The other afternoon, my daughter was practicing a piano piece. My husband—doing double duty as dad and piano instructor—stopped her after her fingers had traipsed over a few notes with a bit too much speed and lightness. “Those are not grace notes,” he said, “they’re actual notes. You have to give them their full time.” My daughter proceeded to play through the measures again, landing with a bit more intentionality on the aforementioned notes, allowing them to ring for just as long as the music indicated that they ought.
The poem that follows and this short note of remembrance are “grace notes.” They are just the slightest sounds offered in the midst of the larger, fuller, more ringing memorials to Wendell Erdman Berry, who passed away on August 31, 2026, at the age of 92. Berry, as described by those who knew and loved him most dearly—his family and local community—was simply “a writer and farmer of Port Royal, Henry County, Kentucky.” This was the uncomplicated essence of Wendell Berry, although he was also a cultural critic, an advocate for attending carefully, and with affection, to one’s place in the natural, familial, and economic world. He was also an essayist, poet, novelist, a prolific, generous writer of letters, and welcomer of friends and strangers alike to the Kentucky home that he shared with his wife Tanya.
My own encounter with Wendell Berry was unique, perhaps, in that it was at first mediated by my education at the John Paul II Institute. As a student in Dr. David L. Schindler Sr.’s “Faith, Philosophy, and American Culture” class, I read—with respect, admiration, and attention, but not without discussion and critique—The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry. At the time I was in that class, my husband and I were living in a one-bedroom apartment in the suburbs and expecting our first child. My husband biked back and forth from a garden plot in the center of town where he raised vegetables, and attempted composting with buckets on our balcony. The agrarian vision offered by Berry, read in company with Dr. Schindler’s unique lens upon American culture and our place in it as Catholics, was provoking and resonant for us as young people just starting our lives. During the same semester, Dr. D. L. Schindler also invited us to read Berry’s Hannah Coulter for a literary seminar. I had abandoned reading literary fiction a few years earlier, after a disenchanting experience majoring in literature at a public university. Berry’s novel gently invited me to reconsider my refusal to read. His fiction nudged me towards the notion that the world of story could, in fact, offer goodness and profundity, when it was wrought by the hands of the right person.
After I graduated from the Institute, Dr. D. L. Schindler gathered a group of friends and alumni to continue the conversations we had begun in our classes about land, place, culture, and community. This “distributism discussion group” invited my husband and I, and our growing family, into fruitful relationships with many people, including Pat and Elisa Fleming of Verdant View Farm and Liz and Jesse Straight of Whiffletree Farm. We watched people living slices of the sort of agrarian life Berry described, and that we realized we longed for. We visited their homes, talked to their friends and neighbors, and although we never took the plunge to full-time farming, eventually moved to a more rural area where we have raised our family, while caring for animals and attempting to garden—with varying levels of dedication and success—for over a decade. The poem I offer here gestures to all of this, and includes references to the experience I had a few years ago of visiting with Wendell and Tanya Berry at their home in Kentucky, along with Marcie Stokman and Colleen Hutt, as part of my work with the Catholic women’s literary group Well-Read Mom. The Berrys welcomed us for an afternoon of conversation and friendship, in honor of our then-upcoming study of Berry’s novel Jayber Crow.
I encourage those who wish to gain a fuller sense of Wendell Berry and his work to read the more comprehensive essays and reflections offered by James Matthew Wilson, Paul Kingsnorth, Jeff Bilbro, Martin Cothran, Gracy Olmstead, and Patrick Deneen. Some may also enjoy listening to this, and then this, podcast episodes from David Kern and the Close Reads crew, people who were my insightful guides as I embarked upon my first reading of Berry’s masterful novel Jayber Crow. Finally, make a visit to The Berry Center, the nonprofit organization begun by Berry’s family and friends, whether it be virtual or—if you are passing through Kentucky in the flesh—more adequate, human, and real.
Deo Gratias
We must daily break the body
and shed the blood of Creation.
–Wendell Berry, “The Gift of Good Land”
I
The flocks have foiled our electric fence
again. Fence-Masher—that’s our name for the sheep
who leads the lunging bunch toward greener pastures.
The miscreant, he seems to know I’ll need
to slip my muddy farm boots on beneath
the dress I only wear to church, leave kids
half-buckled in their carseats, chase the goats
who've hooved halfway across our neighbors' lawn,
as right-on-time turns into late-again.
II
So he invited you? You have to go,
my friend exclaimed, leaning into the spring’s
precocious heat. We held our sweating beers,
and watched the evening ease its gentle dark
over the fields, and felt finality
lean close. Soon he would be ordained a priest
in a midwestern town, too far away,
break bread and raise a chalice in his hands
for people I would never know, or meet.
Our separate lives would gallop on, wild-limbed,
like children forging through tall meadow grass
to crush the fringe of forest near the creek.
III
The highway was a blade that cut the state
in half, a straight thrust east to west. My eyes
were drooping as the sun sank toward the corn
and soybean fields, the quiet houses, barns.
And then—I had a shock I can’t quite name
or conjure here, to tell—when towering turbines,
trunks of steel, loomed like some metaled grove
my car had chanced upon mistakenly.
As far as I could see, huge rotors scraped
the bleeding sky, clutching at wind and air
while I, a momentary passer-by,
sped on and on, across the trembling earth.
IV
The conversation Wendell had with us
rolled like the rain across a riled-up river
on a windy day in June. We talked of Lear
and memory, and dying towns, and faith,
and ways to help a person learn to love.
The books upon his built-in shelves leaned close—
as though they hadn’t heard this all before—
while birds beyond the window wrestled for
the scattered remnants of the feeder’s seeds.
A bowl of cherries that his wife had picked
shone in the farmhouse kitchen’s slanting light,
like rubies, summertime’s sweet backyard bounty—
bequeathed, this humid afternoon, to us.
V
The rest-stop lot would have to do. I parked
and sighed and sat alone, three states from home
and got myself attached to tubes, a pump,
and weirdly angled bottles that would not
quite fit behind the pleather steering wheel.
Breastfeeding was a death, I thought, a life
lived leaky, half-disrobed in pews or chairs.
But this, beside the interstate, was worse,
a rough mechanical subversion of
an offering up, of sustenance that should
be skin to skin. But then, this was the cost
of setting out on solo pilgrimage,
an outlay to be borne, a price to pay
in the sharp currencies of time and flesh.
VI
There are four kittens curling on the porch
where I sit half-awake, in morning light,
with breviary and coffee in my hands.
I marvel at their miniature mewling,
at tiny paws that prod the mama-cat.
The goats complain that I’ve ignored them all,
bleating indignance from behind their fence.
But soon enough our baby will be up,
and soon enough our kids will rumble down
the stairs, tromp out to feed the animals—
and soon enough we’ll start this give-and-take again,
this given life that’s taken much
and will take even more from us today.
Carla Galdo is a poet and essayist who has written for Well-Read Mom, First Things, Word on Fire, Humanum, Verily, Modern Age, and others. She earned an MTS from the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family, and an MFA in poetry from UST-Houston. She lives with her family in Virginia. Discover more of her writing at carlagaldo.com.