God sets the lonely in families, he leads out the prisoners with singing; but the rebellious live in a sun-scorched land.
Psalm 68:6 (NIV)
I. The Graveyard and the Field
My uncle’s former farm sits on a kind of borderland, though I never had words for that as a child. To the south and west, the fields run out in long rows. It’s the kind of midwestern acreage that teaches you to measure time in corn height and rainfall. But to the north, pressed up against the fence line, sits St. Thomas Cemetery, a small field of stone where the dead rest inside the same horizon as the living.
When I was a boy, I used to slip away after chores and sit beneath the oak tree guarding that fencerow. The dog would follow, flop down beside me, and keep the kind of watch only a dog can keep: half loyal, half asleep. That’s where I first read Where the Red Fern Grows, a book about a boy, two dogs, and the kind of love that teaches you through loss. It was the right book for that soil. The land was already translating things for me long before the language arrived.
I went back recently for no grand reason, just a turn of the handlebars and a pull in the chest. The property is no longer a dairy, or worked by my family’s hands. My uncle long ago left the life of a tenant farmer, trading the land for other vocations before retiring. But the fence is still there. The cemetery is still quiet. The oak still leans in the same direction, as if listening. I sat again in the same patch of grass on a cool and damp spring afternoon, a good book in hand. Time folded instead of passing.
The graveyard is an in-between place where love and labor coexist and a boy can sit between the living and the dead to learn the truth of both without anyone explaining it out loud. There were moments while reading as an adult when I looked up and saw the farm less active than I remember. There from my childhood past sat a solitary fence post now weathered beside the machine shed. It almost whispered from its lonely place out of earshot from the house.
II. The Caterpillars and the Quiet
My uncle never talked much about faith, but he had a way of reading the world that felt older than religion. He listened to forecasts, experts, and seed catalogs like other farmers. Yet without formally teaching natural truths, he trusted what the land was already saying. For him, the first sermon of the year was preached by caterpillars. He watched when they appeared, how fast they moved, and how early they crossed the road.
If the woolly bears came out thin and quick, he said it meant the season would burn fast. If they were late and heavy, the ground was holding something cold and wet underneath. It sounded like folklore as a child, but I know now it was a kind of literacy—an informal education in paying attention to things most people dismiss as background. It was a language woven into the way he assessed planting, a quiet counterweight to the burdens he carried through humor and toil.
As I sat beneath the oak, I thought of Billy Colman, the boy in Where the Red Fern Grows who learns endurance, grief, and responsibility beside his father in hard weather. Billy and his father endured sub-zero cold. My uncle and I drove fence posts into Illinois ground already hardening in a spring without rain. The Psalmist says the rebellious dwell in a sun-scorched land. I only know how truth arrives quickly in harder seasons.
In the spring of 1988, while the other farmers planted long-season hybrids that needed time and rain the year would never give, my uncle put in 90-day corn: a short-season gamble based on bug tracks and instinct. The same instinct surfaced in other kinds of weather. Some men checked the news to gauge the world; my uncle checked the township. While gathering feed in Seward, IL, my uncle would ask about the ball diamond, the church and the school district.
If there were no tractor accidents or barn fires, if there were no news of divorces or ambulances in the night, he’d say, referencing his farm, “The neighbors are quiet.” He found a way of naming a real peace, neither bothered nor loud. The kind of peace earned by seasons where nothing broke. He never explicitly explained any of this. He lived it, which is worse and better than teaching. If you wanted to understand, you had to watch him the way he watched the land. You had to learn that the world is always speaking but rarely in words.
III. The Steer and the Ledger
The year the corn survived, I did too. During the summer of the drought, my uncle and aunt encouraged me to raise a heifer for the county fair. They never framed it as a life lesson, just the kind of opportunity farm kids were given to test their grit and endurance. When the heifer did well, my grandfather bought me a steer calf, and that meant I’d stepped into something bigger than a project, making me part of the work. I fed the steer with the grain that grew from the drought—the same 90-day corn the caterpillars had predicted. Looking back, it feels like a parable: scarcity turned into muscle, and hunger turned into growth. The steer was my first real responsibility and my first real grief.
Every day, we tied the steer to the fencepost near the machine shed, and I learned to walk beside an animal over twice my size. At times, the animal displayed a nervousness resulting in broken fences, busted knuckles and gravel ground beneath my adolescent skin. The muscle from the steer’s hindquarters started showing up in my own arms, hips, and chest. When I walked it to the trailer to transport it to the Winnebago County Fair, a rabbit, of all things, startled it, and I was yanked through a cattle pen like a rag.
I remember standing up, furious, and calmly talking the animal into the trailer. At the fair, I would rest on straw bales and a sleeping bag. Some childhood friends and I would play cards into the night by lantern and flashlight. In the morning, I would wash the animal, and its startle reflex would send me chasing the steer through the fairgrounds, walking him back to the beef barn to wash him all over again. Each time, I learned something new about the surroundings, and about how patience develops.
When the fair season ended and the steer sold, part of the money belonged to someone else. I remember handing out a portion to the landowner with whom my uncle farmed on shares. The word economics was foreign to me then, but I understood what it meant to owe something for work I thought was mine alone. There was no room for a teenager’s indignation; the moment required an adult’s accounting. To some extent, even gratitude kept a ledger.
I sat in a dusty kitchen, counting bills into the landowner’s waiting hands, while my uncle swatted flies. Sure, I raised the steer. I fed it, brushed it, walked it, and hauled it where it needed to go. Yet even as a boy, I could see that none of that labor occurred in isolation. The plowed field, the maintained barn and the dried feed all arrived through someone else’s hands. That afternoon, I learned a form of justice that keeps the world upright long enough to plant again.
I cried when the steer left, and the adults decided those tears belonged to my attachment to the animal. Despite my protests, then and now, they were not entirely wrong. But even as a boy, some deeper part of me recognized I was grieving something larger than livestock. The world had just revealed one of its harder laws: if you love something long enough to raise it, you do not necessarily get to keep it. You only get the chance to tend it faithfully enough to know you did not waste the gift.
IV. See the Water
The early 1990s arrived wet and refused to let up. Fields once starved under the 1988 sun now drowned before seed could take hold. Topsoil turned to soup beneath our boots, the creek spilled its banks, and land that had once begged for rain pushed it away in excess. I remember riding in the truck with my uncle one spring, asking why planting stalled. I still carried the logic of the drought in my young mind. If attention had saved us once, surely it could save us again.
My uncle said nothing at first. Then he pulled the truck to the shoulder, pointed through the windshield at the flooded fields, and shouted, “See the water, Colin! It is water!” His aggravation was directed at the land itself, at the absurdity of watching the same ground swing from thirst to drowning in the span of a few seasons. In 1988, listening offered a fighting chance. Floodwater offered no conversation. It swallowed timing, judgment, and intention alike.
That was the year I began to understand something I would not have language for until much later. Sometimes, God does not simply give or withhold. Sometimes He rearranges who belongs where. He leads out the prisoners with singing, though not always the ones we expect, not always gently, and not always forever. No one placed me with my aunt and uncle because they possessed some special gift for raising a displaced boy. Circumstances placed me there because someone had to keep me.
Something in my uncle eventually gave way beneath the strain of too many uncertain seasons, and a few years later he left farming altogether, took to the highway, and hauled freight across distances. As a boy, I thought he abandoned land he understood. As a man, I see something else. The flood taught him even the sharpest listener can only carry so many unanswered seasons.
V. Inheritance
I was living in a house never meant to be mine. My parents could not hold their own ground, and someone had to hold me. No ceremony or paperwork marked the arrangement with my uncle and aunt. I simply arrived to find a bed, chores, and a place at the table. Sitting in the cemetery this spring, with the same fence posts standing where the field meets stone, I found myself praying in a way that felt less like speaking and more like remembering. At fifty, I could see the boy as clearly as if he still sat beneath the oak with a book in his lap and a dog at his feet. For a moment, childhood and adulthood, before and after, no longer felt like separate countries but neighboring fields divided by a fence I had crossed without noticing.
“God sets the lonely in families.”
That verse sounds gentle until you live it. It doesn’t say he asks the family first. It doesn’t say the family is ready. It doesn’t say the family knows what to do with the one set there. My aunt and uncle did not sign up to raise me, and I did not know how to belong to people who were already tired. They loved me in a way made of labor and expectation, not softness. Rather than adoption or foster care, it was something older and harder: an inheritance of responsibility, paid in sweat. Half of what they gave me came from duty before that word became something we speak of with suspicion, as though obligation were somehow less noble than affection. My aunt and uncle belonged to harder grammar.
The other half came from defiance, the stubborn refusal to let a child disappear simply because the adults who made him ran out of courage. The words for this arrived much later; they were completely absent when I was a child. I just knew the love I received always had a bruise in it. Years later, I would hear family members speak of me as if I had almost been theirs, as though my failure to stay revealed some flaw in my own nature rather than a break in the foundation beneath us. But nothing about me at that time was permanent. I was someone’s responsibility, not someone’s son.
And yet I would not trade that season. Because that house, with its strained marriage, its unspoken frustrations, and its fragile welcome taught me cleanly: You can be loved and misplaced at the same time. You can be wanted and resented. You can be set in a family and still feel the echo of the place you were meant to belong. Most people learn those truths in adulthood. I learned them while hauling buckets, feeding a steer, and sleeping under a roof built for someone else’s life.
I never became a farmer, but the land still got into me the way a scar becomes part of the body’s map. I garden, I tend soil, I read weather the way some people read moods, and I don’t know how not to, even in exhaustion, or when there’s no harvest worth the labor. A friend once told me he was amazed at what I can do with the ground. I just felt tired. It’s my inheritance: the instinct to watch the sky, to smell the dirt, to worry the way other people pray.
My own garden tells the truth my uncle already knew: the soil can bless you, but it will not spare you. It will give you tomatoes and wasp nests, clover and septic failures, beauty and rot in the same square foot. It does not care how poetic your intentions are. Some days I want to quit too—the tending, the noticing, the weight of caring what grows and what withers. I inherited work, but I also inherited watchfulness. And maybe that’s its own kind of blessing; the sort you feel only in hindsight, like rain after dust.
VI. The Red Fern and the Stone
I began this story in a cemetery because that’s where I first learned that endings are not the end of anything. The oak still stands there, guarding the line between rows of corn and rows of names. The stones are no newer, the fields no less patient. Now, I am sitting here, in the same patch of grass where I once read Where the Red Fern Grows, reading psalms and listening to the wet spring breeze. I didn’t bring a dog this time, but I still feel the shape of one at my side. As a boy, that book was a story about loss. Now I see it was about what grows after the loss.
The red fern only grows where something has been buried with love. Something in me was buried on this farm in a way before the words. It was a boy’s grief and a man’s vocation. There was a hunger to notice as wounds became a compass. And like the fern, it came back in other forms: in the quiet spaces where I sit with other people’s grief, in my own garden, and in a stubborn tenderness I still don’t fully know how to explain.
My uncle will probably never say what those years meant to him, and I’ll probably never say it the way he’d understand. And yet, even at this moment, I know he was the one who taught me attention is a form of love, work is a form of prayer, and quiet, when it is real, is its own kind of peace. I was placed in his home the way a seed is placed in soil: without full permission, without certainty, and without a promise of outcome. And yet,
God sets the lonely in families, he leads out the prisoners with singing; but the rebellious live in a sun-scorched land.
Sometimes the family is a flooded field. Sometimes the prisoner is a man who sings only in weather and silence. Sometimes the dry land is a cemetery that teaches you how to live. Not all roots stay where they’re planted. But the ones that do remember. And between them, a boy learned that eternity is not somewhere else. It is here—in the seam where what grows and what remains share the same ground.
Image Credit: Eugene Smith, “The Walk to Paradise Garden” (1946)
