The best answer I can give is, “busy.”

My sister Col. Peggy attends Rotary Club meetings early Tuesday mornings in Weirton. She said her Rotary friends often ask her, “How are things on the farm?” She thought it was worth an answer, and deputized me to deliver that answer, so a week from now I’ll be trying to do so in the space of 20 minutes, which I know, being a former Rotarian myself, is about all the time I’ll get.

I sat down to outline my speech and immediately saw problems.

If I begin with the Miller family history on this farm, and tell how 3X Great-grandfather David Miller was born in County Tyrone, Ireland, in 1743 and came to America with two brothers, fit in the Revolutionary War, had 400 acres in the valley of the South Fork of Tomlinson Run and was temporarily chased out by Indians, who dug up his pots near the spring and burned his cabin, I won’t even get to 1x Great-grandfather Morgan Miller who fit in the Civil War and was captured at Winchester, and how his brother John sent him $20 to bribe his way out of Camp Parole, and came back from the war to sign a lease-share agreement with his Uncle Henry Pittenger for the 132-acre farm we’re on now, stipulating among other details that Uncle Henry will get all of the apples from the new orchard but they will share apples from the old orchard, that alone will eat up 19 minutes.

If I start complaining about all the invasive species that are trying to take over the farm, like the multiflora rose thorn bush that is like living barbed wire and was introduced on purpose to this country from Europe as a hedgerow after WWII, and who in America for God’s sake fences with hedgerows?, and the Canada geese that eat my pumpkin sprouts and practice flying south in big V’s but never go, or the Canadian thistle that takes over our cultivated fields and if you disc it up it only makes more thistles, like the mythical Hydra, thanks again, Canada, or the giant foxtail grass that takes over fields, and even if you mow it to an inch high it will make an inch-high seed head with a hundred seeds in it, or the oriental bittersweet vines, not our nice native bittersweet, I found choking trees along our property line with the state gamelands last year, which came into this country as pretty orange berries in a wreath, or the autumn olive bush that was somebody’s great idea of a groundcover for strip-mined land, you see it all along I-70 west toward Cadiz but it loves to take over farmland, too, and let’s not forget the pretty spotted lanternfly that attacks grape vines and trees, and just appeared in Pennsylvania in 2014, and you see one and try to stomp it and always miss because the darned things are so quick because, I found out, they are related to leafhoppers, well I sure can’t get all that into one minute and it’s too depressing to talk about anyway.

I should talk about happier things like the pumpkin patch we started with son Worshrag when he was 8 and 26 years later are still doing it in the fall, and how he bought his first car with pumpkin money, and how we continued it with the five grandsons, who have been paying income tax on the earnings since they were about that age, too, but then I’d have to tell them about the drought and hungry deer last summer eating our pumpkins so it was the worst year ever, and how some years ago the deer were bad and I never hunted before but decided if they eat my pumpkins I am going to eat them, and I could tell them about our farm pond where people come to fish and I swam when I was a teenager and then swam with the grandsons, and almost every year it would get cold enough to ice skate on, but then I’d have to tell them about this winter, when it was so cold for so long the ice was 10 inches thick, and Seed and the grandsons skated but the next day Grandson Bob called me and said, “The ice in the pond collapsed,” and I said, “What do you mean, ‘collapsed?'” and he said the water was gone and the ice was laying in the muck on the bottom of the pond, and it was true because the ice crushed a drain pipe and now we have to clean out the pond and rebuild the dam but we can’t do that until it dries up and it won’t stop raining and trying to fill up again.

If I have 30 seconds to spare I could tell them about all the building projects I’ve done on the farm with help from sons Seed and sometimes Worshrag and the grandsons, like during COVID when we re-sided our 1849 barn with pine and spruce lumber timbered on the farm from seedlings that my grandfather Fred planted, and I repaired the floor, too, because Worshrag finally found the love of his life and she wanted a barn wedding, but then I’d have to tell how six days before the wedding she almost died because an ER doc missed her appendicitis and she was going septic, but she had emergency surgery and lived and they got married on the dock in the pond when she got out of the hospital and then married again in the barn later, and how pretty and magical their wedding was, and everyone cried with happiness.

How are things on the farm? Busy, I’ll say.

(Fred Miller’s two books of stories are only $10, available locally at Calcutta Giant Eagle, Pottery City Antique Mall, Museum of Ceramics, Frank’s Pastries, Davis Bros. pharmacies, and the Old Ft. Steuben gift shop.)