You may think this is about a farm...
But, in fact, it’s personal, and one of the most meaningful pieces I have written.
Kuerner Farm. Chadds Ford, PA.
Creek Road stretches along the Brandywine River. It's one of my favorite drives in Chester County. I take this road on purpose, especially this time of year. Today, the sun shimmered through the branches of Autumn-brushed oak and towering sycamore trees, setting the ripples of the river into a dance of sparkle.
There’s really no way to describe it.
As I drove those curves, the gusty wind tossed the golden-rust, and sunset-yellowed leaves everywhere, spinning about my car in a whirl of delight.
The Brandywine Valley is like one long river of song.
When I made that right-hand turn onto Ring Road, the magic and mystery of the Kuerner Farm began to enchant me like the leaves, gathering up the scattered pieces of me into one quiet soul. All the consternation, the constant string of horrific news streaming out like an electric current of chaos, faded out of range and disappeared…
…all I could hear was the wind carrying the call of the red-bellied woodpecker down from the treeline up beyond the hill.
Kuerner Farm owns a small place in me. It grounds me. For years, stories about the farm have been written throughout the pages and paragraphs of my life. My father speaks of Andrew Wyeth like many speak of neighbors or long-time friends, down to the manners, down to secrets. As much as I know the land our home sits on down Timberlake Drive, backing to the Springton Reservoir, I know Wyeth Country.
Often, my father would set up his paints on the coffee table in our living room and catch the light from the picture windows. Foam core board on his lap, a random photo he took from some farm in the area, and a row of brushes to choose from. Unexpectedly, in 2009, my father began to take his paints from the living room in Timberlake to the fields and farms in Chester County. He would regularly set up under the wide sky and tall grass. He discovered painting classes at the Kuerner Farm in 2014, and he has been going ever since.
Lucky for me, now I wander around this ethereal place; I get quiet and give it space to speak. After walking around, pausing to listen to the birds, smelling the fresh air, and taking a peek in that legendary barn, I find that ideal tranquil spot to set up my chair, spray down my palette, and face the fear of starting a new painting. Autumn is my favorite time to paint here.
Week after week, the farm begins to change. The light shifts, cold nights start bringing the changes to the leaves on the sugar maple and black cherry trees, cattails, and bright marshy green reeds that shoot up around the pond every which way dry out and turn the most stunning mix of muted brown, honey yellow, and mulberry red. Likewise, the endless, undulating hills fade from sap green to yellow ochre. The barn swallows, who take over the property, scatter south in September, and just like that, the juncos arrive.
Karl and my Dad
Today was the last day of the fall class. Karl, who makes his rounds, grew up on this working farm; he is as much a part of its bone structure as the beams in the barn.
Often, between his corny jokes 🥸, he will say something or quote someone, and I grab my pencil, “Say it again, Karl.” His thoughts are written all over the pages of my sketchbook.
“Painting is about seeing,” he often says.
And what I notice in mid-life, beyond the paints and paper, I have been learning to see.
Given my inconsistent schedule, Karl let me come on any day in the rotation that worked. My father drove an hour from Lancaster County to Chadds Ford each Thursday. In this 8-week class, there have been only a few classes when we have overlapped. This last Thursday fell on the tail end of some chaotic and crammed weeks for me; I felt a bit behind in matters of life. I was weary and could use the time.
But I am learning to see, to notice, to pay attention…to take a minute and get underneath things…to care about the essential things. Midlife has this kind of potential, I’ve noticed.
So, quickly, I gathered my key brushes, loaded my palette, paper towels, and water…threw my chair into the car, grabbed my Wendell Berry poems, my coffee, and the painting I had labored over the last few weeks.
I took off and turned right onto Creek Road.
I pulled into the farm and parked in the field where I have been working the last few weeks. It was cold, the wind blew the trees left and right in slow motion, the wild brush around the pond had been cut back; it looked like a Wyeth landscape. I stirred with gratitude, especially when I noticed the small flock of Canada geese, a nostalgic scene for me.
Before setting up, I trekked through the field and made my way up to the farmhouse, I saw my father in the distance rambling up the path, backpack on, chair in hand, and his favorite Snoopy hat, compliments of one of my nephews. Most of the artists that day found spots to work on their paintings in the warmth of the house; my father joined them. Thinking I wasn’t coming, I stepped around the corner, and my dad returned a big smile when he saw me.
“I didn’t know you were coming!”
“It’s beautiful out! I had to come.”
“You aren’t sitting in the field, are you? It’s too cold.”
I responded with confidence, “Yes! I have to be outside, and the geese are there to keep me company while I freeze.”
Besides, I always tell Karl I am making sure he gets his 10,000 steps in 🙂.
There I was! Out in the freezing wind!
It made so much sense. The last class of the year. A cold Autumn day. Being there to close it out together.
The long list of waiting things could wait another day. What I’m more aware of than ever is that there is a story continually taking shape; when I settle down and listen to my life, I know what to do.
Without a scrap of pressure or guilt, my father has invited me into the world of the Kuerner Farm, the Wyeth stories, and subsequently, watercolor painting. When I am visiting my parents’ house, it is a rare thing when he doesn’t say, “Bring your sketchbook,” or send me home with an idea about how to paint stone in a wall, or give me a clipping of a bird photograph to inspire me, a paint brush, or a new Daniel Smith color to try. He has wooed me into the magic of it all. But there is one thing he has said a number of times that has set me in motion more than anything else,
I never had this chance [to paint] with my mother, so I don’t want to miss doing this for you…It wasn’t until after she died that I picked up her watercolor palette and started to paint.
My precious grandmother ended her own life when I was about six years old. It’s a crack in the center of my story; it was a landmine in my dad’s. She was a stunning woman, and a gifted artist…oil and watercolor. Many and varied pieces of hers hang on the walls of my home; they are sacred to me. I never got to take in her magic firsthand. But I do bear her name, and I’m glad I do.
Like many artists, she lived in the cross section of pain and beauty. She felt things deeply and carried a heaviness inside, but she had eyes to see. Recently, I have been thinking about what it means that I get to carry a part of her into my own storyline. My days used to be motivated by a broad and big impact. It wasn’t wrong; my mother taught me to invest in people, to offer presence to those who felt unseen. I had over 20 young women I mentored walk out ahead of Scott and me at my wedding, the most meaningful part of my single years—spiritual children, and they still matter to me.
But caring for my family didn’t get the same press. There was no dopamine hit when my mom needed help cleaning out the pantry or my dad wanted to take me on a drive along Goshen Road to find old farms and spring houses to paint. I would roll my eyes and act uninterested. Yet in those moments, bits of my grandmother stirred inside, bits of my father, too.
Personal transformation often comes hard; it may feel like the wind is getting knocked out of you at first, but Life smooths out the rough edges by degrees. God’s grace will strip off those buttoned-up layers that have kept us hidden, that false self of protection, and give us our humanness back. It will resurrect the orphaned parts of us, the design of us that gets clouded by all the grasping and proving. The delicate seeds of simplicity, sincerity, and gentleness will find their way to the surface, and, in the end, we know we had nothing to do with it.
I will always feel the pull between ego and letting it all go. Ultimately, I’ll have to trust God with this transformation since my pattern is to drift off the rails into the kingdom of the self. God, help me.
And as Paul, the Apostle said, “He who calls you is faithful and He will do it.”
Sitting in the field that day, cold but fully awake to my life, I could see what was happening. The hard things are being reshaped. The sorrow in the story is being retold with hope. My part in the narrative has the potential to redirect what the enemy aims to cut short at darkness and death. Theologian NT Wright says it best,
“The point of the resurrection…is that the present bodily life is not valueless just because it will die…What you do in the present—by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself—will last into God's future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether (as the hymn so mistakenly puts it…). They are part of what we may call building for God's kingdom.”
What is now matters for what will be. I believe that. Heaven breaks through all the time. I just had no idea it would come by means of a paintbrush, cold-pressed paper, and a watercolor palette. Furthermore, a farm where Andrew Wyeth spent so many hours would be the setting, and Karl, who has become a favorite household name, would be our companion. We can’t predict redemption, my friends, no matter how hard we try. We don’t write these stories, we live them.
“Dawn, don’t try. Just paint. Go wild with it,” Karl says, “Be the genius you already are.”
“A crazy, holy grace I have called it. Crazy because whoever could have predicted it? Who can ever foresee the crazy how and when and where of a grace that wells up out of the lostness and pain of the world and of our own inner worlds? And holy because these moments of grace come ultimately from farther away than Oz and deeper down than doom, holy because they heal and hallow.”
Thanks, Karl. Thanks, Dad. This one is dedicated to both of you.