The Things I Get To Worry About

When my mother died, I became executor of her estate. I got to locate, marshal, and oversee all her assets. And as anyone who's been executor can attest, the job entails a fair amount of work. (For those of you who've agreed to be executor of someone's estate - but have yet to perform the task - consider it a mixed blessing.) You've got to be careful. Executors can be audited, called on the carpet by the IRS, brought up on charges for malfeasance, for not doing a good job. So I've taken the job seriously and have been very conservative handling her assets.

One asset I never expected to cause problems is her farm on Maryland's Eastern Shore.

Well, it isn't really her farm. She owned it, true, but like me, she inherited it from her mother. My great-grandparents were the farmers. My mother was no more farmer than me, which is to say, not at all. Neither one of us could tell you much about the business of agriculture. We could probably identify a tractor or a cow or a pile of manure, but that's about it.

During the time she had it, my mother was fortunate enough to have tenant farmers rent the land who were diligent and trustworthy stewards. My mother could be a true absentee landlord without any worries except how to spend her farm rental.

And that's the way I expected it to continue. And probably will continue. But I recently received a letter from the Kent County Planning Commission. It's full of ominous words and dark foreboding. Changes are afoot, forces are moving, armies are massing. You see the property next to mine has been sold. Sold to a mushroom farmer!

Mushrooms! Mushrooms will be raised next to my corn and soybeans. Compounding things, as an adjacent property owner, I've been called to testify. Me. Kem White. Mr. Black Thumb. Testifying to the incredibly rural Kent County Planning Commission, all twelfth-generation Maryland farmers, about what mushroom farming might do to my farmland. I didn't even know mushrooms grew on farms. I thought they grew in caves or bogs or forests or something. Now I'll be commenting on "substrate preparation", "growing rooms", "spore dispersal", and "psilocybin boosting". (Well maybe not that last one.) I'd sure like to have something intelligent to say. But what are the odds of that happening? They might as well have me comment on 14th century Venetian sculpture for what I know.

I think I should at least find out what soybeans and mushrooms look like before I go over there. And what do I wear? Overalls? Nah. Something with more gravitas. A John Deere hat? Maybe.

Just one more thing to worry about.
K-