“Holy sh**, Richard! What are you gonna DO?” asked Ira, our neighbor.
“I reckon I’ll wait until the water goes down, and plant it again…” answered my dad, Dick Heston.
“What?” Ira almost yelped, “What if it floods again?!”
“Well, I guess I’ll wait for the water to go down again, and if it’s not too late, I’ll plant it again,” said Dad. “If it’s too late, I guess I’ll just have to wait until next year.”
I remember it like it was yesterday, but it was sometime in the Spring of either 1968 or 1969. The three of us, Ira, Dad and me, were standing with the water of Cedar Creek lapping at our toes, which sounds kind of cool until you realize that Cedar Creek’s banks were about 300 yards from where we were standing, and the water was rushing over the crop my father had planted just a couple weeks earlier.
Being a farmer is an extraordinarily challenging career choice. Faith, hope, and hard work get you through, and gratitude makes the challenge less daunting and more rewarding. I won’t say Dad never cursed the rain, but he understood the fine line his livelihood required him to walk. And he was grateful to walk it. He was grateful for the rain. He was grateful for the snow. (“Helps the subsoil moisture,” he’d say.) He was grateful for the work and he was grateful for neighbors who pitched in and for the chance to pitch in for them, too. He was grateful for nature, upon which he relied for his income – and for our existence.
He’d have turned 88 years old today, August 4th.
Being a leader is an extraordinarily challenging career choice. Faith, hope and hard work get you through, and gratitude makes the challenge less lonely and more rewarding. Our “floods” might look more like a virus that shuts down “business as usual,” or, it might look like a clear path to a record-setting year that becomes a bumpy road that hopefully leads to relevance and survival.
19 years after his passing, here’s hoping I approach every day as a leader with the gratitude he showed, the commitment that he had, and his confidence that if we do our part, it will all be ok.
It will.
Reprised in part from prior posts in tribute to the Daily Diff’s most quoted professional.
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