Wendell Berry and "Highfill Hill"...

Everyday I receive an email with a "poem of the day" from The Writer's Almanac.  It also mentions interesting facts that have happened on this day in history and birthdays of poets and authors for the chosen day.  My family and friends know the connection I have with poetry.  My nephews and niece have all received at least one book of poems from me that are essential to know if you are a human.  I really enjoy Wendell Berry's poetry because it is so natural and glories in the seemingly normal day to day life on the farm.  He writes of farmers, of animals and bugs of the land, and the beauty of a simple, rural life.  Many of his poems remind me of the land of my grandparents, where I would go when I was young. I think of my grandfather when he used to farm cotton and soybeans.  I think of the stories my mother tells me about picking cotton when she was a girl.  I think of the deep love my family has instilled in me for the "natural" world.  I think of my parent's lifestyle that is so beautiful living on "Highfill Hill" (the title that we called our home and the land surrounding it when my brother and sisters and I were growing up) encompassed with trees, plants, bushes, vegetables and flowers.  Below is the brief summary about Wendell Berry that was listed on The Writer's Almanac...  

"It's the birthday of Wendell Berry, born in Port Royal, Kentucky (1934). He grew up on farmland that had belonged to his family since 1803. All his great-grandparents and grandparents had lived and farmed in the area. As a boy, he was taught by his grandfather how to work a farm with nothing but a plow and a team of mules, no mechanized sprinkler systems or tractors.

Berry had an uncle he described as "an inspired tinkerer with broken gadgetry and furniture ... and a teller of wonderful bedtime stories." His uncle kept a ramshackle cabin up in the woods, and Berry often went up there as a kid to get away from everything. It was in that cabin that he first read the work of Henry David Thoreau, and where he first fell in love with poetry.

He went to a military academy for high school and then on to college and to graduate school. He lived in California and Italy and New York City. But through all those years, he never stopped thinking about the place where he grew up, and he often went back to his uncle's old cabin. He finally decided to move back to the area permanently. Most of his city friends thought he was crazy, but he bought a small farm in his hometown, which still had a population of only a hundred or so people, and he began farming it the way his grandfather had taught him, without any machines.

He grew squash, corn, and tomatoes, and he got a flock of sheep, a milk cow, and some horses. And he wrote about his experiences as a farmer in more than 40 books of poetry, fiction, and essays. His collections of poetry include The Farm (1995) and A Timbered Choir(1998). But he's best known for his essays in books such as The Gift of Good Land (1981), What Are People For? (1990), and Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000)."