The Minnesota Historical Society has in its collection, a photograph of a man with a dapper mustache holding three prize-winning rutabagas from the 1926 State Fair.
Judging by the fact that this man is wearing a collared shirt, tie, suit coat, and matching vest BENEATH his over-alls, and by the look of pride on the face that confronts the camera head-on from beneath a fedora, the man in the photograph is probably clutching the fruit of his own labors.
Each of the three rutabagas are the size of children's snowshoes. They easily resemble small torpedoes or salted cod fish.
One looks at such a photograph with awe.
"Hot Dang. They sure knew how to make fun out of nothing back then!"
Growing up, I considered the power to make fun out of nothing akin to the power of flying or beaming lazer out of your eyes, or multiplying loaves and fishes. My mother had this power in spades. She could turn a lazy afternoon into the stuff of memories with little more that some paper and a cup of flour. It is a superpower which makes it possible for one lone adult to entertain a squadron of children for hours on end. It is a quality which can aid a young man in turning virtually anything and any place into a memorable date. It gives a person the gift of no impatient wasted hours in the check-out line or at the bus-stop.
And sadly, it is an ability which is disappearing in people...perhaps due to their growing dependence upon screens and gidgets, which, in effect shape and mold them into passive crevice dwellers instead of artists of poverty and thrift.
Recently we trekked up to the North Shore of Lake Superior for an overnight trip. As I sat by the water's edge, and sighed at the blue horizon line, watching birds skim the big lake in little flocks flying in B-52 bomber formations, noticing the wind whip patches of Superior up in little skiffs of gray and dark blue, waves at times slapping the rocks, and at other times, the water tranquil in little pools of mirror glass, I noticed how many hours my children were spending down at the rocky shoreline. The afternoon and evening were ticking by. In the morning they leapt out of bed to disappear down to the water yet again.
What were they doing down there?
I sipped coffee. I fingered the pages of my book. I watched them. Soon, I joined them.
They were practicing the art of doing nothing- of making hours of fun out of anything to hand.
Collecting driftwood to build bridges and dams. To fashion into little boats that were launched with great ceremony and imaginary bands playing "OOOMPAh PAH" on the quay. They were laboring over japanses tea gardens created with swirls and circles of pebbles, made darker by special moist dirt from little rock pools lined with seaweed helicoptered in by an eager-to-help sister. They were spotting and enshrining sacred triceratops eggs, turning into a small dwarfish race of rock-hoppers who scoured the rocks for food and survivors of shipwrecks. Hunting out the best rocks to skip or paint later. Hunting out the rocks to give a college bound sister, or a Mama fond of speckles. They were toe-dipping, wading, falling in, stripping off, jumping into the frigid Superior waters and testing their limits of persevearance, hardiness, and fool-hardiness. And these were the occupations noticeable to an adult whose powers of imagination have crustified somewhat in her 45th year. All through these hours by the water's immensity and changing face, there were rumblings and whispers of running commentaries from under the breath, or at times sung into the wind, or shouted over the rock faces.
And when we returned to the farm, I realized we were coming home to the cradle of this power.
Some zucchinis had managed to evade our searches before the trip, and now, after a mere 48 hours we had some behemoths. They were lovingly harvested and faces were scratched into them immediately in keeping with decades long traditions of summer squash dolls. Soon they would be carted around in wagons dressed in lacy dolls' clothes, and sniffed at by the dog.
We have a friend who is currently circumnavigating Lake Michigan in a sea kayak. Halfway through the journey, his brother joined him to share in the adventure and complete the trip. Google A.I. will tell you that such a trip will take 7-10 weeks. That typically you can manage 15-20 miles each day.
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| Barn Post-Hole Digging Crew June 2026, MI |
But if you have grown up on a farm, and are accustomed to seeing the dreaming and doing colliding often, accustomed to butchering your own animals, hunting wild turkey, trying your hand at construction projects without the use of nails or screws, jumping from rooftops in friendly games of tag, building your own barns, brewing your own beer, bringing in your own hay, and watching the night sky as you fall asleep rolled in your sleeping bag, you will start to look like someone out of Robinson Crusoe, and you will find your capacity for sagas is above the current average.
It helps not to have one of those smart phones in which so many people deposit their intelligence.
After all, if you consult on of those, you may never undertake such an adventure. You may hesitate when you have to eat sea gulls to survive, you may not enjoy sleeping night after night on the sandy shore of Lake Michigan, pulling your canoe up over a bee's nest in the dark, or pushing through the initial days of back and arms cramping up. You may not have acquired the power of making fun out of nothing. You may have rendered yourself imprisoned by passivity because Google said so.
On Friday they will have finished the complete circumnavigation of Lake Michigan in 5 weeks and three days. This is counting the two-day delay enjoying the sights of Mackinac Island with family that traveled up to see them and the day they hiked 15 miles inland to go to Saturday vigil mass.
When I watch my college bound daughter messing around with our fjord horses, I wonder, if such a life surrounded by Euclidean propositions, Aristotelian syllogisms, swing dancing, and bug collections while she read Fabre, will such a life be filled to the brim enough? 26 years ago I came to the same studies with wide-eyed wonder, but I came to them from the St. Paul/Minneapolis suburbs. My experience of keeping livestock was limited to zebra finches, rats, and a very corpulent guinea pig. I watch her now, in the round pen, with Freddie and Erling, anticipating their movements by eyes trained instinctively on muscle quivers and head motions. She gets Erling to follow her around the pen as if by hypnosis. She has no treat in her hand, she carries no whip. She is simply messing around for an hour outside with these giant beasts, in the kind of patient observation which Freshman Lab wishes it could train into a student, but which, in her case, has taken wings into being and not just knowing.
There is no doubt that she has so much to gain and learn at such a college, so much of her personhood waiting to be developed by serious pursuit of truth embedded in the greatest works of Western civilization...but so much of the college experience is the "city life". It is gossip, and vanities, and the overemphasis on thinking rather than doing. It is pages and pages of books, and pencils, and hands curled around coffee cups, and doing one's hair, and picking out outfits, and worrying over math, and reading for entire weeks on end...and in the meantime calluses disappear, and the body grows accustomed to inside spaces and boys think you're pretty and your fingers remember the fragile blippy blooms of the garden snap dragons you sold on the roadside stand, stripping them of their bottom leaves and stuffing them into jars filled with cold well water.
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From a letter to her sister Cornelia, dated Monday October 13, 1930 and signed by Linda Benitt of Hastings, MN:
"We have about 3 days of plowing yet left to do. There is nothing like turning over those furrow slices for days at a time to sink one's roots into the soil of home. Plowing can either be an art of a job- like most things in life perhaps- but as an art it is very fascinating. It is a step in a sequence of events, a link in a chain; if well done, all that follows benefits, if ill done, all suffers- including profits. One must think of many things as he plows and adjust his work to attain his ends...."
Linda was a farmwife and together with her husband of eight years started "Apple Acres Farm". But this was after she had earned graduate degrees in Public Health from Harvard and MIT. She did post graduate work at the University of Minnesota. Sometimes you have to leave the farm, plant yourself like seed in other soil, only to come back and reap the rewards of your education on a piece of land.
"But of all the occupations by which gain is secured, none is better than agriculture, none more profitable, none more delightful, none more becoming to a freeman. "
CICERO, Section 151 of Bk 1 of "On Duties"
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| Little Flower Farm gardens July 2026 |
