It’s a long list of things that COVID has taken from us, many of them distressing. Seed shopping isn’t on top of the list. But I’m going to miss it.

After harvest, I sit down with Dan Steffl in his pole barn office with a Grain Belt to talk farming and consider Pioneer Seed choices for next spring. Ron Geiger and I look at Channel Seed over pizza and beer at the Ridin High Saloon in Cobden. Bart Kretschmer brings over a 6-pack of craft beer, and we sit at the kitchen table to see what Fertile Crescent Seeds has for options.

I know. There’s a common theme. I like beer.

This year all that’s been replaced by phone and mail, which is functional without the “fun.” Bart did stop over to pick up a check and we talked, loudly, 15 feet apart. We did a condensed version of our usual afternoon-long visit. How’s the wife, where are the kids at, what kind of yields did you get?

I asked about Bart’s mom Irene. Irene and my mom were in Study Club together. Our dads, Hugo and Sylvester, helped each other with corn shelling and silage making. Now Irene is the last of our parents living. She’s at Divine Providence, so that’s been difficult these months with evolving restrictions.

This Christmas will be a challenge for everyone, none more than folks in any sort of assisted living. Bart’s family will try to spend time with Irene in whatever form that takes.

Last year, in case you can remember last year, Bart could pop in on his mom when he was running errands in town. Bart’s wife, Katherine, made a regular Saturday morning cookie stop with whatever kids happened to be around.

The Kretchmer’s son Billy missed most of those. He was finishing up at St. Thomas and then starting a job in the Cities. Trips back to the farm are sparse for Billy, although he tries to get back to help in the fall. Last Christmas, Billy decided to block some time to visit his grandma. She wasn’t going to be around forever. Bart reminded him of that. Sometimes guilt is good incentive.

Billy went there the Saturday before Christmas. After checking at the nurses station, he went down the hall to Irene’s room. On the door was a collage of family pictures, mostly old. There was Billy’s 7th grade photo. He cringed, bemused at his early adolescent look, like most of us.

He knocked lightly and slowly pushed the door open. Irene was sitting in her recliner, silhouetted by morning light coming through the shades. “Grandma?” Billy said, above a whisper.

Irene straightened in her chair, “Oh Bart! Come in, come in.” Irene has bouts of memory lapses, a main reason she’s at the nursing home. It comes and goes. The present blends seamlessly with the past for Irene.

“Grandma, it’s Billy. I’m Bart’s son.”

“Oh, Billy, of course. I know that! Sometimes I get mixed up. I don’t know why I do that.” Irene shook her head slightly. “I’m glad you came to see me. Come in. Do you want a cookie?” She pointed at a small plate of wafers from her last night’s supper.

“No, but thanks.” Billy moved closer for a sideways hug, the kind that young men give their grandmothers. He sat down on the crisply made bed. “I’m home for a couple days, and thought I’d come see you, Grandma. How are you?”

Irene squinted, “Oh, the same. There’s not much on TV. I read some. Sometimes I sit and think about things. That’s what I was doing now.”

Billy smiled at her, “That’s a good thing to do. I sit and think sometimes, too”

“Did you see Hugo when you came? He went out to the barn. I thought he’d be in by now.” Moments like that are tricky for the family. Hugo passed away ten years ago. They’ve decided it’s best to let Irene’s mind spin in place.

“No, I didn’t see Grandpa. Has he been busy?”

“Oh, heavens yes, there’s bedding and scraping out the barn this time of year. I think I should help, but I don’t get around much now. It’s hard going outside for me.”

Now Billy thought he should push back to present time. “Grandma, I’m going to graduate from college this spring. I wish you could come. Right after that I’m going to visit you, so we can have a little graduation party right here.”

“Oh, that would be nice.” Then Irene’s brow furrowed, “Billy, do you have a girl? I think I know that but can’t remember. I wish I could remember things. I don’t know why I don’t.”

“That’s okay Grandma. I’m seeing Jessica a lot. You met her last summer. We came to see you. You liked her.”

Another squint from Irene as she dug in a memory vault that was often locked. “Well, good, Billy. I’m sure I did. I’m glad for you. Are you going to marry her?”

Billy hates those questions. But coming from his grandma they’re harmless. “I don’t know. We talk about it. I’m going to be starting work and Jessica wants to finish school.”

“Good for her, Billy. I wanted to finish school. Ma and pa needed me to come home after country school sixth grade. Ma needed help in the house and pa outside. It was okay. I liked to help them. But I always wondered what school would have been like.” Irene said as she looked out an opening in the shade to what daylight there was. Then her eyes turned back to her grandson. “Billy, are you going to farm after you get married?”

Billy took a second. Another one of “those” questions. “Dad and I talk about it. I don’t know, he and mom have a while to go, and we don’t run that much land. I don’t know, Grandma. Maybe? Some day?”

“Well, Billy, it’s a good life. Hugo and I liked it. We worked hard. We had fun, too. It was a good place to raise your dad and the others.”

Billy saw a chance to mine some memories. “Grandma, remember Christmas then?”

A smile crept on her face, “Oh, Hugo always surprises me with a present from town. Something from the drugstore or McKnight’s. He even went in Anthony’s one year to look at clothes. Can you imagine Hugo going in Anthony’s! A couple times I had to pretend to like his present. I always sewed something for Hugo. I think sometimes he pretended to like it. That’s how it is sometimes when you’re married.”

She nodded to Billy, “Do you have a present for your girl? Darn, I can’t remember her name.”

“Jessica, Grandma, that’s okay. I got her something, some pottery I think she’ll like. Maybe I inherited my present-giving from Grandpa. She might have to pretend she likes it.”

They went back and forth for a while: something remembered, something forgotten, “What was her name?” It was a good visit. Billy was glad his dad guilted him into it. Grandma wasn’t going to be around forever.

Came time to leave, and Billy said he’d be back with his family on Christmas. “Grandma, you be good. Else Santa might bring coal for your stocking.”

Irene smiled at the thought of something she was scared of 90 years ago. “I’ll try to stay out of trouble. Billy, when you go out, could you see when Hugo’s coming in for dinner? He’s down in the barn.”

“Sure, Grandma. I’ll do that.”

To make coffee in our kitchen on one foot and using a walker, you need to shuttle things to intermediary spots along the way. Between the sink and the coffee maker is a table and a cupboard. You shift the pot with water from one to the other to the other while hopping on your lone leg. You need both hands on the walker to hop-step.

I learned this after Achilles tendon surgery. I partially tore my Achilles last spring but didn’t know till an MRI in September. Then it was a matter of not tearing it completely during harvest, which I was lucky to do. After some time in a splint and a boot, I hope to be healthy by planting.

Besides making coffee, there’s a bunch of activities I took for granted a week ago that I don’t now. It’s a short-term inconvenience. I know I am blessed to: A. have access to health care, B. be in relatively good health, and C. have a home and spouse to make this easier. Not everyone has these.

It does cause me to think about those who struggle every day from annoyances like an ongoing pain to major life-altering disabilities. Now and then I hear of someone suffering one of those, and think, “Oh, that would be tough to live with.” I might spend a minute imagining how difficult life would be in that state, and then move on.

For a few weeks as I hobble on one leg, I’m given the chance to feel a little deeper what life with an affliction would be.

I had time while my injured foot was elevated to think about my dad. When I was twelve, Sylvester lost his right hand to a combine’s straw chopper. I have vivid memories of that day. After that, it was just part of my life to have a dad with a prosthesis where everyone else had a hand. I blame my inattentiveness on the self-absorbed teen years that followed.

I wondered about those days after the accident. At the time, my folks had cows, laying hens, sows, plus crops. There was lots of manual labor, all designed to be done with two hands. Yet there I am a few years later, working with my dad who adjusted to a million different tasks with a hand and a hook.

I’ve thought about the days I don’t remember when my parents learned to deal with their “new normal,” to borrow a current phrase? I learned later there was tremendous stress on the both of them. Older brother Dale helped out as they made hard decisions. This was 1968. Margins in farming were thin and backup plans didn’t exist.

How is to learn to strap on a milking machine with a hand and hook? Or working a shovel and pitchfork? My dad probably used those every day since he barely walked. With two hands. Gathering eggs? A metal hook was useless there; you’ve suddenly lost half your capacity.

As I was thinking these, it occurred to me that I was feeling empathy for my dad. Perhaps I was fifty years late. Some things take time.

Empathy is different from sympathy. Both are valuable but have distinct purposes. Sympathy involves feeling sorry for another. My sister recently passed-away, and my family appreciated sympathy cards and messages. Empathy might lead to sympathy, but not necessarily.

Empathy is putting yourself in someone’s place. It takes imagination and effort. It means stepping in another’s shoes, sandals, or maybe bare feet. In their very place. It’s one thing to say, “Oh, that must hurt.” It’s another to try to feel that hurt. To put that sensation on your skin and have your nerves react. Not just pain, but things like another’s frustrations and anxiety. As I put myself in my father’s long-ago place, there were all those.

Someone said of the songwriter John Prine, “He had the gift and the curse of great empathy.” I suppose that’s right; it is both. Once you put yourself in another’s stead, responsibility comes with that. Empathy is difficult, but it can be core to relationship with another. Caring, humanity, compassion grow from it.

The ability to empathize is always useful. But some things here and now make it more so. As our nation wrestles with historic racism, the ability for enough of us to empathize with someone who is a different color or class or lives in a different place might be our only chance to make things better.

Can a 64-year-old rural white guy know what it’s like to be a young urban black man constantly surrounded by people suspicious of him? What it’s like to walk into a store and have security follow you and white people shift over an aisle? Most people I know have health insurance and as nutritious a diet as they want. What if that wasn’t the case for my relatives and neighbors? The schools around here are good. What if my kids attended a school with decaying walls and corroded pipes?

I can never fully know those sensations and that life. But empathy can move me beyond, “Why don’t they just get a job like everyone else?”

Also, in this time, I think there is value in imagining life in the skin of immigrants and refugees. The “curse” of empathy is you can’t take the easy path. It is easy to see them as a lawless horde of people-not-like-us at the border. It’s becomes difficult if they are human beings.

The smallest amount of investigation reveals that whole other truth. The truth is the immense majority of those seeking asylum and refuge here are good and decent people. People who love their kids and seek a safe and healthy place. Like me. Like you.

What’s it like to live in a place where gangs threaten your wife when she goes out? What does it feel like to have no opportunity to work to support your family? How difficult is it to be compelled to leave the place you know for a place you don’t? Only to be met with something like military force rather than an understanding and helpful border presence that should be that of a great nation?

We hope our leaders have this skill of empathy. Regardless, I need to hone it in me. A couple weeks on one leg helps.

I’ve spent a lot of my time on Earth alone. Farming has meant many hours alone on a tractor or working in the yard. A part-time job in the summer has me walking fields, just me, the crops, and the fenceline. Going back, my older siblings were leaving home when I showed up. Close brother Dean spent school weeks at Braille School in Faribault, so I was alone a lot growing up.

The years we were raising our kids were an exception. There were people around then. A bit of time alone early in the morning felt like a gift. Sometimes the kids had friends over making a great racket, and I was glad to sneak off to a tractor, leaving Pam to enforcement duties.

Then, there are people who live alone for a variety of reasons. These range from young and starting out, to old and everyone else is gone. Some choose to live by themselves; others have it thrust upon them.

It’s partly a factor for each of us whether we are an extrovert or an introvert how we feel about time alone. An extrovert, by definition, craves interaction and is energized by that. The introvert is drained by steady human contact and craves time alone to regroup, reflect, and relax. Most of us are some of each, depending on the day.

I am generally comfortable alone and like keeping company with me. I tend to introvert, although wife Pam would argue that isn’t true. Admittedly I often engage random people in line or at bar rails in conversation. That has led to hearing whole life stories sometimes. I tell Pam these are nervous reactions on my part to situations, like standing next to someone.

I’d like to say I spend all this time by myself in introspection and deep thought. It could even be in prayer. Unfortunately, I am an easily distracted introvert. Often, I have a radio on and a cell phone pinging at me in recent years. These can turn into noise filling my head. I try to spend time in communication with God. But that often ends with, “What were we talking about God?”

Time spent alone does allow me to write these columns in my head before putting them to paper. Well, computer screen. A danger with being by yourself can be the chance to overthink something given enough time. One can think themselves into a funk now and then when you are alone. A friend nearby might tell you, “That doesn’t make any sense,” and save you some agony.

I think we all seek balance between solitary and social time. Ideally, we would get the right amount of interaction with other human beings to allow us to do some good and fill our cup of curiosity each day. We know we have been charged to love our neighbor (and enemy). There are ways to do that even in solitude. Caring for the Earth, nurturing a place that will be passed on, even just not wasting resources that can be used by others. Of course, we can always use spare moments to pray for our fellow travelers.

As Covid Winter descends (that just sounds depressing), whatever our situation in life will be concentrated and intensified. If we live in a house full of people, they are around more than normal, and you might be faced with intense busyness around you. If you live alone, it is the opposite, with less visitors and reduced events out of the home.

Circumstances affect our efforts to balance time alone and time together in normal times. Curveballs can be thrown at us any day. But in this time of quarantine and pandemic, it’s more fastballs up at your head than curveballs.

There are people living alone who are struggling right now. I think of a bachelor farmer or retired guy in town. They might have gone for coffee or a beer with a group every day, and now that is taken away. Maybe worse than being alone, are those who are trapped with an unkind or even abusive other.

It calls to mind the early settlers. There are stories of men and women trying to set up a life on the unforgiving frontier. Women going insane were commonly reported, but there were men, too. According to the Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, “driven to madness by the isolation, hardships, and environment of the settlement experience…often buried in unmarked graves, their illnesses became dark family secrets, their individual stories are lost to history.”

Our daughter is employed by the United Nations working in Human Rights. It’s interesting that the UN considers solitary confinement a potential type of torture that is inhumane and illegal according to international law. In a statement issued last year about concerns of excessive use in the United States, the UN said:

“The severe and often irreparable psychological and physical consequences of solitary confinement and social exclusion are well documented and can range from progressively severe forms of anxiety, stress, and depression to cognitive impairment and suicidal tendencies. This deliberate infliction of severe mental pain or suffering may well amount to psychological torture.”

Coming out of this difficult pandemic there are going to be individuals who will need support and healing. All of us should look around and see where we can bring light to someone’s darkness.

A final depressing thought on loneliness. I am sure the saddest piece of music ever written was by Hank Williams. Hank wrote this in 1949, feeling tormented in a relationship at the time:

“Hear that lonesome whippoorwill

He sounds too blue to fly

The midnight train is whining low

I’m so lonesome I could cry.”

If you decide to listen to that song, please, follow it up with something cheery. Maybe a good polka. We need that right now.

I was talking to Dale, a former farm kid.  I was telling him how harvest was going.  Dale tolerated me a while, and then said, “You corn and bean farmers.  You’ve got about as much to do as me mowing my lawn.  You get your machinery out a few times a year like I get my lawn mower out.”

My comeback was, “Yeah, but the government gives us a bunch of money, so this must be important.”  To which, he said he should get a Lawn Support Payment.  I couldn’t argue with that.  It made about as much sense as some farm payments.

Farm kids like Dale and me grew up on diversified farms with day-long and year-round lists of things to do.  With cows, steers, pigs, chickens, corn, soybeans, oats, alfalfa, not to mention kids and a garden, the work literally never ended for our parents.

Now animals are mostly raised in large confinement operations, and a shrinking number of us raise corn and soybeans on the surrounding land.  I admit there are gaps on the calendar for crop farmers.  There’s time to do other things.  Frivolous things.  Like write a newspaper column.

Springs and falls are still intensely busy.  Yes, more than mowing your lawn.  Every harvest, a few days stand out that become stories to share with fellow farmers.  Those are days that don’t go as planned.  Here’s a couple from Harvest 2020.

I was unloading corn in the yard.  Nephew Jay was running the combine.  I got a text, which usually meant a wagon was full.  This time it was a short video with the message, “Is this dust or smoke?”  The video showed wispy white something coming from the side of the corn head.

Oh oh.  There’s a lot of dust around a combine, but not like that.  I jumped in the pickup and raced to the field.  Jay was out of the combine.  There is a panel on the side of the corn head covering the pulleys and chains that propel everything.  Smoke was sifting out around the edges of that.

That cover is held on by six bolts.  I grabbed a wrench, got the first one off, and pulled back on it a bit.  Given a gasp of oxygen, the smoke leapt out as flames.  We ran to get the fire extinguisher on the side of the combine.  We don’t extinguish many fires, and there were a couple frantic seconds figuring that out.

Inside that compartment was a perfect combustible blend of oil, grease, and corn dust.  Unfortunately, we couldn’t spray the fire without getting the panel off.  One by one I removed the bolts on my knees getting a face full of smoke, dust, and extinguisher retardant as Jay sprayed the newly freed fire leaping out into the air

It was briefly exciting.  In seconds that seemed like hours, the flames were out as smoke continued to billow.  If, this a large “if,” we didn’t have that fire extinguisher, I’m not sure how the story ends.  It was windy, and a hundred acres of dead corn plants might have given that fire a mind of its own.

We had several days of Red Flag Warnings this fall.  Those are increasingly common: dry wind and extreme low humidity at the time of year when everything green has turned into potential tinder.  Combine fires are not uncommon, each of them being a combustible vessel of grain dust and petroleum products.

Our situation was not apparently dangerous, although there were enough ingredients to make it so.  It was reminder that there are hazards in working with machines and nature.  Lots of jobs around here, not just farming, are so defined.  An increased emphasis on safety and better equipment during my career make things better.  But danger remains.

We drove the combine to the yard where I took a hose to the smoking parts.  The water was met with hissing and more smoke, and finally just dripping.  Our attention turned to back to the task at hand: harvest.  I called Miller Sellner Implement to let them know we were bringing in our disabled machine.

We were met by Laverne Krzmarzick and Cole Krzmarzick who ascertained that a bearing going out had caused sparks leading to fire.  A half day in the shop would get us going with some repairs to be completed later.  They were joined later by Clint Krzmarzick and Carter Krzmarzick.  Every customer at Miller Sellner gets great service, but I figure it doesn’t hurt to have my surname.

My other story involves less danger and more embarrassment.  Promise not to laugh.

I was racing to finish corn before our October snowstorm, working alone with ten acres to go.  To get done quicker, I was going to haul these last loads to nearby Central Region elevator.  Heavy snow was forecast late in the day, but flakes began falling in the morning as I started combining.

I filled my two wagons and jumped from the combine to the tractor.  I drove the first wagon to the elevator in increasing snow.  As I unloaded, I heard other farmers were quitting.  Snow on corn plants can plug up a combine’s innards.

Getting home with the empty wagon, I jumped in the combine to drive it home and into the shed.  Then I ran to cover things up by the bins.  Now it was full-out snowing, and I ran back to the field to take the other wagon to the elevator.  That was the plan.

When I pulled off the scale, Jay (a different Jay) waved me to the number two pit, which wasn’t normal.  I climbed off the tractor and Jay said the sample came out weird and we would have to recheck it.  He turned to unload my wagon.

My empty wagon.  My mind spun briefly, wondering where my corn had gone.  OH!  It hit me.  I forgot to switch wagons back in the field and hauled the empty wagon back into town.

“Um, that’s imaginary corn,” I said cringing.  “I heard the price for imaginary corn was up today.”  I was scrambling to not look dumb.  At this age, I regularly misplace things like phone and wrenches.  But not 400 bushels of corn.  It was a senior moment, writ large.

Oh well, any time you can get out of harvest with the people and the machines mostly intact, you have to be thankful.  Thanksgiving Day is timed perfectly in that way.