I found something last week I wasn’t looking for—and had never seen before in my life.
Isn’t it wild how our memories work? How there’s so much stuff crammed in that brain of ours, and somehow it’s all still accessible in a moment’s notice? One little thing triggers something, and boom—you’re back in a different time like it was yesterday.
So let me take you back. I’d guess it was around 2005. I was barely farming then. We had downsized pretty dramatically and were just planting two fields a year. I was in the thick of building a career off the farm, and Tess and Ezdon would’ve been 4 and 5 years old. That was around the time we started into something that would go on to consume many years of our free time: dirt bike racing.
Now, that’s another story—and oh, there are so many! But back to today’s thought…
Back then, I had commandeered a few acres of farm ground next to the house to build what became an ever-evolving motocross track for us to practice on. Being in my 20s, I had failed to realize I’d need some sort of weed control for the space. The regular farm sprayer wouldn’t cut it—not with the crazy terrain I’d carved up.
Dad, noticing the issue at hand (and probably trying to prevent the farm from becoming a 7-foot weed embarrassment), told me I needed a special kind of single-spray nozzle that would mount to the lawn sprayer. Something that could hit the hills.
None of that really matters much to the story. What does matter is that Dad told me he had just the thing—he just needed to find it.
A week or so went by, and then one day a brand-new nozzle showed up on my workbench. I figured he’d caved and bought one. I installed it, and it worked great. The old one? Never found.
Fast forward 20 years.
Dad’s gone now. I was walking across the barnyard in the rain—mud, manure, sheep hoof prints everywhere—when I kicked something that felt like a rock. But it wasn’t. I bent down to pick up this rusty thing, and instantly I knew what it was.
I had never seen it before, but I knew exactly what it was, where it came from, and who it belonged to.
It was that sprayer nozzle.
Turns out, Dad did have one all along. And in that moment, this whole memory came flooding in. Dad caring about what mattered to our little family. Helping me out in his quiet way. Just doing what he could to make something work.
But what really amazed me was how quickly and clearly my mind recognized it. A thing I’d never laid eyes on before somehow connected the dots in a split second.
Memories are funny like that. We carry so many around with us—most buried deep until something unexpected brings them to the surface.
And I guess the lesson here? Hold tight to those little moments. They might show up again someday… maybe as a rusty lump in the barnyard mud.
Thanks for walking through the memories with me today.
Farmer Rod
Buried in the Barnyard: A Memory I Didn’t Know I Had
