The Bank Gave Me 90 Days to Save My Family’s Iowa Farm. The Woman at the Auction Wasn’t There to Buy It

Nora had grown up twenty miles away, in Story City. When she was nine years old, her father lost their farm in the farm crisis of the 1980s. She remembered the auction. Strangers walking through her house. Her father sitting on the porch steps afterward, not saying a word.

That year, her fourth-grade teacher was Mrs. Evelyn Hutchins.

My mother.

“She stayed after school with me every day that year,” Nora said. “She knew what was happening at home. She told me if I worked hard enough, someday I could be the person who stands up and says stop.”

Nora became an agricultural attorney. For thirty years, she had specialized in farm debt restructuring. She’d seen my auction notice in the paper and recognized the name.

“Chapter 12 is bankruptcy for family farmers,” she explained at my kitchen table that afternoon. “It’s not the end. It’s a pause button. It lets us restructure your debt, stretch out the payments and keep the land while you farm your way out.”

“I can’t afford a lawyer,” I told her.

“I know,” she said. “I’m not charging you.”

I argued. She argued harder. She won. I would learn later that she usually did.

The next twelve months were the hardest of my life.

Nora negotiated with the bank. She found a farm credit lender who would refinance part of the debt at a lower interest rate. She helped me sell forty acres of timber ground I didn’t need, which paid off the equipment loan. She made me sit down and build a real budget for the first time in my life.

And then, in the middle of all that paperwork, something else happened.

She started staying for supper.

At first, it was because we worked late. Then it was because she said I needed someone to make sure I ate something besides cereal.

Nora had never married. She said she’d been too busy saving other people’s farms to build a life of her own.

“Do you regret that?” I asked her one night.

She looked out the window at the cornfield for a long time.

“I didn’t,” she said. “Until recently.”

This fall, the rain came right. The corn came up tall and green, and the harvest was the best I’d had in a decade. The court approved my repayment plan. The bank stopped calling.

The farm is still a Hutchins farm.

Last Sunday, Nora and I walked the field road at sunset, the way my parents used to do after supper.

She took my hand somewhere between the second and third field.

Neither of us said anything about it. We didn’t need to.

I think my mother would be very proud of both of us.

Have you or your family ever been close to losing a farm, a home or a business? Tell me in the comments how you got through it. Someone reading might need to hear it.