The Old Moss Farm

Lazy days on the Old Moss Farm consisted of sitting on the porch and drinking iced tea. Now the farm didn’t always grow moss. At one point, if you ate a peach or pecan in southeast Texas, it was likely that it came from Old Moss Farm. But these days, the farm was living up to its name. Long tails of Spanish Moss decorated the limbs of the old orchard. The trees seemingly weighed down with age just as much as with the moss. No one harvested the pecans or peaches these days. What did grow was left for the squirrels and birds.

Old Farmer Palmer sat in his chair on the porch, drinking iced tea, looking over his tired, mossy orchard. It wasn’t just the orchard that was tired. John Palmer had spent all 67 of his years on the farm. His father and his father’s father had carefully planted the trees over the years and grew the farm as the market grew. When John was a boy (Johnny at the time) he spent his days climbing the trees of the orchard and chasing chickens around the back of the house.

John had done his best to keep the farm alive. Even when grocery stores were able to import cheaper fruit from Mexico and California year-round, John innovated. He opened the orchard to the public and let people pick their own peaches as the apple orchards do in the Northeast. People around the area came for a few seasons. Then they didn’t. John tried to sell peaches online, but when people could get them cheap at the grocery store, they didn’t really think about where they came from. The biggest blow was when his best friend Ralph passed away. John and Ralph weren’t public about the totality of their relationship, so John wasn’t able to publicly grieve the way that others who lost their lover would. When people spoke of Ralph, he would sit stone-faced and nod along, willing the tears to come later when he was alone.

After Ralph died, John let the tractor rust a little more. He let the paint on the barn fade. And he let the moss grow. Each season, the moss grew longer and there were fewer peaches. The moss slowly took over spaces where new leaves would grow until John sat on the porch each morning, staring at an orchard of moss. If he were younger, he would be out on a ladder fighting back the moss with chemical spray. But John was content. The orchard would die with him.