Chess-Club Farmer

I often return to an image of my father in the hayfield: plaid shirt darkened with sweat, straw hat pushed back, a stem of hay sometimes held loosely in the corner of his mouth like he belonged to an old Midwestern fable. He drove the orange Allis Chalmers WD with a kind of absorbed calm, one hand on the wheel, another reaching to adjust some improbable contraption of chains and levers he had rigged to old nineteenth-century implements. I rode the metal wheel well beside him, gripping hard as he had taught me, feeling the heat of sun-baked steel through my palms. To me, he seemed born to this life—utterly a farmer.

And yet he had not begun that way.

Long before the straw hat there had been horn-rimmed glasses, sideburns, French and German textbooks, and the presidency of a college chess club. Before haying, there was a young man at Oshkosh during the Vietnam era, watching protests spill into streets and buildings burn, deciding when to disappear and head home. There was the boy collecting bottle caps after the Brown County Fair, the Eagle Scout roaming West De Pere on a bicycle, the student wandering Europe through France, Germany, Liechtenstein and beyond, with languages on his tongue and books in his bag.

Sometimes I try to reconcile those two men—the intellectual leaning over a chessboard and the farmer chewing on straw—but I have come to think they were never opposites. One became the other.

Or rather, he transformed.

That realization came slowly to me. As a child, I simply accepted him as my father, a man who could fix anything, fell a tree, pour a concrete floor, rebuild a chimney, repair a door, and coax abundance from difficult soil. The whole property seemed to extend from his hands. Even the machinery, patched and adapted through ingenuity rather than money, bore his mind at work. What I would later recognize was that the same intelligence that once played chess had simply been redirected toward fields, tools, and seasons.

And I suspect love had much to do with it.

I have no proof because he was a quiet man and rarely explained himself, but I believe he reinvented himself because he loved my mother and wanted to help bring her rural dream into being. Their plans and visions seemed shared, spoken over chores and supper tables in ways I only dimly perceived as a child. He became, somehow, my mother’s farmer.

The thought returns most sharply when I remember the pigs.

As piglets we treated them almost like pets—riding them, snuggling them, laughing at their curious sweetness. Then the day would come when they were loaded into the trailer and taken down the road, returning later in cardboard boxes of wrapped paper. It was simply the cycle of a working farm. Yet I am struck, even now, by the person carrying out what had to be done: that former chess-club president with the sideburns and horn-rimmed glasses.

After my mother died, I watched another transformation begin. The farm faded. He let some of it go. He moved into a house in the suburbs, remarried, and once again adapted himself to a different shared life, this one shaped partly by Wei’s vision—tidy lawns, order, a different kind of domesticity. In some ways he became another version of himself again, and I used to feel a quiet grief about that, as though some essential piece had been lost with the farm.

Maybe some of it was.

But I think now that what looked like loss was also survival. Reinvention was perhaps how he kept finding happiness after grief.

He even told me once, speaking of meeting Wei, that he had never been so happy since my mother died. That told me more than any long confession could have.

And through both transformations, certain things remained.

Gardening never left him. Neither did making. There was always some greenhouse improvisation, some trellis, some injury sustained in the service of growing things—a grapevine whipping an eye, a near heat stroke in the garden, stories worn almost as badges. His practical intelligence remained pre-YouTube and self-forged, the old resourcefulness of books, trial, and nerve.

So did other quieter residues.

The cooking. The chef who had once worked at Royal Scot was still present in pig roasts and church dinner theater meals.

The music. The fragments of whistled choruses. The one-line French songs.

The books in the bedroom.

Even in plaid and chore boots, the intellectual had not disappeared. He had simply worn work clothes over himself.

What I am coming to understand is this: identity is not a fixed essence, but something layered, weathered, revised by love.

The chess-club president did not vanish into the farmer. The farmer did not vanish into the suburban gardener. They accumulated.

And perhaps the evidence of love in a quiet man is sometimes not what he says, but what he is willing to become.

When I think of him now, I do not choose between the horn-rimmed student and the straw-hatted farmer. I hold them together.

A man leaning over a chessboard.

A man steering an orange tractor through cut hay.

A man kneeling in a tidy backyard garden years later.

Different lives, maybe.

But the same hands.