Wisdom of the Last Farmer: Harvesting Legacies from the Land

In a series of five previous popular books, Mas Masumoto, the storyteller, has given us vignettes into his life on his farm in California's Central Valley. In Wisdom of the Last Farmer, Mas returns to his familiar themes - being Japanese American, the struggle to maintain his farm, his own mortality and succession planning. His experiences mirror those of many Central Valley farmers struggling to make a living and debating whether to continuing farming. To these experiences he adds his family's struggles after his father's strokes. I feel for Mas and his family while reading about his father's stroke, rehabilitation and subsequent second stroke, recalling my family's own experiences with my grandfather's long illness after a stroke. His books mirror so much of what I knew growing up on a farm in the Central Valley - baling wire repairs to farm equipment, a noxious weed that can puncture tires and bare feet, "dry" Valley heat, an old farmhouse built in the early 20th century and parents that worked so hard and sacrificed so much to give their children a better life. In his earlier works, there was an undercurrent of optimism in his writing. In Wisdom, however, I sense a certain fatalism; that he feels that time might be catching up with him. Maybe his optimism will be renewed when his daughter returns to the farm.