For the Love of the Game & Grain

For the Love of the Game & Grain

Every year, March Madness and the NCAA Basketball tournament bring a special feel and excitement to our household. If you start talking sports with Papa Jennings, it doesn’t take long to learn that he was born and raised in the mountain area of north central West Virginia described as ‘a sparse place inhabited by a staunch people.‘ It’s also the wild and wonderful area known as ‘the Coaching Cradle’ that claims Nick Saban, Jimbo Fisher, and others that led to 15 national championships in college football. In fact, my father and Nick Saban (six years his junior) were birthed in the same Fairmont, West Virginia hospital. Yet while he has appreciation for nearly every sport, my father’s love has always been basketball – you should see his eyes light up when he tells the story about seeing Elgin Baylor play for the first time! This, of course, was well before my staunch father met my staunch mother and together launched the family farm in Michigan in 1979.

Growing up a Hooper (coached by Papa Jennings himself) in the 1990s, I lived for tournament time so I could watch Pat Summitt and her Lady Vols play on the national stage. Back then, you only saw the women’s game televised during the Final Four – and even then, our family didn’t have satellite or cable tv, so my mom would find someone who would loan us a couple hours on their tv to catch the games (Thank you, Mrs. Heath!). From age 12, it was my dream and aspiration to go to college and get a scholarship playing basketball. I was lucky to have a father that was a student of the game and could teach me so much right there under the hoop in the barn. And I wasn’t the only one who learned from him. No doubt, one of his many legacies is not just farming, but coaching and impacting hundreds of young people through sports.

Upon graduating high school from 2000 to 2004, I got the opportunity to play basketball for the University at Buffalo and Utah State University. As much as I LOVED playing basketball and venturing out on my own, I always missed the farm. Basketball is one of those college sports that is never really off – if your not in-season, your in pre or post season training. During those years, I rarely made it home – maybe two or three times a year for a couple days at most. Sometimes it felt like going home for short stints made it more difficult to be away from the farm. I’ll never forget the ‘Christmas Massacre’ practice at the University at Buffalo in 2001; we had 36 hours to be home with our families and had to report back to the court on Christmas evening by 7 p.m. Why we call it the ‘Massacre’ is a story for another day (we all survived -btw)!

A Taste of Home

While I was away at school, my parents had fully transitioned the farm to USDA Certified Organic in 2003. Additionally, they started tinkering with freshly milled grains on the farm. My dad and his brothers had recovered and rebuilt several old, gristmills from West Virginia that were left behind when the local community mills began shuttering in the 1960s. Many of the mill stones were abandoned and rotting on site. I suppose restoring those old stones and putting them back into action gave him a taste of home and bit of nostalgia for the hills he came from. Milling on the farm started with primarily feeding the family kitchen and quickly branched into sharing with neighbors and friends. Whenever I caught a break from schooling and balling (now, out in Logan, Utah), a brief visit home would include the ‘BEST PANCAKES EVER’ – organic multigrain pancakes my mom would whip up with a buckwheat, cornmeal, soft red wheat, and spelt blend. I would soak up as much goodness as I could before heading back out west nearly 1600 miles away.

Mama must have known how much those pancakes meant to me. I distinctly remember the arrival of the first, spontaneous flat-rate box to my apartment in northern Utah filled with organic buckwheat flour, cornmeal, spelt, and soft red wheat from home. While I was learning how to get along with the Mormons (insert smiley face), nothing nourished me better and helped bridge the distance from where I was to where I wanted to be than those fresh, wholesome grains packed with my mother’s loving hands. She would send me a box full every few months. ‘Put what you don’t use in the freezer.’ she would say.

A Seed Was Planted

Those flat rate boxes filled with farm fresh treats and an encouraging note from home helped me feel less homesick and more optimistic that I could persevere through the challenges before me. To me, those freshly milled grains represented the mighty combination of comforting and gritty ingredients that made my staunch parents. I remember making multigrain pancakes, buttermilk cornbread & buckwheat cakes, and strawberry shortcake with spelt for my college roomies and other athlete friends – they were amazed by the flavor and how well it fueled performance. No one had ever really had anything quite like it as most flours available at the stores were from roller mills that had stripped away all the bran, germ, and flavor.

It never seemed like a big deal at the time, but time, my friends, sure can provide perspective. Sometimes I wonder, was it my mother’s shipments of organic grains from the farm in Michigan to Utah all those years ago that started sowing the idea of Firefly Fields? No doubt it played a part. The love of grain and the love of the game run strong in our family. It gives us so much joy to be able to share the comforting, gritty, goodness that’s cultivated on our family’s farm with you. Every note that’s written in every package is like writing a love letter to you (and my mother) for every encouraging word she shared in those flat-rate boxes years ago.