“The river to the north of my place is claimed by the U.S. Park Service, and the creek to the south is under the protection of the Missouri State Conservation Department, so I am surrounded by government land. The deed to the property says my farm is a hundred and five acres, but it is probably something more like ninety. The land hasn’t been surveyed since the mid-1800s and it is hard to know where the boundaries are; a park ranger told me he suspected that the nineteenth-century surveyor had run his lines from a tavern, because the corners seem to have been established by someone in his cups.”
— Sue Hubbell, A Country Year, Living the Questions (1983)
Sue Hubbell, a fiercely independent beekeeper who made her living alone on her rugged land in the Ozarks, had to be convinced that she had a memoir worth writing. Her slim book, which covers five country seasons, has become one I am grateful to have on my shelf of favorites.
I was saddened to learn that this impressive woman died in October. She was 83. Her life changed radically in August after having been found some 14 hours after wandering from the new home she had made in Maine with her second husband, who preceded her in death.
Diagnosed with dementia, she chose to move in with her son. On Sept. 9, she ate her last grapefruit, announcing to her doctor she intended to stop eating and drinking.
“She stuck to her plan and died 34 days later, increasingly lucid through her last days,” according to The New York Times, which had published many of her writings.
She wrote that when she first laid eyes on the Ozarks acreage that became her home in the early 1970s, she found it so beautiful that she was nearly reduced to tears.
Wisely, she writes, she was never the sole proprietor of the hundred acres, with the cast of characters claiming ownership changing on a weekly basis through the seasons.
“At the moment, for instance,” she writes, “I am feeling a bit of an outsider, having discovered that I live in the middle of an indigo bunting ghetto. As ghettos go, it is a cheerful one in which to live, but it has forced me to think about property rights.”
Have you ever seen an indigo bunting? I once held one in my gloved hand as life faded from it, and I still cannot get over how stunningly beautiful that little male bird was. To find oneself in the midst of an entire flock of their particular brilliant blue would be enough to take one’s breath away.
“Indigo buntings are small but emphatic birds. They believe they own the place, and it is hard to ignore their claim. The male birds — brilliant, shimmering blue — perch on the garden posts or on top of the cedar trees that have taken over the pasture.
“From there they survey their holdings and belt out their songs, complicated tangles of couplets that waken me first thing in the morning; they keep it up all day, even at noon, after the other birds have quieted. The indigo buntings have several important facts to tell us, especially about who’s in charge around here,” Hubbell writes.
This tiny, 105-pound woman wrote of days filled with incredibly hard work as she struggled to make a living from her patch of ground after her first husband left for good.
She chopped and stacked her own firewood because everyone knows you either chop wood for the wood stove or freeze to death. She enjoyed her days among snakes, spiders, rats, bats and chiggers, saying each held a place in the world and they were all there long before she arrived.
“Whatever the reason, many people are irrationally afraid of snakes, and this makes for poor observation. It is hard to tell what a snake is up to if you are running away from it or killing it,” she observed matter-of-factly.
After a divorce was finalized in the early 1980s, Hubbell found herself with 300 hives, a lot of farm work and even more debt. Determined to find a way to survive on her farm, no matter what, Hubbell became increasingly self-sufficient.
Given all the challenges of the land, commercial beekeeping became the answer, while doing freelance writing for The NY Times, The New Yorker and The Boston Globe, among others.
She approached her work with the same fearless, open-mindedness with which she approached every other part of her life.
Keeping 20 hives in her home bee yard, she had dozens of hives scattered in outyards across the Ozarks.
“I always have a waiting list of farmers who would like the bees on their land, for the cover in their pastures is more abundant when the bees are there to pollinate it,” she writes.
She knew that farmers in the Ozarks needed all the help they could get.
“Once the timber has been cut from these hills, the thin soil will barely support cattle or hog farming and crops won’t grow here, so many of the clearings and old pastures go to scrubby second growth and blackberries. That kind of cover and the hot steamy summers make it a prime place for chiggers,” she writes.
She learned to live among all of nature’s challenges.
Hubbell lived with a whole lot of heart and shared, very honestly, life on the farm. She learned to service her aging truck, and to be involved in her community as much as time would allow. She needed to re-shingle a barn, and first built the shingles, a true story that serves as a great analogy to the way she lived her life.
Her words, while living in harmony with all of the creatures on her farm, serve as a wonderful reminder that there is so much more to see, accomplish and appreciate than most of us ever realize.
But she was quick to remind us that one need not enjoy rustic living to enjoy the wonders of nature.
“You don’t have to sit on a farm out in the Ozarks to watch and see things that are interesting,” she is quoted in a 1986 Boston Globe article. “You can look at people going by. Pieces of paper blowing! The important thing is to pay attention to what’s happening to you wherever you are. To give the present your full attention.”
This seems to serve as a perfect new year’s resolution, in a nod of respect to one amazing woman whose wisdom will live on in her life’s work.
