12/02/2025
My name is Jack Miller, and on Saturday at ten o’clock I’ll be standing in my own driveway watching my life get sold by the piece.
They call it an estate sale, but it feels more like a yard sale for a dead man who just hasn’t had the decency to lie down yet.
I’m seventy-four. My boots are cracked, my flannel is soft from a thousand washings, and the Nebraska wind still smells the same as it did when I was six years old riding on my daddy’s shoulders to check the cows.
This ground has had a Miller on it since 1924. My granddad turned the first sod with a team of mules. My dad kept it alive through the eighties when the bank tried to eat us. I thought I’d be the last one to leave it, but I figured I’d leave feet first in a pine box, not watching strangers load my combine onto a lowboy trailer headed for Kansas.
The sign at the road doesn’t say Miller Farm anymore. It says ABSOLUTE AUCTION – NO RESERVES – EVERYTHING GOES.
All week people have been poking around like crows in a cornfield. A woman in yoga pants held up Grandma’s butter churn and asked if it was “real” or “just for looks.” A guy with a man-bun tried to talk me down on the price of my hay rake because he only wanted the wheels to make a chandelier.
Yesterday a young couple stopped at the old wooden gate my dad built the year I was born. The paint’s mostly gone, but you can still read MILLER in faded green letters.
“Oh my gosh,” the wife said, snapping pictures. “This is perfect for our entryway. So rustic.”
Rustic.
That gate held back stampeding cattle the night lightning hit the barn. It’s got hoof marks and blood stains and a patch from the time I backed the pickup into it at sixteen. But sure, honey, hang it over your subway tile and call it rustic.
I stood there with my coffee getting cold and didn’t say a word.
It wasn’t one big thing that killed this place. It was a million little cuts.
The elevator started paying thirty cents less a bushel because “the world market.”
The seed corn went up forty dollars a bag because “research and development.”
The fertilizer plant shut down, so now it comes from Morocco and costs twice what it did in 2010.
The grocery store sells sweet corn flown in from Peru cheaper than I can grow it thirty miles away.
Two years ago I had the prettiest stand of corn you ever saw. Ears filled clear to the tip. I ran the numbers and it would cost me more to harvest it than I’d get paid. So I fired up the shredder and turned a hundred and sixty acres of gold back into dirt. Sat in the tractor cab and cried like a baby while the stalks fell.
My granddaughter Lily is sixteen. She helped me sticker everything with lot numbers last week. She stopped at the old John Deere and ran her hand across the seat worn smooth from three generations of Miller backsides.
“Why sell it, Papaw?”
“Nobody needs what it does anymore, darlin’. It’s made for growing food. The world don’t want food grown this way now. It wants food grown cheaper, farther away, by somebody else.”
She didn’t get it. How could she? She’s never seen a grocery store shelf empty. She thinks food just appears.
That’s the joke, really. Shelves are full, but the people who filled them are disappearing.
Saturday they’ll sell the tractor, the tools, the gate, the butter churn. They’ll sell the kitchen table where my wife and I paid bills and held hands and raised two kids. Some of it will end up in landfills. Some will end up as “farmhouse décor” in houses that have never smelled silage or heard a rooster.
I don’t hate the buyers. They’re just folks wanting a piece of something solid. I hate that the only piece they can still afford is the memory of it.
When the last item is gone and the auctioneer says “Sold,” I’ll still be standing here. The barn will be empty. The fields will already belong to an investment group in Omaha that’s never felt this soil between their fingers.
But the wind will still blow. The red-winged blackbirds will still call from the cattails. And somewhere under all this black dirt, my granddad’s sweat and my dad’s blood and my own broken heart will still be feeding next year’s crop—only it won’t be mine anymore.
If you ever bite into an apple and it tastes like sunshine, or pour milk on your kid’s cereal without a second thought, just remember: somebody loved you enough to get up before dawn for fifty years so you wouldn’t have to.
Most of us are almost gone now.
When the last small farm disappears, don’t be surprised if the food gets a little less sweet.
Because love was the secret ingredient, and nobody’s figured out how to import that yet.
