Their scarcity rendered them all the more meaningful, and I still have them all today. In one he responded to my plan, in 1983, to leave Los Angeles, where my first wife, young son, and I were living at the time, and come back to Cummington to try our hand at making a living in a less stressful manner. Pop wrote in support of the idea, and philosophized about his work on the farm. He said: “Many of my friends ask me—‘how come you seem to be so happy all the time?’  I tell them that I am doing what I like to do best, and most of the time I understand what it is that I am up to.”

That sentence has stuck with me ever since. “I am doing what I like to do best, and most of the time I understand what it is that I am up to.” How many of us can say that about our own lives and careers? All the career counselors and psychologists in the world could not come up with a clearer, more sure-fire prescription for how to achieve happiness in life.

What my father liked to do best was to be out on the farm working—driving his tractors, cutting wood, getting in hay, making maple syrup, fixing fence, tending cattle, planting corn, or weeding his garden. It was what he did all his life, and what defined him as a person.

He had a great word to describe this way of life, a word that I never heard him use until one day in the early 1980s, during the time when I lived in Cummington again for a couple of years. He and I were down in the village somewhere, going about whatever business it was that we had that day, when we ran into Lincoln Howes. Linc gave my father a hearty greeting, in his usual manner: “Hello Francis! What are you boys up to today?” To which my father replied: “Oh not much…the same old thing...just farmering.”

I thought: “’Farmering.’  What a great word!” It evokes so much more than does simply saying that one farms for a living, or that one is a farmer. It implies a way of being in the world, and describes an approach to life rather than a mere occupation. 

This is a life that is very much tied to the rhythms of the year—to take the words of Ecclesiates 3:1-8 quite literally, for everything in my father’s life there was indeed a season, and a time for every purpose. Spring meant sugaring, and then planting corn, fixing fence, and putting in the garden. Summer meant haying, and at the end of the summer, the Cummington Fair. Fall was time for picking sweet corn and getting in silage, while winter was for cutting and hauling wood. There was always something different to do so the work stayed interesting, yet the constancy of the yearly cycle provided a stable backdrop against which it all took place.

It is perhaps impossible for us today to understand fully the world my father knew and grew up in. To live one’s entire life in one place, to be rooted as firmly in family and community as he was, is something that is becoming remarkably rare in our society. This rootedness gave my father a solid sense of self and purpose, and this sense was inextricably bound to place—to the farm, and to Cummington.

Students at Bryant Schoolhouse, Cummington, MA, c. 1920. Frannie standing far right, under corner of window.

Look at the dates his life spanned—one decade shy of the entire 20^th century—and think of the astounding changes to our culture and way of life that he witnessed! Literal horse power gave way to the internal combustion engine. When he was a boy, a one-way trip to Northampton meant a day’s travel, and long-distance communication was limited to the range of one’s voice. He was born into a world much quieter and more slower-paced than what we know now, a world in which hard, manual labor was the only way to get things done. His was perhaps the last generation to grow up in this world, in the culture of the small family farm that formed the backbone of the rural New England economy for so many years, and that our family has been part of since the first Wells ancestor came to the New World in the 17th century. 

His solid grounding in this world was, I think, what allowed him to maintain his extraordinary sense of who and what he was, in the face of the great changes that he witnessed in his own community and in the world at large. It allowed him to keep farmering into the age of the Internet.

Farmering kept my father out of doors a great deal of the time and, unlike many of his peers, he developed an abiding love, appreciation, and respect for nature and the wonders of the natural world. His interest in birds was well known, and he passed this love along to many of us in the next generations. Every year he would delay cutting the hay in the meadow above the barn until the Bobolinks had finished their nesting—and he took a great deal of ribbing from some of his peers when they learned of this practice.

His face would light up with sheer delight at the sights and sounds of geese migrating in the fall. Some of my own most treasured moments with him came when we were hard at work hauling wood or taking down fence on some gray November day, and all of a sudden he would freeze and say: “Hark! Geese!” Then together we’d search the skies for a glimpse of the V of a big flock, wheeling at full throttle, high in the air on its way to wintering grounds down south. 

He had an excellent ear for identifying and remembering bird songs. He knew the songs of numerous species of warblers that he would hear only a few times a year during migration, and could make the fine distinction between the songs of the wood and hermit thrushes. All of this skill and knowledge he acquired simply through a lifetime of observation, during the course of farmering for nine decades.

But farmering was not the whole extent of my father’s life. There was, after all, the “buzzing swarm of Frannies” that friend and neighbor, poet Richard Wilbur, once described in a short tribute poem to him. He was a man devoted to public service. He served the town of Cummington as Selectman for a quarter century, from 1951 to 1976, then came out of retirement in 1982 when his services were once again needed to fill the void left by another man's death. He served on boards and committees throughout the Hilltowns and the Pioneer Valley, and through this work made many friends far beyond the bounds of Cummington. He was a lifetime member of the Massachusetts Maple Producers Association, and enjoyed many years as a member of the Harvest Club. He also drove a school bus, served as substitute rural mail carrier, and worked many winters at Berkshire Snow Basin. He maintained a lifelong interest in politics on the state and national level. In what was perhaps his final act of will, he completed his absentee ballot for the 2000 presidential election, on what turned out to be the night before he went into the hospital for the last time.

My father had his share of the contradictions and paradoxes that make human beings such interesting creatures. He was an utterly non-violent man, but his favorite sport was boxing. He was a devoted family man, but was an incorrigible flirt. He could wrap a young waitress or store clerk around his little finger in a matter of seconds, blushing profusely all the while. And I can still hear my mother, clucking in disgust: “Frannie!  Honestly!”

He always wanted to travel to see new places and to visit far-flung family members, but was itchy to get back to the farm and to Cummington after about two days away. He felt that he was unmusical, but was an enthusiastic, graceful, and skilled square dancer. He often said that he would rather square dance than eat! His formal education ceased when he graduated from high school, but he was an avid reader and was extremely knowledgeable on subjects ranging from American history, to aviation, to meteorology, to world exploration.

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To close this remembrance of my father, I would like to share a personal memory of one particular time with him. I do not know why this incident sticks in my mind as strongly as it does, but so be it.

On Christmas Eve, 1983, the two of us went to cut some wood in what our family called the Drake Pasture. It was a cold, blustery day. There was a bit of snow on the ground, but not so much that we couldn’t drive a tractor and trailer deep into the woods. We spent the day felling trees and cutting them up for firewood. Fairly late in the afternoon, probably around 3:00 or 3:30, when daylight was beginning to fade, it started to snow. Down in the woods there was little or no wind, so the snow just fell quietly to the ground. We had quit running our chain saws by this time and were loading up the trailer with wood to haul back to the house. Anyone who has ever been in the woods on a day like this knows the peculiar effect that this sort of silent, heavy snowfall can have. A profound stillness descends on the world as the snow covers up the ground and muffles all sound.

Once we had the trailer loaded, we both just sat there for awhile. No words were exchanged between us, nor were any needed. We watched the snow drift down around us, and silently marveled at the way it transformed the landscape into a beautiful world of white. After a few minutes Pop finally broke the spell and said simply, “Well, let’s go home.”

As I remember that day, I like to think that he has now  “gone home” for the final time, to greener pastures, where he is reunited with our mother, and is farmering now with God.

Paul F. Wells 
November 20, 2000