Like seeds carried by birds to faraway places, our words travel, and we seldom know the impact they might have on another’s life.
After her father’s death in September 2019, Kristi Johnson, from Hood River, Oregon, was sorting through her father’s belongings and found in his wallet a folded and worn column I had written about Thanksgiving published in 2012. You can read the column at ruralite.com/bestholiday.
When Kristi wrote and told me this story and then sent me the obituary her daddy had written himself, I am not ashamed to admit tears flooded my eyes. No one deserves such an honor, I thought.
To add to this already humbling honor, Kristi shared that she started a tradition of reading the column out loud when the family gathers each Thanksgiving Day.
Through phone calls, letters and a visit last winter with Kristi and her husband, Vern, in the Hood River home her father built for them, I learned more about the man who followed this column and often talked with his daughter about what I had written.
Alfred Andrew Arnoldus was an avid reader.
“He loved books and could quote anybody, anything,” Kristi says. “He read Ruralite magazine regularly and often showed me your columns when we would go to visit. ‘Did you see this one?’ ‘Did you read this one?’ He never showed me the Thanksgiving one, until I found it.
“He was the greatest storyteller. He read books to us kids in the wintertime. We would sit as a family, and he would read, and we didn’t want him to stop because he would act them out. He was very dramatic.”
Alfred always wanted to be a dirt farmer.
“His dream was to be a great big farmer,” Kristi says.
He eventually bought his own place.
“It wasn’t much of a farm at all,” she says. “It was the only thing my dad could afford and was considered trash, basically. It was swampy. But he tiled it out.”
She remembers how the family lived in a machine shed while her dad built a house next door.
“He carpentered in the winter then farmed in the summer because he didn’t have enough money for farming in the beginning.”
In time, with the help of her two brothers, the farm became one of the biggest, if not the biggest, in the area.
It saddens me that I missed the privilege of knowing Alfred, a man who never flew on an airplane and didn’t drink or smoke, built his own house and one for his daughter, fashioned a dream farm, had faith in God, loved words and had opinions he didn’t mind sharing. I know I would have liked this farmer poet who could quote Shakespeare.
But I am thankful we had a connection.
My life continues to be enhanced by people I admire yet never met, many of whom walked this Earth centuries before I was born.