A cool, sunlit morning and my day is fully ahead of me in splendiferous expectation. There’s nothing I will do today that I won’t love doing, except to write the following paragraphs.

I have heard the news from his brother, Gilbert, that Kenny Valk, another farmer, passed away this weekend. The brothers were born on a big dairy farm right up the road and we were in 4-H together – when 4-H was something – and we all knew cows and dairy work like it was second nature. The Valks were a later round of Dutch farmers who moved into the area, who, using a combination of generational knowledge of farming from the old country and hard work, built prosperous family dairy farms. The Valk barn was big and white with a full hay mow and equipment sheds and a white farmhouse. Although naturally shy, given the opportunity, Kenny was the gregarious type with a keen eye as to what might go wrong. He kept a close watch on our local government and was a staunch defender of property rights, especially those associated with farmers, as he knew the world did not understand the workings of farming families to the land. Often, I saw him at town hall meetings. Like many of us, he had opinions on everything, but if we disagreed, he was always willing to listen and debated in an honorable and respectful manner, behavior increasing scarce in the modern political world.

As dairy farming declined, the sons of these family farms turned to other enterprises and Kenny became a builder, another profession common to the Valk tribe, and he learned excavation. After numerous squashed proposals, the farm was given over to solar panels, the family reduced to owning the farmhouse and yard. This solar farm is unique in that it is mechanized, and the panels follow the trajectory of the sun across the sky, as if mimicking the sunflower heads in last week’s column. A few days ago, I ran into Kenny in the parking lot of the Mobil station, now built on the empty lot that remained empty our entire lives at the corner redlight of Albany Post and 52. Our school bus passed by there twice a day forever and forever and ever.

“How ya feeling?” I asked, as we maneuvered on the building’s sidewalk. Kiln-dried firewood, wrapped in clear plastic, was stacked near a package ice freezer.

“Oh, you know, slowing down a little, but still going,” he said with that particular self-deprecating smile common to him that, in this case, meant the inevitable really was inevitable, but probably not today and life is good. It’s clear once a farmer, always a farmer, I thought, and, like it or not, and for most people born on farms, retirement simply means taking up another line of work.

“How do you like that solar farm?” I was bold enough to ask. We both had attended the planning board sessions where the details of the solar installation were ironed out.

“I hate it! What a nuisance!” he said shaking his head. I could see his mind ordering up a list of complaints.

“Why? What’s wrong with it?” I asked.

“It catches on fire, bursts into flames, every couple weeks another fire.”

“You’re kidding?”

“No, the fire department comes, the electricity goes out for hours. The whole thing shuts down.”

“I didn’t know. Why does it do that?”

“Gets too hot!” he said, lifting his hands. I knew I would not get the actual details, as probably only the solar company was privy to the facts behind the fires.

We said our goodbyes and that was the last I saw of him.

This is not the column I intended to write, but I am keeping the title caption. Kenny and I grew up together -- he, a couple years older -- grew up under similar circumstances and with commonalities of childhood work experiences and with a feel and love for the land which provided a basis for our respective families to exist. That old dairy farming community is fragmented now and has all but disappeared from the scene, and Kenny was one with it, and with his passing another clear and extensive memory of that life is erased, extinguished. “You Can’t Go Home Again,” Thomas Wolfe wrote.