A Morning at Wild
Woman’s
“This is old Weasel Evans.
He used to be down at the Fly Branch, where we used to go for country
music. One day he asked me to dance so I
picked him up, twirled him around, set him back down, and told him that’s the best I
could do. The Colonel’s wife told him
‘You need to find yourself a woman like that’ but he said “Oh no, she’s too
wild for me! She’d throw me through a
barn door.’ And that’s how I became the
Wild Woman of Trace Creek.”
Thus begins a morning with Edith “Wild Woman” Smith. What ensues is the epitome of hospitality and
love. She has had a relationship with
the Glenmary Farm since 1989/1990 and has welcomed over 11,000 first time visitors
into her home (and quite a few return guests). Each of those 11,000 experiences
a morning filled with jokes, advice, pictures, cow feeding, laughter, and
love.
The day begins with the opportunity to feed her cows. She keeps 5 or so cows on hand at a time
specifically for volunteers. The cows
quickly make their way over once they see the hay being brought out and begin
to crowd the fence, jockeying for position as the volunteers tear off pieces of
the thistle to dangle in front of them.
Only the most courageous of volunteers dare to feed them with their
mouths, chancing an encounter with the long, leathery tongues of the
bovines.
Once inside her home, volunteers read a series of jokes and
funny articles collected by Wild Woman over the years. They are a gathering of what we might
recognize as those annoying spam mail chain letters that our older relatives
insist on clogging our inboxes with to our chagrin. Our gut reaction is to banish things like
these to our trash bin. But the beauty
of a morning at Wild Woman’s is the ability to transform the commonplace or
mundane into a communal experience filled with joy. Of course, it is Wild Woman herself who helps
the transformation through her presence and attitude. She sits in a chair as the volunteers read
off her stories and jokes and laughs right alongside them. Her anticipatory giggles before an especially
funny line or her outright guffawing at a volunteer’s reaction punctuate the
proceedings.
At first, it can be difficult for volunteers to understand
why we bring them to visit Wild Woman. They
question where this falls in the spectrum of service and wonder whether, despite
the fact that she is a wonderful person, time might be better spent out
building houses for people. To be fair,
it can be difficult to grasp the abstract concept of ministry of presence for
some and while it is fundamental to the work that the Farm does, it is often
the last piece of the puzzle to fall into place for volunteers. Giving of one’s self, and the vulnerability
that comes with that means that a strong connection can be formed with those we
serve. She teaches this through her own
example and, in a magnanimous gesture, allows those who visit to do the
same for her. The idea that service can
be done as much in the living room of a 90 year old woman as it can be at a
construction site is an invaluable one. She
imparts the critical lesson that service is attitude as much as it is action on
every volunteer she meets. She sees
every person as an opportunity to encounter, to reach out and touch a life and
hopefully be affected in return. This is
a true gospel of Love, where her heart is always open to the heart of those she
meets and the world is always seen through those Love-tinted glasses. She is a paradigm for service and so she
becomes the perfect frame for the volunteers’ week of service at The Farm,
which is reason enough to visit her.
It’s amazing to think that she has heard the same jokes
hundreds and hundreds of times before because she is always so
enthusiastic. Every time seems like the
first time she has heard them because she takes so much joy in the joy of
others. The enjoyment of the volunteers
in turn becomes her own. And that is the wonderful life-giving cycle
of a morning at Wild Woman’s. She and
the volunteers engage in this dance of reciprocating joy. The volunteers get so much from sitting and
talking with her and she gets so much energy from talking with the volunteers. Maybe that’s why some volunteers have a hard
time associating that morning with service.
It all comes so easily and is a source of such joy that it doesn’t feel like service at all. At the end of it, both sides have cups that
runneth over. She often says “Half of
the time I’ve got patches on my britches, but who can say they have the
opportunity to meet people as beautiful and as wonderful as all of you?” I and the other 11,000 volunteers can certainly say the same about our time with her.
