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I spoke with my friend Josh, who I met through one of our core classes at UWG. He always had a thing for plants, and I recently found out why. I stopped by his apartment, and over a quiet afternoon at his kitchen table, he told me about an old mentor who changed everything for him. DOUGLASVILLE, Ga. — That man is Skip Donnelly, an 81-year-old former farmer from Douglasville, Georgia. I met with Skip a few days earlier, also across a kitchen table. Though he’s since sold the farm and moved in with his son, the green hasn’t left him—the kitchen wasn’t just painted green, it was filled with plants of all kinds, including his favorite, cactuses.

Skip had been working on farms since the mid-1960s. He’s seen hard years, but never stopped. “This place kept me sane,” he told me. “Even when Maisie got sick, even when I thought I might lose it. The work keeps you moving.”
Maisie, his wife of 42 years, passed away in 2012. After that, the fields went quiet for a while—until a neighbor asked Skip if he’d consider hiring a teenager who needed structure. That teenager was 15-year-old Josh.
“He showed up in Jordans and cologne,” Skip said with a grin. “Didn’t even bring water his first day.”
Josh didn’t deny it. “Yeah, I thought it’d just be yard work or something. I didn’t think he was gonna hand me gloves and point at a half-acre of tomato rows.”

The work was tough. Josh remembered the feeling of Georgia heat clinging to his back, the smell of cut grass, and the constant buzz of flies near the melon patch. “You’d think the silence would make it easier, but it was the worst part,” he said. “Skip wouldn’t fill space. He’d just let you mess up and figure it out.”
Josh recalled a summer morning when the two of them were fixing a busted fence post. It was hot, the kind of sticky heat that made everything feel heavier. Josh was sweating, swatting at gnats, and struggling to keep the post level. “I must’ve sighed for the tenth time,” he said. “And Skip just looked at me and went, ‘It’s not supposed to be easy. That’s the point.’” Josh didn’t say anything back, but he remembers feeling like the complaint had landed somewhere—it had been heard, but not indulged.
Skip remembered that day too. “He was frustrated, sure. I figured he might not come back. But the next morning, there he was, waiting by the truck. That’s when I figured maybe the boy’s got a bit of backbone in him after all."

Josh ended up working on the farm through high school. During those years, Skip slowly gave him more responsibility—checking irrigation, helping with sales at the Saturday market, even learning how to diagnose soil by smell and texture.
“It wasn’t just farming,” Josh said. “It was about showing up and being consistent, even when no one’s clapping for you.”
Now 22, Josh is in school for environmental science. He still visits Skip every couple of months, usually bringing along a small gift—sometimes a new cactus. “I don’t think I’d be on this path without him,” he said. “It wasn’t therapy or speeches. It was a man showing up every day, and letting me watch.”
Back at his kitchen table, Skip shrugged when asked what he thought he taught Josh. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just needed a hand. And I figured if he kept showing up, I’d show him something.”
Before I left, Skip showed me a few of the plants he’s been tending in the backyard—mostly herbs and greens, with a few stubborn tomatoes that he says “refuse to quit.”
“Farming don’t fix everything,” he said. “But it’ll teach you something, if you let it.”
And for Josh, it did.
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