Simple Times

BY SUZY McCRAY

I was reading a 2013 Countryside Magazine late last night when an ad caught my emotions unexpectedly. The ad proclaimed that a particular book about raising sheep by Sue Weaver would contain everything anyone needed to know about raising sheep from choosing them, birthing, pasture raising and more.

Why would a book on sheep cause tears to flood my bed? Sue Weaver and her husband, John, were found dead in their mobile home on their sweet Arkansas farm earlier in July. Both had been sick but it was so unexpected.

I had quoted Sue in my June 2020 Cooperative Farming News article about why I choose small goats on our farm as we grew older and she was tickled to help.

Although we had never met in person, we had been

friends for many years because of our shared love of writing and of animals. My texts back and forth to her just on this phone, which I’ve had since 2019, show each of us congratulating one another on our writing successes and commiserating with each other when editors either declined our hard work or simply took longer than we expected to get back with us.

When I was learning to spin on my spinning wheel, Sue sent me an entire fleece from one of her sheep!

We didn’t agree politically on most things but we were still friends.

One of my last texts to her was how I’d been reading a 2010 Hobby Farms magazine, again late at night, and found an article she’d written about horses.

She celebrated with me when my books were published, and I asked her a zillion questions when she changed primarily from print to e-books.

Now my visits with Sue will come though the old magazines that are stacked in my sewing room, by our bed, and in bookcases throughout our farmhouse.

But words and old magazines kind of define my life.

I can trace much of the last two decades of my life through past issues of the Cooperative Farming News, starting when it was a tabloid-sized newspaper and continuing as it changed to the award-winning glossy print magazine of today.

I know exactly when I began writing for the Cooperative Farming News – 2007. My first few articles included a man struggling to establish a trout farm in St. Clair County, Alabama, radio personality Neal Vickers' then-farm in the small St. Clair County town of Steele (where his horses and sheep grazed contentedly in a pasture adjacent to one of the town’s historic churches), and a family in north Alabama who raised long horned bulls, primarily for rodeos and other shows.

The last six weeks of her life, I was forced to place my mama in a local nursing home because caring for her around the clock was taking its toll on my own health. The day I went to visit those majestic longhorned bulls was the day I discovered my mama, who died in April 2007 shortly before the article was published, would never be coming back home. I have only missed a deadline to Cooperative Farming News two times during all those years. Once the month I became a widow, and then in March of this year when I was hospitalized twice, and my editors graciously reprinted an article from 2014. But magazines and words and I have a long history that started when I was just a youngster and continued when my biology teacher, Mrs. Leeta Pesnell at Oneonta High School, would encourage me to read the stacks of inspirational magazines stacked on her messy desk. Encouraging me by saying, “You know you could write articles better than this!” During my early adult years, I often read sitting beside my young son’s bunk

I can trace much of the last two beds as he went to sleep. decades of my life through past issues of the Cooperative Farming News, The early Mother Earth News helped me learn to garden in concrete blocks on our hilly starting when it was a tabloid-sized then-farm, raise rabbits, cook newspaper and continuing as it from scratch and more. changed to the award-winning glossy In 1990, old friend, the print magazine of today. late Nelson Green, appeared in my Christian book store with a rolled-up magazine in hand. “You need to read this,” he said as he left a shiny Backwoods Home magazine on my counter. I was soon entrenched in stories about Editor Dave Duffy as he worked on his simple homestead while raising his daughter as a single parent. The next day Nelson appeared again, this time carrying a Countryside Magazine, written by other homesteaders under the leadership of Editor J.D. Bellenger. Some of my friends from both magazines still keep in

touch as the internet delved deeper into social media. (And I’ve written articles for both magazines through the years!)

On my roll-top desk now beside my modern laptop is a September/October 1997 Countryside from which I learned to make tomato jelly, apple butter and corncob jelly.

There are many articles in the old Backwoods Home magazine that son Nathan and I used during his home schooling before he graduated in 1999!

I read about Great Pyrenees as livestock guardian dogs when Shadow came unexpectedly to live with me here on the farm when I first became a widow. (That big shaggy dog was my guardian angel, taking care of my animals and me until the month after Mack and I married and Shadow died peacefully of old age under his favorite tree.)

But there’s more. A September/October 1992 Countryside magazine showed me all about the Angora goat enterprise, Southern gardening and even preparing your tractor for winter, as I worked to keep a raggedy old International Tractor going.

I bought my first Angora rabbits after seeing the breed featured in a 1990’s issue of CountryWoman magazine and I treasure a March/April 2003 that shows a woman spinning on an identical wheel of mine.

Those who follow these Simple Times articles in this magazine have rejoiced with me as I married my beloved eighth-grade boyfriend (after more than 50 years) and have followed as he built a barn, redid our pasture with a new SECURE fence and more, but most special, how God has worked in our lives during these past few years.

I can look back at the dates on each issue of Cooperative Farming News or on some of these other great magazines that seem to overflow our house, and I can tell you what I was doing then, which grandchildren came along, and other milestones on our farm and in our lives.

Mack and I read the Bible together each year and this year we are reading a Chronological Bible which really shows how the Bible is true history as well as God’s Word.

Like all these magazines, my Bibles are also filled with dates and notes from sermons, Sunday School lessons, and just blessings that have occurred in my own life. There are many encouraging passages with the dates of when I was facing and then stumbling through my first days as a widow. There are passages of when I was struggling financially, and how God’s Words encouraged me even then when things looked so bleak on this farm and in my life. And there are glorious passages of when God was leading Mack and me into marriage and a new life together.

So you see, words and dates mean an awful lot of me.

As I look at my dad’s Gideon Bible and read John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God,” I also see daddy’s written note from about 1985, “Jesus is the living word of God, and through the written word, the living Word comes to us.”

Words, magazines, and books have indeed shaped my life and record the history of it, but The Book and its words give me a future!