Project Dateline

Kentucky soil provides sustenance, solace

Photos By David Stephenson

DSTEPHENSON@HERALD-LEADER.COM

Story By Amy Wilson

AWILSON1@HERALD-LEADER.COM

SPROUT –

A man on an ATV whizzes down the hill. It’s only 7:15 in the morning on a backroad in Nicholas County. Minutes pass. A man on a tractor takes a slow turn and chugs up the hill. Minutes pass. A man in a truck stops in the middle of the road to chat.They turn out to be all one guy.

His name is Everett House, and he is just about all the morning traffic here in a town that most people know as Buzzard’s Roost but Everett remembers, when prompted, as Sprout. Everett’s folks still live right there in that big old white farm house, and he’s been farming tobacco on these acres since he was strong enough to wave a tobacco stick around and actually be dangerous with it.

Now 60, he’s just about ready to retire. This could be his last crop of tobacco, though who knows? He looks around at the hills which, in stereotypical Kentucky splendor, do roll, one after the other, away from his land.

“I’m my own boss. No one to answer to but my wife,” he laughs. He might just give it up. Garden for pleasure. Grow corn and tomatoes. Fight weeds. Look up at the view instead of down at his foundling crops.

“Poor man’s country,” says Everett’s son, Robert, who is looking at the same view. He says he isn’t really sure what he’ll do when Dad stops farming because, well, there might be better things.

That said, he and his father are going to be setting tobacco sometime after noon today. Right now, they’re lopping off the tops of some tobacco seedlings with a suspended mower on a track, to “make the plants hardy” before putting them in the ground to fare for themselves.

Well, not exactly for themselves. Everett makes note that he recently spent the exorbitant price of $234 a ton for fertilizer and that baling twine is going for something unbelievably high, like $35 a roll.

What’s a man to do when times change like that?

“You put your faith in the Lord when you work on a farm,” says Everett, knowing that alone should suffice but, still, it took $4,782 to give compostable umph to 15 acres of bottomland.

Again, what’s a man to do when times change like that?

Because they do change.

Just look at Sprout. The center of town was down at the four-way stop, says Everett. He is trying to explain to 27-year-old Jeff Capps, who by himself comprised the rest of the traffic this morning, about how Sprout used to have a store — in fact, there were three stores within four miles, but now you have to go to Moorefield to shop — and how all that’s down there by the old store now is Miss Jolly’s house and Miss Jolly’s chickens, her ducks, her bunnies, her cats, her peonies and her just-getting-rolling vegetable garden.

You should go down there, he says, then suggests compassion because Miss Jolly’s companion, Mr. Mitchell, just died a month ago and she might not be answering the door.

“Just knock on the door and yell out that Everett House sent you.”

Mr. House’s name does not have to be invoked, as Geneva Jolly is watering the pots on her porch and says hey. She’s 73 and still marveling that the tiny apple tree she put in 21 years ago now towers over her house. That the purple clematis and the grapes don’t need a darn bit of attention. That the sour cherry and the peach trees, despite a few dead limbs, produce a fine summer dessert. That the lilies do what they must and smell so good and “I don’t have a bit of training in such things.”

Out in the field, beets and broccoli, peppers and rhubarb, tomatoes and all manner of this and that, work their way from the ground up. A single plastic chair sits at the edge of the plowed square. Geneva says she’s not sure what will come up this year without her partner, Bill. He succumbed to cancer only weeks ago, she says. It’s still so soon after.

She finds she does better, emotions-wise, outdoors than in, so maybe the garden will be spectacular this year.

Don’t know, though. April’s bitter cold took some early garden momentum and a few things had to get a start over. Starting over is hard.

Even Everett says so. He’ll have to reseed his alfalfa, he thinks. And he knows what he is doing, she says.

It’s the lesson of spring. That time changes things.

Especially if you’re a seed in Sprout, says the deeply gifted gardener Geneva, “which you put in the ground and most times makes good.”

It is the lesson of life that time doesn’t have the power to change everything.

Like Geneva’s love for Bill or that the apple, the cherry and the peach trees, untended and unasked, bear fruit.