The Daylilies We Put Back on County C

Mitch

Mitch Ruegsegger is Frieda’s nephew, the son of her husband’s younger brother. He is 55, and he farms the ground along that stretch of County C, including the fields that used to be hers.

When Frieda and her husband sold the herd, Mitch rented the cropland. After her husband passed, she sold Mitch the barn and the 160 acres around it for a family price. She kept the house and two acres.

I will say this for Mitch. He works hard. He milks about 90 cows in that red barn, and he crops another 400 acres besides. His truck is in the yard before five every morning and after nine every night.

He was not a bad nephew, as far as anybody knew. He plowed Frieda’s drive in winter. He brought her sweet corn in August. He never once missed her birthday.

But milk prices had been terrible for three years running. Feed went up, fuel went up, and the milk check went down. Every dairy farmer in this county was hurting, and some of them were selling out.

And the summer before, Mitch had caught the end of his sprayer boom on a culvert post in that same ditch. He was spraying the field edge, the boom swung out over the ditch, and the lilies were so thick he never saw the post.

It snapped the outer section clean off. The repair cost him about $4,000, which is a lot of money for a man who was already counting every dollar.

I heard about it at the time. Everybody heard about it. It was the kind of thing men talk about at the co-op over coffee.

What nobody heard about was that he had decided to fix it himself, by killing every lily in the ditch along his fields.