“Dirt is good for the gut,” my dad announces at dinner, munching on a suspiciously crunchy leaf of garden-grown lettuce. He credits his physical constitution to the large amounts of soil he ate as a toddler; he grew up predominantly in my grandmother’s garden. 

“My playpen was made out of barbed wire,” he sometimes jokes.

My father is a child of the endless cornfields of northern Illinois. As an adult he relocated to Madison, Wisconsin to work with computers. Now he has retired to a hobby farm about 30 minutes outside of the city. He’s become good friends with his next-door neighbor, Gene.

After supper, the three of us meet at the barbed wire fence where Gene’s herd crosses over to graze in my dad’s pasture. My family gets 250 pounds of beef per year in exchange, it’s a good deal. 

Gene, too, is a child of the rolling cornfields. He’s about as strapping as a 79-year-old can possibly be, and he’s been on farms all of his life. He’s tumbled around this Oak savanna since he was shorter than the raspberry bushes he loves to grow. The energetic smallholder continues to pay homage to Wisconsin’s bounty with his 17 acres of corn and 14 beef cows.

They grumble about the rain (too much or too little), talk about the merits of pasture-raised cattle, complain about how their tomatoes were bitten by this year’s late May frost.

As retirees, though, their work is not toil; all exertion is completely voluntary. With more time than ever they both enjoy simply sitting on their land. My dad sometimes lies on the grass next to the chicken coop as the hens curiously wander over. 

Our young and our old seem to have a peculiar affinity for the earth, and interfacing with the dirt becomes more interesting to us at both ends of life. In Wisconsin, the soil, the neighbors, and the hens make for good company.