MY FAVORITE TREE ON THE FARM

There’s a tree out here on Stillwater Farm that’s older than my remembering and wiser than my knowing. We called it a horse apple tree when we were boys, though I’ve since learned its proper name is the Osage orange—Bois d’ arc, the old-timers say, bow-wood, as if even its name carries the memory of hands that shaped it for use and survival.

It drops those strange, wrinkled green globes—like something the Lord made on a thoughtful day and never quite explained. We were told not to eat them, that they were poisonous, which was the universal warning for anything a boy might be tempted to taste. Still, they had a kind of beauty to them, and we made our own use—turning them into ammunition for our childhood wars. We hurled them like grenades, not fully knowing that the real war was flickering across our television screens each night, the faraway thunder of Vietnam War echoing in the play of boys who didn’t yet understand what we were imitating.

Across from this ground sits the old farmhouse, built in 1907, where Daisy and Paul Young once lived. It was Paul who told me, plain and certain, that the three Bois d’ arc trees on this place had stood a hundred years and were meant to stand a hundred more. He spoke of wagon wheels fashioned from that stubborn wood—wood so hard it resists both nail and blade, as if it answers only to time and patience. I’ve seen a chainsaw spark against it, like striking flint, as though the tree remembers fire.

And under one of those trees, I’ve been feeding pigs—twenty-four of them, reddish and growing fast into whatever you call that season between piglet and full hog. They gather in a kind of fellowship, not quarrelsome just now, because there’s enough for all. That’s a fine thing to witness in any creature.

We call them Iberico, which sounds too proper, too distant for animals that root and grunt and look you in the eye like they’ve got something to say. Around here, we try to keep a simple covenant: every pig knows its name. Not because it changes the market, but because it changes us.

One sow—purebred and steady—built herself a nest yesterday. Not a careless pile, but something deliberate, almost hopeful. And this morning, there they were: ten piglets, laid into that nest like a promise kept. Safe. Dry. Alive. I found myself proud in a way that had little to do with ownership and everything to do with witness.

There’s a kind of wisdom in that sow that no book ever taught me. She knew what was coming and prepared for it with what she had and where she stood. That’s more than most of us manage.

Now I’m considering moving them—taking that small family from the shade of the Bois d’ arc to the shelter of a shed we call Hog Heaven. It would be drier there, safer from a hard rain or a turn in the weather. That’s what a farmer does—he measures risk and makes decisions.

But I’ll admit something plain: I don’t know for certain that I know better than that sow. Still, the work of tending land and life is bound up in such choices. You do what seems right with what you’ve been given, and you carry a little doubt alongside your confidence. Maybe that’s part of the covenant too—not just between man and animal, but between humility and responsibility.

And the old Bois d’ arc tree stands over it all, saying nothing, holding its ground, keeping its counsel the way only something rooted deep in time can do.