The Route My Father Never Missed
A Store Built By Hand
My father built Hollis Farm and Feed out of one grain bin, a used flatbed truck, and a bank loan he was terrified of, back in 1988. I have heard the story enough times to recite it in my sleep. He was twenty-six. He had a wife, a baby daughter, and a stubbornness that ran through our family like a fence line, straight and impossible to argue around.
By the time I was old enough to sweep floors, the store had grown into the kind of place every farm family in that end of Illinois knew by name. Feed, seed, fencing, tools, the smell of grain dust and diesel that never fully left my father’s clothes no matter how many times my mother washed them. I grew up back there among the pallets, learning to stack fifty-pound bags without throwing my back out, learning which farmers paid on time and which ones needed the quiet grace of a running tab until the harvest check came in.
My father was not a soft man, but he was not cruel either. He believed in work the way other men believe in scripture. He believed a debt paid on time meant something about your character, and a debt forgiven quietly meant something more.
I thought I would run that store someday. Everyone did. I was the oldest, the son, the one who already knew the difference between orchard grass hay and alfalfa by the smell of the bale before I was ten years old.
Then I went away to college, and something in me changed that I still cannot fully explain to people who did not grow up the way I did.
The Path I Chose
I wanted to teach.
Not because I disliked the store. I loved it the way you love a place that raised you, the way you love the sound of a screen door and a particular gravel lot under your boots. But somewhere in my second year at the state university, sitting in an agricultural science lecture surrounded by farm kids just like me, I understood that what I wanted was to stand in front of a room and hand that same knowledge to the next batch of them. Not to sell the feed. To teach the science behind it.
My father did not see it that way.
“You’re going to spend your life explaining dirt to children,” he told me the summer I finished my degree, standing in the same loading bay where I’d learned to drive a forklift at fourteen. “I built something you could have had free and clear, and you want a classroom and a county paycheck.”
We argued about it for the better part of two years. Then, worse than arguing, we stopped. Silence settled over us like the dust that used to hang in the store after a delivery truck rolled through, and neither of us knew how to clear it. He came to my wedding. He never once asked about my students.
Back then, before he married my sister, Gilbert was one of the only people who did not treat my choice like a betrayal. He worked the loading dock in those years, a hired hand my father trusted with the forklift and the ledger both, practical and steady in a way I admired. I remember him leaning against the tailgate of that same old truck one evening, telling me, “Go be the kind of man you can stand to look at in the mirror, Gavin. That’s worth more than a paycheck.” I held onto that line for years. I did not know yet that a man can say a true thing and still turn into someone who no longer believes it.