Chickensoup for the soul: Pop's Farm

Pop's Farm
By Mere***h Hodges

My grandfather, "Pop," was born to a family with 13 children in 1879. By the time he was nine years old both parents had died and the family was split up. Children were parceled out amongst various relatives. Pop went to a bachelor uncle who put him to work in the fields to earn his keep. He never went to school again. From then on, he did a man's work, putting in 12 to 14 hour days.

It was hard work but Pop was good at it. He liked farming. He liked the feel and the smell of the earth. And he loved the plants. Nothing made him happier than putting in seeds, tending them and harvesting the crops. It gave him a sense of accomplishment, and it made him feel close to God.

After his uncle died, Pop began looking for a farm of his own. He was in his early twenties and engaged to my grandmother, and he desperately wanted to farm. For a few years he worked at jobs and tried to save the money to buy his own farm. But progress was slow, and my grandmother's patience was wearing thin. Finally, he gave up his dream. He went to Chicago and took a job at Pullman making railroad cars. He rented an apartment and married my grandmother.

I was born in 1944. By then Pop was retired; he'd worked at Pullman for 30 years. He'd raised two children, my mother and my aunt, and he'd built and paid for his own house. World War II was dragging on. My father was overseas, so my mother and I had moved in with my grandparents. Times were hard. Food was rationed and a lot of people were just getting by.

Pop mulled it over, and decided what to do. There was no land to farm on the South Side of Chicago, but there were plenty of vacant lots. So, without bothering to ask anybody's permission, he started planting. We were a strange pair, the toddler and the old man, with our hoes and shovels. Every day we went from one vacant-lot garden to the next until all four or five had been tended. We planted potatoes, corn, cabbage, squash, and carrots: food to eat fresh and for my grandmother to can.

Every day, as we worked in the gardens, people came by. Food was scarce for everyone and people with small children often had a hard time feeding them. Pop shared with them all. Anyone who needed food got some. Families of all sizes and backgrounds, men who didn't speak English, old people. They all got fed from those vacant lots. For years, until the war was over and rationing ended, Pop fed everyone who came.

Pop passed away in 1972. He was 93 years old. My grandmother had died nine years earlier, the house had been sold, and he had come to live with us way over in a different neighborhood. We knew Pop was old-fashioned and would want a wake, so we held one. But we never thought anybody would come. It had been years since he had lived in the old neighborhood. Besides, all his friends had died. Who would still remember him?

The evening of his wake was one we would never forget. People came and kept coming and the family didn't know any of them. Over two hundred people came, of all races, religions, and backgrounds. As we stood, stunned, in the receiving line, every person who shook our hands said the same thing. "I saw his name in the paper and I just had to come and pay my respects."

All the people Pop had fed during those difficult war years had never forgotten. Twenty-five years later they still remembered him. His gardens and generosity had changed their lives. Pop never saw the differences between people. For him, the food that comes from the earth belonged to everyone equally. On that night, I realized that the man who had wanted his whole life to be a farmer had finally fulfilled his dream.


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There is no death. Death is the limitation of our vision