Origins
My first Substack piece is dedicated to my late father: Before words made sense, there was music and the land.
Let me tell you a little story.
I was a first-born daughter, arriving in the time of summer when the field corn has tasseled, and silk is growing from the husks like fine, fairy maiden hair. The time of cicadas. The time of heat lightning and fleeting summer storms. The time of sweltering days full of sun and heat. The dog days, when Sirius returns.
My father was a god, who rose daily out of tractored fields and sank lithely into easy chairs, napping between work and meals like animals do. His hands were limber, moving statues, and could do anything. He picked up giant stones, he sewed his leather saddle bags, he made me soft moccasins based on a pattern in a book.
I was born into a world of stories. Stories and songs and laughter and the language of the land: animal cries, wind, rain, thunder, silence. The river mist makes no sound, yet we can listen to that, too.
I wasn’t sure where the land ended and where we began, but I loved our world and the slow days that went by.
Those very first years, words were just another form of strange but lovely nourishment. Like watermelon and banjos. Mules and colts and Holstein cows. Lullabies and AM radio.
"Daddy's corn needs rain", was my first full sentence.
When my second little sister came, Rachel, it was the beginning of summer, late June. Hay cutting time in that fevered way, and I remember clearly walking with my mother, holding her hand, as she held my two-year old sister Anna, my bare legs engulfed by the tall grass as we made our way from behind the farmhouse to the field where Daddy was cutting hay. She waved and waved and finally managed to flag him down in the tractor, to tell him it was time.
Many, many small epochs later, a day before the summer solstice, my father drove the old 1086 International tractor and disc harrow down into the river bottoms, while the morning fog was still thick. My older cousin who knows by way of experience just how daunting a task it is to begin working a field of that size, says it doesn't take long to go into "tractor mind", where you slip into a different dimension of thought; the repetition and pure scale of ground to cover, the time it takes, can transport you to a place far beyond normal thought patterns. Imagination, meditation, memory, preternatural vision...and all those times my dad would somehow spot "arrowheads" turned up in the soil, seen from all the way up in the tractor seat.
On this day, June 19, 2025, by noon, when he didn't return for lunch and wasn't answering his flip phone, there was cause for alarm. My mother could hear from the house that the tractor was running. But from the kitchen windows, even with her binoculars, she couldn't make out it was going in tight circles.
He had left us in some unimaginable instant, alone, working in a field by the river. Not far from the "fish trap", made by ancient, native hands that lived upon and farmed these same river bottoms, thousands of years ago.
I wrote in his obituary that he "died with his boots on" because he did, and because he used to say that is how he wanted to go.
My uncle John says the land here by the river is different (what we know as the Holston was the Hogoheegee in pre-colonial days). "There are spirits down there", he says. And we all know that is true. And that is where my father chose to walk through his very last door in this life.
What is this new quiet
crept upon the land?
As the rooster crows
from the fog
I awake with a lost melody —
I put a mixed tape together (yes, I know, it’s a playlist, now) — dedicated to my recently departed, mythic -- yet of course, very human -- father.
Youtube playlist here.
Some songs are literally from the soundtrack of my childhood (Merle Haggard, Earnest Tubb and Marty Robbins were on cassette deck rotation for years); some songs are simply inspired by his essence and memory, some by the world he came from.
Before words took root in meaning, there was the land and the music floating through. And in the center, holding me up on his wide shoulders, stood a beautiful mystery: my father, Frank Samuel Niceley.
Nothing and no one can take him away from me now.
Thank you for sharing such a personal and beautiful essay. ❤️
this was so sweet 🥲