“Crows are family.” This wasn’t precisely the first utterance from Denton Parkins, but it was certainly the most arresting. He’d already gone through a list of remedies for crows and mice, his major competitors in the pumpkin and strawberry market. Crows, it seems, are wily creatures and sociable; he proposes to me that, “the crows scope us out.” I sense that he and the crows, from long dwelling together, have become familiar with one another’s faces.
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One of the most perplexing and discouraging realities the modern world confronts us with is a disconnection from our past and the past in general. We are separated from the first European settlers of West Tennessee by just less than 200 years, but we have less in common with those ancestors than they themselves would have had with the Ancient Greeks or Romans. Time is a relative construction in this sense, just like it is in physics.
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Loading my three children into the car to take the oldest to school in the early morning is usually a pretty somber and quiet routine. However, sometimes my kids have the craziest conversations. Recently my daughter, who is five, asked, “What are we doing today?” This is a common question for her to ask, as lots of times she runs errands with me or visits friends. On this day, though, we were going to check out Marmilu Farms, a recently established farm in Jackson raising organic animals.
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The connection between agriculture and West Tennessee is as old as the last ice age. When the glaciers retreated and the sea whose northern reaches brushed the southern edge of our state dried, what remained in the land between two of the great rivers of our nation was a fertile alluvial plain that stretches from the line of hills bordering the Tennessee River all the way to the Mississippi River.
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