S2 Packet 2

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contents SUMMARY 7 TAKEN DOWN A NOTCH 10 SOMETHING REALLY DIFFERENT 13 CORN FIELDS & COUSINS 17 BEHIND THE CURTAIN 20 WATER JUGS 25 I WOKE UP IN A WORKSHOP 33 PATTERNS & PRAYERS 37 ICEBERGS CAN BE COLD 42 HOW TO SOLVE EVERYTHING 46

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Parlor Wallpaper

A piece of wallpaper I found from the our front parlor room.

In 1976 my mother wallpapered a few rooms that were habitable. Choosing various floral patterns to fit the original homes decor & to cover old plaster cracked walls.

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Summary

"Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things."

—Robert Brault I’ve continued research this month focusing on sense of place, listening to new writer's voice, and stumbled in and out of thoughts of when (and why) I began to live this design life. I feel I am paying extra close attention to the little things as Brault’s quote above reads.

It’s from an app I use on my web browser. It acts as a screensaver and greets me each day with something optimistic said by someone famous typically that I do not usually know.

I really am enjoying the little details I hear when reading new work by interesting authors such as Anne Lamott, Alice McDermott, Ian Morgan Cron, and Margaret Renkl. Those familiar voices of Wendell Berry, Natalia Iliyn and Brene Brown are also wonderfully a comfort to me. The descriptions of characters, their clothing, the landscape, home and life written by these writers have my own joy meter completely bursting.

Looking further into collecting data and documentation from the family farm is stirring up happiness inside of me like a plow tossing the old roots of the last corn crop up and over. Exposing fresh dirt and old memories of objects from an earlier time that keep flooding inside of my head. I’m realizing these small experiences have grown into big things that have made me the designer I am today.

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1998 Peace on this earth and good will to all – people who desire peace and love for one another. May 1999 be as good to us as 1998. Could send us a little more H20.

JAMES THOMPSON Grandfather's handwritten prayer inside a planner on New Years Eve 1998.

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Sunset at Long Vue Farms

iPhone photo taken by Jason Head, farm manager, April 2017 on his way out the driveway at the farm. Summer bean field in the distance & grain bin in the foreground.

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G R O U P I N T E R V I E W S : TA K E N D O W N A N O T C H Cash Flow Ledger

Background image of a ledger from the Kentucky Farm Business Analysis Records binder dated 1986 handwritten by my father Larry Thompson.

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In this process, I’m gathering a stronger depth for a sense of place, the objects that surrounded it and the life that was created from it. It has me thinking of place in the sense of where one begins, and those that might feel lost, do you know where you belong? The powerful feeling of belonging and safe and steady from it is something you alone can control and create. Yes mixed up in the dirt of your place is good and bad but you can focus on the growth and goodness from each pile. The earth, seeds, and memories on the farm have naturally unearthed these thoughts of what is the greater meaning to this life we live each day?

For example, in reviewing my notes from last semester I see the words “existential angst.” This isn’t something I’ve heard before so my mind is currently working at understanding it, just as my family did, through the old fence rows, rocks, roots, and sun, as well as the storms of the life I’ve lived. We tried to build, grow and design a life on the farm no matter what hardships or rewards happened we just kept planting.

I continue that mindset each day today as I’m growing and living this design life.

The importance of learning where you come from, and your purpose, as you travel through the ups and downs of life really do mold you into who you are as a human. Yes, at 41 I’m just realizing the powerful influence of my place and how being a maker made me the person I am today. So it’s not too late for you my friend to keep plowing away at life!

Transitions occur in one’s life just as the weather changes for the farmer. You do not know if the rain will come but you can work hard, plan and pray for the best while you check the heavens every now and again and hope for the rumble of thunder off in the distance. In life, you can plan and prepare, and design the life you want. You can learn to set healthy boundaries like fencerows so not to damage the seeds you carefully planted. Yes, there will be moments out of your own control we all know, and how we handle them is important to how we survive each day.

A problem-solving approach to life with optimism, hope, and gratitude is how I grew up farming and is how I live as a designer today.

Trying not to let life consume you and fill you full of this existential angst can be a battle, but I’m realizing I was too busy making with my hands in the earth and my head in the clouds to feel the gloom and doom. I’ve discovered that I enjoy helping others learn to realize they can control their lives, and be more optimistic if they will work at it each day. That the hard work of life will turn up hard truths, but you can learn from each one and help others learn from your experiences.

There is a distinct parallel to the rural farm life spent planting and plowing to a design life spent making and creating. Studying my sense of place, through my childhood home and early memories spent farming, making, and designing, I realized that’s all I’ve ever known. In this world, both the farmer and the designer have left a piece of themselves here forever that will last long after we’re dead and gone.

In research interviews, I asked some folks what’s a valuable lesson you learned growing up, working and living on a farm?.

“I guess the obvious answer is probably no different than yours; a hard work ethic. If we had a problem we worked to fix it however we had to.

As far as a specific lesson, one that comes to mind is the time I almost ended up in a pond with a tractor. I was about 15 and a know it all, the ground was icy and I went off a hill too fast with a load and started sliding.

Could have been bad but somehow I got stopped about 50 feet from the pond.

This brought me down a notch and taught me to be more cautious. I feel like a couple other similar events have led me to be more careful and cautious.”

– Jason Head, Farm Manager “My three: Manual labor teaches you more about life than a classroom.

Your day is never long enough. Country Boys can survive!”

– Craig Burgess, Cousin, Veteran, former farmer, and Financial Advisor “One of the best lessons I’ve learned growing up on a farm is how a seed must be buried and die to itself to produce fruit. It’s biblical. And it’s so symbolic of life. I’m so amazed how year after year we can use the same piece of dirt to bury another seed and grow new life that goes on to sustain all life on earth.

No matter how rough or wonderful the harvest is each year, we get to try again the next and start all over. I always watch the seed being planted and think to myself how amazing it is that we get to watch such a transformation and benefit from it. The same happens to us as people season after season.”

– Mandy, Sister, Farmer, Owner of Long Vue Farms Design life spent making is directly connected to this optimistic life I lead. I’ve always planted something, cared for it, and watched it grow.

I knew that the seasons would change, the earth may take it and bloom, or it may dry it up and wash it all away, but that fear of failing didn’t stop the continued drive to take the risk and try again. There’s always the next season, to do better, learn from the mistakes, work harder and push to do more. So, here I find myself taking more risk at becoming a writer, and fully prepared to be taken down a notch if I fail because I can always keep trying. You should too.

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Gardening

Snapshot of a bucket and ripe tomato from our landlord Mrs. Alzada Gill's garden.

The scrapbook says "Garden 1978." There's other photos of blooming plants, flowers and dog wood trees all around the main house.

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Something really different...

“IT’S JUST FUN TO BE IN A GARDEN, FOR ME, DREAMING ABOUT WHAT COULD HAPPEN: THAT KIND OF MYSTICAL SPACE, ACTUALLY, OF TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHAT THIS THING THAT I DO HERE COULD BE IN FIVE YEARS, THAT KIND OF STRANGE DREAMING SPACE THAT IT IS. THERE’S ALSO SOMETHING REALLY MOVING ABOUT PUTTING A SEED IN THE GROUND AND IT TURNING INTO SOMETHING REALLY DIFFERENT.” – ROSS GAY, AUTHOR

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I listened to an interview with Ross Gay from the website On Being about his new book The Book of Delights. I’m planning to read this over the next month. I found it very interesting in his thoughts about daily practice to see joy and practicing delight in everything. Intentionally focusing on a daily practice on joy seems like a wonderful idea. I loved what he said in the interview about a garden he helped create...

“For one, it’s just fun to be in a garden, for me, dreaming about what could happen: that kind of mystical space, actually, of trying to figure out what this thing that I do here could be in five years, that kind of strange dreaming space that it is. There’s also something really moving about putting a seed in the ground and it turning into something really different,” The thought of turning into something really different like a writer is powerful. Growing and turning into something really different in life, career, and health and becoming better is a joyful and optimistic way to strive to live. It is a moving moment to put a small seed in the ground as Gay says. His words have helped me to better connect with the joy of my childhood home and upbringing on the farm instead of the sad and painful memories. By doing this I’ve remembered that the act of making is all I’ve ever known. My life began only thinking of how to grow grains, how to harvest them the safest way for the land, and how to leave that soil rich for the next season. This is the origin of my design life that I’ve been searching for to better understand why I live the life I do every day.

Studying charisma, joy, and gratitude and why some have it naturally is where I began in the first semester. This led me to other topics such as optimism. It made me wonder why designers have a desire to want to always help make something better. From this, I began to ponder the question why are we designers this way?

My own daily practice to see joy and practice delight in everything instead of focusing on the negative is my own survival mechanism.

Through a hard life on the farm, hard life as a woman, and hard life as a highly sensitive person living a design life my treading water is joy.

My balance beam act can only work focusing on joy on the other side of the canyon I’m crossing.

My own experiences end in a lesson of seeing the joy, learning how to be better, and practice delight in what I’ve planted. This hard life, this hard fun, and being a designer was planted within me from birth. I grew up with a grateful heart from a hard life farming and became a designer. Today the seeds planted from my past are helping me become a writer and I’m turning into something really different.

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CORN FIELDS

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COUSINS

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I can close my eyes and remember standing in the front yard, under the big maple shade trees that towered over the old house. The soft bluegrass blades felt cool under my sore bare feet. Looking out over the big fields that surrounded the house, life seemed warm, powerful and endlessly happy. Rows of 10 foot corn stalks were tasseled and blowing in the wind. Dad stood beside me, coffee in hand. He was sure proud of this year’s crop, as “that corn crop was in the background of every wedding photo taken yesterday.” He smiled as he turned up his coffee and loudly sipped.

The year was 1994 and my oldest sister married a cowboy she met in college in the front yard of our house. A big powder blue sky, rolling clouds and rich dark green corn stalks were breezing as far as the eye could see. Rows of wooden white folding chairs lined the old brick sidewalk. I can remember our preacher, Brother Mack Wayne Craig, standing on the porch with his hands clasped together, smiling to greet everyone as they walked up to their seats.

Gizmo, our old black sweet mutt dog, was standing on the porch at his side with a white ribbon around his neck. I know he was wondering what everyone was doing in his yard. A quick pop up summer shower had blown in and quickly out “just enough to cool things off babe,” Grandma said, as she stood beside me ready to be ushered down the aisle. My upper lip was sweating and so were my feet in my new heels.

Handmade hot pink puffy shoulder dresses obviously were mandatory for the bridesmaids and it was also mandatory for sisters to be bridesmaids. My sister’s soon to be Mother-in-law was an expert European smocking seamstress. The collars she made for our dresses were as wide as our shoulders and lay across our chests like a shield of crocheted cream armor. The tomboy in me was miserable. From my braided head to my high waisted nylon toes I felt like I was in a criminal line up versus a wedding party. I was chubby and all cheeks at 16 just yet to hit puberty and desperately wishing I was being carried off to be put up in the dog pen with Gizmo as I watched my cousin take him around the side of the house.

The day before we all spent the whole day in my Aunt Marsha’s beauty shop. It’s a fancy double-wide trailer with an addition built on the backside full of spinning chairs, wash bowls, hair dryers, and tanning beds. I was getting my hair pulled through a thick rubber cap and eyebrows waxed before I even knew what had hit me.

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It was a full Steel Magnolias moment with my grandma under the dryer, mom flipping through a magazine of hairstyles, and Aunt Marsha mixing chemicals. All of my 6 female cousins were getting blown dry and there was enough aqua net in the room to gag a horse.

After the frosted blonde highlights were painted on and blew out, it was time for the french braiding. My hair was pulled so tight I just knew it was going to rip clean out of my scalp just above my ears.

We had all worked tirelessly for months on all the details of the farm. We painted the railings, touched up the gingerbread trim, washed windows, shoveled in mountains of black manure mulch, and strategically planted white caladium flower bulbs all over the yard at Grandma’s command. We painted the gazebo, and the lamp posts, and added new rocking chairs to the playhouse porch. The house was scoured inside too, and extra murphy’s oil rubbed on all the antique bedroom headboards, and every prism polished on every chandelier.

Our family home never looked brighter, fresher, and happier as we invited the whole community to celebrate our family’s wedding.

Elders from the church, landlords, great Aunts and Uncles came from the city. We all worked so hard together to make the farm a show place and I thought it was the most beautiful scene in the whole wide world.

1994 Michelle's Wedding

The infamous handmade collars and dresses. Cousins dresses also handmade in white. Sisters of the bride and groom glowingly in magenta. Divorced in 2015 I was tickled to be rid of the dresses and brother-in-law.

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Life back then felt endless and limitless on the farm. We could make that wide open space anything and everything we ever wanted it to be.

We cleared old fence rows, tore down old factory buildings, built waterways and laid sod to protect the run off. We bulldozed our own farm roads to transport the grain so as not to compact and damage the good earth. We grew in tillable acres, built more grain bins, and harvested more than ever before I moved away to college. We worked til’ it rained, and worked in the shop til’ it stopped, then headed out to do it all over again once it dried up. It was never ending work, planning, and making along with never ending gratitude reaping what you sowed. This way of life is the only way I know how to be.

So in today’s world, where I’m very far from the plow, I still realize I can make and care for something that will be here long after me.

There's great comfort in that. There is meaning and there is joy, so very much joy. Creating and making my own world as an entrepreneur and designer are as natural to me as breathing. I believe from my research and interviews with family, farm hands, and a few new therapists that making something that will be here long after your gone is key to building a more authentic happy life.

It takes some work, some careful thought and self care, but we can help each other have vulnerable conversations that make us feel better, and connect us. We can create a place similar to how rural farming communities once did, where cousins and cornfields were everywhere. Where we can help our neighbors, become stewards of the earth right at our own feet, and in turn be healthier, healing, and experience an authentic life. Wouldn’t you want to go to that place?

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Behind the curtain Do we have to keep two lives going at once? Do you ever feel as if you have an on stage life with clients and social media, but only really live an authentic life behind the curtain?

We lived out in the country growing up, 30 minutes from town.

We lived, worked and worshipped all on the same acres, and in the same breath. The most that changed was that on Sunday you had to wear your church clothes. You farmed shoulder to shoulder with the same men you passed the communion plate to. This is what I thought was an authentic life lived long before technology.

However, we were strictly forbidden to talk in church about anything personally going on at the farm. We were never to speak of dad’s fits of rage, or a new truck he bought, or that glass of bourbon he had each night. The Church of Christ don’t drink or divorce. We stood up straight, smiled and shook hands with the elders and gave no signs of any struggles. Church was where you wore your best and were on your very best behavior.

At home we ate breakfast together every morning around the kitchen table. There we could talk about good yields, good fortunes, and any good gossip in secret. I fed and watered the dogs each night, watched the evening news for the weather report, and listened to dad make nightly calls planning where each of the farm hands needed to be at sunrise tomorrow.

He would say things like, “David Wayne report to the Kerr farm.

Get those seed wagons parked down by the yellow flags.” “Durell, Jr. on your way in pick up Craig and have him escort you and the planter over to Kerr’s. Craig knows the way to the back field.” “Pop, you be sure to be there before the parts store opens its doors so we can get back here and have Randy repair that broken disc. They know what to hand you as soon as you walk in the door. I called them already. They will give you two extra in case it breaks again.”

My uncles, David Wayne, and Durell, Jr. were as loyal as the day is long to the farm. They still work there today. They never finished high school, and can’t read nor write, but their machine, welding, painting and dozier skills outweigh any degree a piece of paper can

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Uncle David Wayne

David Smith, my mother's baby brother. Sweaping up spill over grain as he unloads a semi truck at the dump shed during corn harvest in 2012.

Photo taken by by business partner who passed away, Shea Wright.

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provide. Dad marked old jugs with colored sharpies for them, drew symbols and set out small plastic flags for them to know where to start. I’ve watched them climb the tops of grain bins that were as big as skyscrapers with buckets, tool belts, shovels and face masks.

They would dive into boiling hot bins to fix grain augers so the grain didn’t overheat and begin to germ. They sat with dryers all night in dump sheds keeping the trucks running before a big rain was threatening to ruin a year’s crop. They did electrical work, welded on trailers, changed tires, filled seed bags, and shot a few groundhogs all before most folks had even had their breakfast.

They didn’t know how to read the tractor manuals or their paychecks, but they knew how to work hard. Didn’t mind getting dirty, and could engineer any part that was needed to keep the farm running. These two brothers, my uncles, are kind, loyal, hard working and like no one I’ve ever seen. Watching how they worked made me want to work harder. Watching how they gave all they had to the farm made me want to give my all. The nightly orders from dad to everyone made for a great start to the next day. This way of life kept us prepared for anything and always on the alert if something might could go wrong. I’ve discovered it’s the foundation I didn’t even know I had and use daily now as a designer.

There’s a great discovery of understanding about how one grows up as a human and how they learn to handle the pressures of daily life. How today I typically work on a plan, appreciate the small things with joy and gratitude, all while challenges still come. Just like the threat of rain, and the breakdowns on the farm you learn to flex and look for a plan B, C or D to keep going. As the deadlines are still coming and in the meetings, you need to look cool, calm, and collected. Always making sure you look like all things are running smoothly even if they are not.

The non-stop making, reaping and sowing, knowing there’s always work to be done is how it was on the farm. This is how I feel designers also work today chasing the deadlines and the weather of the client's mood. It was always important in communicating on CB radios, to planning, and being flexible while hustling on the farm.

This is still a familiar feeling today in the design studio too.

So can you approach life as the farmer, sneaking a sip of bourbon behind closed doors and being on your best behavior on Sunday?

Working your uncles to death who are loyal to a fault? OR can we live

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our personal lives treating them like design projects? Measuring, cutting and solving emotions with an Exacto knife? I don’t think so.

Living a design life and problem solving, planning and trying to control the uncontrollable of life can be exhausting. We live at a desk designing logos all day and live behind bedroom walls on Netflix all evening. How can the stage life and behind the curtain balance work together? The hard farming life behind a plow and behind a church pew didn’t always mix. We must think about how we act, live, work, and play in both areas as they do affect one another greatly.

Curtains

The farm's banking deposit ledgers during the worst years of farming our family ever experienced. These documents represent a difficult time we were not to talk about, and a peek behind the curtain.

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WATER

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Wendell Berry’s essay Think Little reads:

“If we are to hope to correct our abuses of each other and of other races and of our land, and if our effort to correct these abuses is to be more than a political fad that will in the long run be only another form of abuse, then we are going to have to go far beyond public protest and political action.

We are going to have to rebuild the substance and the integrity of private life in the country.

We are going to have to gather up the fragments of knowledge and responsibility that we have parceled out to the bureaus and the corporations and the specialists, and put those fragments back together in our own minds and in our families and households and neighborhoods. We need better government, no doubt about it. But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities. We need persons and households that do not have to wait upon organizations, but can make necessary changes in themselves, on their own.� (Berry, 18) GROWING

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I finished the greatest little pocket book, Think Little by Wendell Berry this month. I felt so much goodness and gratitude in reading these essays. From the very first few pages, his words rang powerfully strong inside my gut. His words were as familiar as morning coffee pot conversations at the county Crop Service with local farmers I’ve heard all my life.

Berry writes about the idea that the world's problems are big, and government is big, but we cannot wait on them, or expect them to fix it. We can start helping on our own, in our own homes, our own families, neighbors and communities. This is something I was taught as a child to believe.

When I read the essay I immediately stopped to see when this was written expecting it to be from just last year and learned this essay was first published in 1972. Think Little is a powerful essay that critically talks about the rural life I’m so well versed in. I’ve never read much at all, and never dreamed anyone would understand me, much less think that I would agree with Berry’s own views of the world we live in and where it’s headed.

I love how he writes about how we are all connected to the earth, environment and each other. Berry’s essay, A Native Hill, took my mind along with him on his walk around his farm. His voice, the descriptions, is incredibly comforting, powerful, and makes the reader really think about what you are leaving here on this earth both in your environment and in your own creations.

He writes in great detail of the dew on the horse’s feet in the early morning field work and I can remember my own toes cold and wet from an early fall morning walk to the tractor and the dew soaking my boots. He talks of the farmers setting their water jugs in the shade on the fence row. I immediately know it’s so to keep the water cool and out of the way of the work.

A water jug’s an important tool for a hot farmer, I speak from experience. If left in the pick up it’s like drinking boiling water by the mid-morning of the summer. If kept in the floorboard of the tractor it might vibrate off and be splintered into a thousand tiny pieces as you drive over it with the bush hog, but you won’t notice until your next pass through the field when you wonder what’s all that red and white confetti. So listen to Wendell when he writes about setting the water jugs in the shaded fence row. It’s important I tell you.

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1979 Miss Maggie

Maggie Bell, housekeeper for Mrs. Alzada Gill. I found this in family photo albums left to me by Mrs. Alzada. There were many images of Maggie and Mrs. Alzada picking buttercups with the title 'Spring of 1979' hand written above.

My first job on the farm was mowing and bush hogging all of the landlord’s farms, homes and driveways. The landlords were often widows whose farming husbands long past away usually from hard work, hard living and often hard hearts. So as our family signed lease land rent agreements my father would begin to bring me around to meet the landlords. He wanted them to know me, know I was his loyal daughter, and that it was a safe person coming up the driveway to their estates.

Many of the farm places were similar in size and stature. They would be a large two story farmhouse with big columns, big front porches, and back porch mud rooms, and a few out buildings. A few utility sheds full of old tools, tractors and trucks rusted and no longer usable sat around too. Some of the properties still had old chicken coops, and smokehouses for bacon and hams but had not been used in my lifetime. A few of them still had family farm workers there that lived in small houses on the property. I imagined they were originally built for sharecroppers in the early 1900’s and generations of families never knew any other place other than these farms as home.

Miss Alzada Gill’s estate had a large rock entrance that was original to the farm and narrow, as horse and buggy didn’t need it to be as wide as a Chevrolet does. It was quite the challenge to get the pickup truck and mower loaded trailer through that narrow path. I learned to swing the long wheelbase white farm truck and trailer out wide

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behind me and then quickly straighten it up to fit just right through the middle of the curved drive entrance. The two large concrete rock posts were massive and I knew I’d be in trouble if I hurt them or the mower. I could barely reach the pedals of the truck and see over the dash, but I learned after a few weeks how to slide right through as quickly as a gardener snake.

I loved going to see Miss Alzada after I finished mowing because her house maid Miss Maggie made some of the best tea cookies on earth. I can smell the butter and sugar now just thinking about it. I’d make sure to get out of the truck and sometimes dump out my water jug to pretend I needed more and that's why I stopped by the house.

A trick my father had taught me. So I’d dump my jug, brush off any extra grass from my jeans, remove my cap to reveal a terrible sweaty rats nest of a hairdo and go up to the back porch and knock. I would hear Miss Maggie holler, “Come on in child!” As she walked to the old storm door, wiping her hands on her apron. She moved pretty slow and must have walked many miles I always thought as she couldn’t stand up straight with a painful looking limp, but the biggest smile ever. She always seemed so happy to see me.

She’d say “Ma’am has been looking forward to seeing you today. We made an extra batch of the tea cookies when we heard you mowing.”

Miss Alzada was going blind, but keen on her hearing. I could smell the vanilla coming from the kitchen. They were a small round butter cookie with a drop of melted caramel, and a pecan sat right on top.

She called them Caramel Pecan Thumbprint Tea Cookies. I called them amazing.

Still warm out of the oven, she would place a dozen or so on a silver serving platter and pour me some fresh lemonade into a heavy crystal thick patterned pressed tea glass. I remember the weight of the glass in my hand and the intricate cut details, yet the glass barely seemed to hold 8 oz. of liquid. With the ice, it was merely a sip to have with those delicious sweet cookies.

Miss Maggie would walk me down the side porch into the parlor where Miss Alzada sat in front of the window. I knew she always sat looking out at the front yard and main rock entrance. Although she had gone mostly blind by the time I met her, her mind was crystal clear.

She listened to many books on tape and had stacks and stacks of them on her end table beside her emerald green recliner and her walker.

Along with a telephone equipped with large oversized one-inch push

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button numbers and a radio where she listened to the local Russellville AM news station. She would sure light up when I walked into her dim room. The room was surrounded by built-in bookcases brimming full of what I’m not sure. I sure wish I could go back and ask.

We would sit and talk about how dry the weather was and how the grass just still keeps growing, as well as anything I might have heard such as babies born, how my grandmother was doing from hip surgery, or what a great sermon Brother Craig preached Sunday. She also wanted to know if my father was planning on coming by to look at the johnson grass across the road in the ditch. “It’s hard to stop it, but we were on top of it,” I assured her, and “I’ll be hitting it with my wick of weed killer again on my way out today.”

She used to be a college professor at Berea College in Kentucky I was told, and after her husband died early in their marriage she never had any children. She lived there at his family estate with her older sister Miss Lillian. They were the classiest women I thought I’d ever met in my young 15 years. Not like any other kind of woman in our small town.

They always had on real nice clothes during the week, unlike the farmer’s wives I knew. The kind like you wear on Sunday’s to wedding showers, like bright colored thick wool or linen dress clothes. Miss Lillian seemed a bit more modern to me and years ago was a nurse in the army. Her frame tall and slender, she wore high waisted dress pants with collared blouses, stockings, and patent black leather shoes.

I admired their style so much that if they could have seen very well they would have noticed how I would stare.

They looked just like movie stars I remembered from the 1950s. In their fitted business looking skirts and ivory colored silk blouses on hot summer, middle of the week, days. They looked just like I imagined Betty Davis, Grace Kelly, and Katharine Hepburn would have been. I’d never seen my mom or grandma dress like that on a Tuesday, nor talk about college, teaching and city life like they did. I was fascinated by every word.

The tea cookies were served, the community news was tastefully discussed like any southern belle until things got too gossipy or catty.

That’s when Miss Alzada would sigh and smile saying “What about fried irish potatoes?” We would all giggle, and that would mean we should drop that topic. She would call for Miss Maggie to fill my water

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jug and I would be off to the next farm to mow. I’d lean in giving her a hug and kiss on the hand, promising to see her next week and report back to dad the message on better weed control.

Moments with Miss Alzada were some of my most favorites growing up. She passed away just before I turned 17. In her will, she left me her vintage salt and pepper antique collection, many other fine antiques, and her home. I had no idea water jugs and tea cookies meant so much to us both. Sigh, what about fried irish potatoes?

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Gillmeade

Mrs. Alzada Gill's estate in Spring 1977 from the main entrance. The home was left to me in 1995 upon her death. My father traded the homeplace back to her family for more farmland.

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I WOKE

up in a

WORKSHOP

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REFLECTION – I’m sitting in the Laguardia airport drinking an Americano with avocado toast about to board a plane home. I’m overwhelmed with emotion reflecting on the idea of where I was sitting a year ago in Tennessee, burnt out on life. Today in New York City, my heart is fluttering in disbelief. I am incredibly humbled and grateful to have just sat in a classroom at Cooper Union College just a table away from Ellen Lupton. I’m sitting here sober and clear headed thinking about this trip where I met up with some incredible new grad school friends that I feel like I’ve known all my life.

A year ago I was suffering a great heartache personally with struggles in my family, dealing with my parent’s divorce, and burnout from managing my own design firm for 15 years. I was emotionally and physically exhausted, extremely overweight, hungover and fighting to drink each day by 10am. I thought I was high functioning with the bump of a few Xanax daily.

I am not proud of where I was and not able to actually believe or put into words that a year later I’m here with you now. I’m more than just here. I’m in the midst of my 2nd semester of grad school mindfully aware of so much more happiness than I could imagine.

I went on a trip to NYC without my husband, Xanax or alcohol and Ellen knew who I was AND used my design on her instagram.

There’s not an accurate way to put into words exactly what point, where and when this major transformation actually began happening.

I do know the moment I was no longer afraid to say enough. I’m done.

I’m tired. I’m tired of the anxiety, the arguing, and manipulation, the hangovers, and brain fog, the mad sister, the mad husband, crying mother and the asshole narcissist father. I was DONE and I was going to run away. I was not sure where I was going but I had had enough and I was going in my own direction that would heal me.

I no longer could function spending all my time helping everyone else. It was time that I helped myself. I had a clarity moment of breaking and being unable to keep doing it all. All the clients, the kids, the cooking, the sounding board, the employees, the payroll, the helping I just could no longer do it all. It was a powerful moment when I decided to stand up for myself and my well being. It felt amazing.

What came out of my moment was strong reflection, no longer people pleasing everyone in my path, and that I was going to go to grad school. I was going to follow my dreams, not a client’s instructions,

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budget and deadline. I was headed for rock bottom and didn’t even realize I had shot my own flare into the air from my driveway fighting with my husband over a yoga class. That was one fall morning in November just a year ago.

Today I’m developing friendships with people who are like minded, caring, creative and supportive. Yesterday I was beside Ellen, and spent a whole day making… making a beautiful piece of design for only me. Making a poster of my grandma’s recipe for myself. Not for anyone else. Me. I’m calm, I’m clear headed, and I’m standing on solid, strong ground no longer full of fear, anxiety and pressure to keep everyone else happy. I’m living mindfully and seeing so many things in a grateful way, not in fear of what my client will think, what will my husband do, what if I don’t take my sister’s call. I am doing something selfish for my own mental health and it’s incredible. It’s incredible to say I spent my day caring for myself. There must be better words that I will google later to better explain this overwhelming joy. In the workshop were laughs, jokes, beauty in the design examples, the form, the grids, the me time, the happiness.

2019 Ellen Lupton

The view from my desk during the all day wonderful Typography Workshop in New York City at Cooper Union.

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I woke up this morning to a beautiful light shining on a single tree outside my hotel room window. I woke up clear. I woke up sober. I woke up feeling such peace and self happiness. No worries. No regrets.

No what did I do last night? Or how big the bill was from the bar tab, or why my husband was angry at me. What did my kids see? What meetings do I need to cancel?

I woke up to rest. It was the best rest I might have ever felt inside my soul. I could not understand this in any other way but to go through it.

You can’t read about this type of self change, or watch a youtube video about it. I can barely even accurately describe it to you now how I’m feeling today from one year ago. I had to live it to be able to tell it. It’s powerful, incredible and it’s magical. It’s how I want to feel forever.

I woke up.

Chess Pie Recipe

Grandma Smith's Chess Pie Recipe poster design.

Workshop assignment was to build a Bauhaus inspired typography based poster from a favorite recipe using a grid.

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PATTERNS

and

PRAYERS

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I’ve found myself rummaging through old boxes in the shop attic for my data collection and research on the history of the farm. I’ve found old cigar boxes full of bank deposit slips, daily planner entries by my grandfather, ledgers full of my mother’s handwriting, scratched out by my father’s notes and signatures by my grandfather all where they worked together keeping the books. It feels like I’ve unearthed a time capsule from some of the hardest moments.

I had always heard about how there was a farming crisis, and farmers went to Washington D.C., even Wendell Berry writes about it in some of the essays I’ve read, yet in my hands is actual proof. There's an old newspaper clipping from the late 70’s farmers strikes, overdraft deposit slips, news articles of equipment dealerships unable to sell tractors and notes from my grandfather as he turned to scripture.

“The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God endures forever.” Isaiah 40:8 The verse is beside an article about the hard living conditions of coal miners in Kentucky even though coal was so valuable. The other side reads about a dealership that use to sell tractors to farmers who paid in full cash, but now can’t sell any. Other clippings are pages from Metter, Georgia of a strike where farmers came out in an estimated 12,000 tractors, with crop dusting planes flying over a crowd of 30,000.

“His remarks about pork rinds, where hogs brought $6.40 per pound and the farmer gets 38 cents received a tremendous ovation. Someone in the local group asked Odom beforehand if he had his speech written. He replied that he’d been

Strike! Strike!

writing it for forty years and knew it well by now.”

Newspaper clipping included in farm bank records from a Farmers Strike. Metter's Town and Country News, December 1, 1977. Metter, Georgia.

Quote of farmer Oliver Odom.

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These are the stories I was told my whole life of the great strikes at the capital marching for farmers to be paid more for what they produced, and of the great droughts and bankruptcies of the early 80s in farming. Farmers were going under and some of my fathers best friends committed suicide due to the hard times. This is why we prayed and were so thankful when things got better, crops produced good yields, and the bushel per acre prices were good on the grain markets.

My grandfather Thompson’s daily planner reads on New Year’s Eve 1998...

“Peace on this earth & good will to all – people who desire peace and love for one another may 1999 be as good to us as 1998. Could send us a little more H20.”

I laughed to myself, as I know too well that the farmer always prays for rain. That was my Sophmore year of college and we were doing very well on the farm producing more grain than we ever had, farming nearly 10,000 acres. The good Lord was certainly blessing us in those days my grandfather reminded us often.

There are stacks and stacks of papers in boxes, and as I open an old cigar box I can see mostly weathered old bank receipts. Yet as I thumb through the stacks I see bright pops of colors and patterns and begin to pull them out. I’ve photographed these beautiful security patterns from the backs of checks, deposits, receipts and envelopes from the piles. There are such vivid rich colors, individual patterns, and great printed details in every piece. The jewel tones, fonts, stamping and handwriting all look like great works of art to me. There’s a rich history, color and texture to every piece.

As I’m building my inventory of ledgers I’m excited to think about how to use these textures for works of art. I’m already daydreaming of ways to preserve these and make something personal and beautiful with them. I’ve found such joy through the process of grad school in collecting these patterns and prayers.

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Check stub patterns

Found during my research in boxes of farm ledgers and documents from the late 1970s and early 1980s

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Icebergs can be cold Becoming a writer is some of the hardest fun I’ve ever had.

In reading and listening to voice and researching there’s all these feelings, emotions, empathy and hearing the vulnerability screaming softly inside to let me out it says. There’s so much work below the surface to each piece, each word, each thought. There are so many hours of love, care, and detail in just a few pages of thoughts. This feels like the tip of the iceberg. Just a tiny piece is submitted for the outer world to see, but there’s SO much more below that you cannot even begin to really articulate. I feel that in this packet I must try with you today to help you understand.

I’m reading as much as I can possibly take in every free moment I can spare. I do mean that I’m listening too, but you get the point. I finished Charming Billy by Alice McDermott and Operating Instructions

by Anne Lamott. I began The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker because I found in my notes to get this book, my therapist suggested The Road Back to You by Ian Morgan Cron, and my former professor illustrated Late Migrations for his sister, writer Margaret Renkl. The stacks on my bookshelf keep growing. I skimmed over all the pages during Thanksgiving break to not get behind on Dear Data and it was an intense amount of beautifully creative making! My level of intake is

Winter wheat

The Teeter Farm in 2000 by Lorilee for a college Senior exhibit. The wheat was young & about 2 feet tall. By laying down in the field the perspective is as if looking out at the ocean, and the leaves would blow like waves. Today this land is an Industrial Park and a Google data center "server farm."

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intense but I’m craving more. I’m trying to take it all in and listen to each piece and take away a little piece of it to help build my own new writer’s voice. Can I get a "Bless your heart?"

The raw, the happy, the sad, the fear and comfort from learning to write is filling my head and my cup. My cup runneth over, and so is the mess to clean up after. It’s full of reading and learning and forming a thought. From a thought to a story, a story shares an experience that is so personal, and intimint and yet so streakingly naked feeling and loud when you hand it out to the world to see. That’s what becoming a writer feels like to me.

This new way of making for me is becoming more powerful than any drug, any high, and sex I have ever experenced in my seasoned 41 years. I feel as if I’m on this small white spot out in the ocean. Yet below me is so much deep water, dark and light, some cold, some hard spots, and some melting. All of this writing has me feeling mixed into this titanic size piece of ice keeping me afloat.

I’m realizing with writers there’s so much more behind the cursor to appreciate. These thoughts, ideas, pen strokes, hours, are all so much more than the PDF that sits before you today. I’m humbled and in awe from what I'm learning from the writers voices I'm studying as I drift alone on my iceberg staring warmly out to sea. I sit comfortably and steady, so thankful to be afloat.

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HOW TO

solve

EVERYTHING

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When designers try to approach life as a design project to be solved what happens? In looking at life's stressors and ways to combat high anxiety it’s natural for me, as a designer, to want to approach it like a design problem. There’s a lot of planning, trying to control the situation, deadlines and prepping for the unexpected that my brain tries to do in any situation. This way of thinking can build up and make things worse as you become more aware of the lack of control, fears and worries that are simmering in your subconscious.

As a designer, we are known for being problem solvers. We can hear the problem, pick a few fonts, colors and shapes and produce a solution, right? If the client loves it, and it's a success, than these are heightened moments of creativity and making at it’s very best and why we love what we do. It is what can bring us joy in the design world and in our careers. We can upload that file, send it off to the presses and off load a whole bucket of worries on to the next person on the other end. The client's entire life is packaged, outlined and zipped. This is the classic way we solve a problem and stay steady professionally.

It’s when you close up that laptop and get into your car to head home that real life begins to creep in. The high you are on for completing the project, making the client happy and using your favorite sans serif font to save the day once again begins to fade once you step into your own back door. You smell the overflow of the trashcan, see a sink of dirty food crusted dishes, and the laundry piled on the couch, while the kids are yelling what’s for supper! Gaussin blur isn’t going to save you in this moment.

So let me give you a bit of permission to pause before the anxiety of your crying child, or your angry spouse agressively throwing laundry in the wash, while the dog is throwing up on your favorite rug, makes your chest pains soar. Life and design do not mesh! We cannot ask our middle schooler who the target audience is, and how many customers they need to have walk in the door next month. There is no brand standards guide to a 15-year-olds heartache and that’s ok!

Life is always changing but being a designer is not. Design is our stable and steady. It’s our comfy yoga pants, soft heather gray tee, and no bra. It’s our safe zone, and our daily 8-5 (if you're lucky) work. We can take a huge deep breath sigh at the sound of the rocket taking off as the file is blasted through email to the printer and wipe our hands as done! Then in the same breath of joyous celebration, look at our phone to see the text that mom wants you to meet her new boyfriend.

Ugh. There’s not enough iStock images in the world to help with that.

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How to solve everything...

WE SPEND OUR DAYS PICKING A COLOR, PICKING A HEADLINE AND DONE. IT’S THE BEST PART OF BEING A DESIGNER, PROBLEM SOLVING. DESIGN IS PROBLEM SOLVING – LIFE IS NOT. FARMING WAS PROBLEM SOLVING – LIVING ON A FARM WAS NOT. LIFE MUST BE LIVED, AND NOT DESIGNED. THE EXISTENTIAL ANGST THAT HITS YOU WHEN YOU WALK AWAY FROM YOUR LAPTOP IS A REAL THING THAT CANNOT BE IGNORED. THE KEY IS TO REALIZE YOU DON'T HAVE TO SOLVE EVERYTHING. LORILEE RAGER Designer + Writer

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“THE GRASS WITHERS AND THE FLOWERS FALL, BUT THE WORD OF OUR GOD ENDURES FOREVER” ― ISAIAH 40:8

JAMES THOMPSON'S NOTES My grandfather wrote on a newspaper article about a great flood.

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Bankruptcy

Typewriter set inventory lists of the farms assets in 1986.

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I've enjoyed this month looking further into my writers voice, collecting data and documentation from the family farm. It is stirring up gratitude and optimism inside of me like a plow tosses the old roots of the last years corn crop up and over. Exposing fresh dirt and old memories of objects from an earlier time are flooding inside of me. Each small piece of paper, new piece of writing and new artist date experience has grown into big things inside of me making my place richer as a designer and writer.

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