"Nah," said Dean. "He just sits at home these days. Works on whittlin' spoons and chopsticks I imagine."
Jean looked into her empty teacup. "Sold most of his farm to the neighbor, the young guy. Henry's older'n any of us. He deserves to retire, poor bird."
In downtown Sharon Springs, on the western edge of Kansas, a handful of aging locals sat in Dooley's Restaurant, as they did most Wednesdays. There was some frost on the ground outside, but most of the snow had melted or been blown away already. February was always cold, but this one seemed to be more wet than frozen, which made for ugly fields and soggy lawns. The ever-present wind was blowing, of course.
Dean and Jean Metcalf sat together on one of the benches. Across the table, past the carafe of coffee and the plastic flowers were Randy James and Hank Marshall, both farmers. Sam Baird, the pharmacist was there too, and so was Johnny Redd, the cattleman. Johnny hadn't raised any beef in ten years, but still considered himself a cowboy to the bone.
Dean and Jean, contentedly married for over forty years, were drifting dangerously close to their seventies, fully aware that the routines of their weeks and months and years had been cycling repetitively for a couple of decades. Both were tired, but took life with enough sarcasm and critique that they couldn't call themselves unhappy.
All half-dozen characters had finished their small-town breakfast and the empty plates waited to be cleared, smelling of syrup and bacon. Johnny Redd said "There's too many farmers leaving town."
"They're not leaving town, Johnny," said Dean. "They're just passing on, giving up the farm for wings and harps and halos up there."
"Well," said Sam, who had been dealing in medications and hokey greeting cards since Kennedy's inauguration, "the trouble is, the kids ain't sticking around. See, if the kids bothered to become farmers, we'd have plenty of folks in the field, but they all head out to college and don't come back. Last I saw your kids," he nodded to Dean and Jean, "was a couple of Christmases ago, wasn't it?"
Jean nodded. "Our daughter's got a family. Our son would have been a good farmer, I suppose, but he's doing good in school. I don't think he'll want to come out here to live. Why would he? Dean can handle the farm on his own anyway, with the tractor drivin' itself and everything."
"You two gonna retire like Johnny Redd here did?" asked Sam.
"I ain't retired," said Johnny Redd. "I just ain't felt like keepin' any cattle for a spell. Thinkin' I might get a new herd comin' up here. Next year."
Dean smiled at Johnny. "Yeah. I don't know. I imagine we'll just sell off the fields to the neighbor. He's already got a couple thousand acres of his own, and we lease him another couple hundred. It's all the same wheat and hay anyway. There's no reason for us to keep separate operations these days. He's a good farmer. A little snide sometimes, but not a bad guy."
"Snide? He's only really pleasant in the morning before he starts drinking," said Jean. She hadn't had many good interactions with the neighbor over the years and they generally didn't look each others' way when they were near the fencelines. The Metcalf's house and the neighbor's house were nearly a mile away, so it wasn't hard to avoid contact.
Randy, who kept a farm a few miles west of Sharon Springs and grew more sunflowers than anything, said, "You know, wasn't too long ago everyone had their little homesteads out here. My granddad used to tell me how it was all 80-acre plots, west to Colorado and east to Lawrence. He came out here when he was a boy, when his folks fell for the whole 'westward expansion' package. Lived through the Dust Bowl.
"He told me what it was like to watch everything dry up and see everyone he knew pack up and get out of here. Most everyone left, but our family stuck it out, raising what they could. All them other families left all them homesteads here, just empty and bare, and the bank claimed most of them. My family had a little money and the bank sold us a bunch of little farms cheap. Same went for your family, Dean."
Dean nodded. "Little farms got pretty big pretty quick. Lot of folks out on the coasts who don't like farms our size these days. They think we're too big, that we're corporate and bad and drinking chemicals in our coffee every day." He smiled at the thought of Roundup Lattes.
Randy continued, "Hell. But then, next generation, half the kids went off to college or to California, and didn't come back. All my granddad's peers started dying off, selling the land to the neighbors. Same thing with my dad's generation. Then mine. Those of us that stuck around saw all this land come up for sale, cheap. What were we gonna do, let it go stale? Just sit there while we grow ten-acre gardens? Wheat won the war back in 1918, and hippies still eat bread and Cheerios, don't they?"
The six patrons sat quiet for a few seconds. Randy stared at the fake petunias on the table, obviously riled. He took societal accusations personally.
Hank, the other wheat farmer, finally said, under his breath, "My kids aren't coming back."
Jean said, "Ours either."
Randy pursed his lips, imagining his family surviving those dust storms, growing wheat for World Wars I and II, feeding the world, going through generations of Allis Chalmers tractors, John Deers, and now big red Case combines.
"Mine either," he said, barely audibly.
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