This Life I Live: One Man's Extraordinary, Ordinary Life and the Woman Who Changed It Forever

by Rory Feek

  And through it all, my girls had been watching. They’d seen the hard times we’d had. And they’d seen us stick it out and get on our knees and turn our tears into prayers and our prayers into smiles and laughter. For the first time, they saw their father in love. Truly in love. And they saw a woman honoring their daddy. The thing that I think they wanted to see most of all.

  They are watching still. Grown now, but watching. Learning from us. How to live truly loving someone and how to love someone even when living isn’t an option anymore. That has been such a gift to me. To know that after all those years of getting it wrong, of giving them bad examples and images to look at, we were able to give them some good ones.

  I’ve learned that it’s never too late to start over. Never too late to impact someone in a good way. Every day is a new day—the start of a new and better story.

  Thirty-Nine

  A GREEN HEART

  Joey can grow onions and tomatoes, potatoes and zucchini, and squash and peppers and corn ’til they’re coming out your ears. That, and love. That’s what she really grows best.

  Joey had a gift of seeing things simply. Black and white, right and wrong. No gray areas, not really. As I’ve mentioned, she didn’t really know that she saw things that way, or understand what it was she was doing . . . but I did. I could see it, analyze it, understand it all . . . but couldn’t do it. Joey could just do it, and she managed to skip all the steps in between. It was another one of her many gifts from God.

  Each year in the late winter, Joey would start ordering seeds. She’d pull out her dog-eared catalogs, and her bookmarked seed-savers exchange website link, and spend days preparing, then placing orders for all the things she wanted to grow in her garden. The things she wanted to put on our table, in our freezer, and on our pantry shelves. It would still be cold outside, but you’d think spring was already here by how excited she’d get about it. She’d ask me if I thought we should get the Burgundy Red or Black Beauty beans or the Indian-head sweet or bread-and-butter corn. I never could really tell much of a difference in how they all tasted, but I’d pretend that I did and do my best to help her decide. Joey was passionate about her garden. About raising good food to feed her family.

  It was a lot of work. Like I said, I’m a little more analytical about things, and it didn’t take much figuring to realize that it’s not only faster and easier but also cheaper to just head to Kroger to buy the food to cook for dinner, rather than grow it. Mostly because growing is a complicated word. Growing actually means preparing, planting, weeding, and watering the seeds and the soil they grow in. Then a bunch more work starts once you’ve done that. Besides the picking and harvesting, there’s the peeling and the cutting and the canning, the shucking and the boiling and the bagging, and the freezing. All that so you can do the cooking. The math never really added up to me. But for Joey it did.

  And it didn’t just add up to her; it was super one-sided. The garden outweighed the grocery store any day. And every day. My wife understood that there are things you cannot put a price on, and there’s a huge difference between time wasted and time spent. The amount of time that Joey was in her garden, or doing things in and around it, were outside of time. Outside of money. They existed on a different plane. “How do you put a price on your family’s health?” she would say. To know what she was feeding her children and husband was very important to Joey. And to know that she played a small part in the existence of that food was a big source of pride for her.

  And she had a strong opinion about GMOs—genetically modified organisms. She wouldn’t go near or serve her family anything that wasn’t non-GMO. For her it wasn’t a government or big-business thing—although neither she nor I have much trust in either—it was a nature thing. GMOs aren’t right or natural, and a lot of research out there says that for all the good they can do in the short-term, all that modifying of what God Himself provided for us is doing irreversible damage to our bodies and our health. There weren’t many things that Joey would get on a soapbox about, but that was one of them. That and immunizations. But I’ll save that for a different chapter—in probably a different book someday—about raising something even more precious to Joey than the garden full of vegetables that she loved.

  Besides her garden, Joey always had chickens too. We’d keep a dozen in the henhouse for eggs each morning, and she’d get fifty or a hundred day-old chicks each spring to raise for meat-birds for our freezer.

  My wife didn’t like to read much. Not really. Reading to her was the same thing as watching a movie. It meant going to sleep. But she did love reading the latest book or article by Joel Salatin from Swoope, Virginia, the self-proclaimed “lunatic farmer” she heard about. About how he moves his chickens from spot to spot each day in a homemade chicken tractor so they can have new grass to peck and new soil, around the garden, to leave droppings. Joey loved learning about homesteading and farming and simple living. And the more old-fashioned and commonsense, the better. I bought her a brand-new tiller a few years ago, but she continued using the one her mama had given her. The one that would beat you to death as you moved up and down the rows. It would turn the soil over just fine, but it would also turn your arms and body to mush because it was so old and rickety. Joey loved it, though, because it had history. Her mama had used it and probably some other mamas before that.

  I have two freezers full of things Joey has grown. Enough to last a good while. Probably a year or two would be my guess. We’ve been pulling some green beans and other vegetables out for dinner the last couple of evenings, and though the bags say 2014 or 2015, the food tastes like it just came straight out of the garden. I know she would love that she’s still providing for us, even now. And I love still being able to “taste” Joey here at our table, even though she’s no longer in the chair next to mine.

  Another part of me wants to leave them there. Those bags. The vegetables and fruit of Joey’s hard labor. Leave them in the freezer and not eat them. I don’t want to walk out to the mudroom one day and open the freezer door to find all the bags she carefully filled and dated are gone. Or worse yet, find the freezer filled with nothing but bags of chicken from Kroger or Whole Foods and no sign of Joey or the foods that were most important to her.

  As I look out the window and type this, Joey’s garden is full of life. Life has begun to spring from the seeds Indiana and Hopie and I and some friends planted this spring, with hopes of keeping our table filled with Joey’s beliefs in healthy living and eating. To honor her. To see if, just maybe, in doing that, one of our older girls or the little one will pick up Joey’s passion for the garden and run with it. Make it her own.

  One thing I know is that the love Joey planted here will not die. It continues blooming and growing. I see it, feel it, everywhere. It’s in our hearts and in the smiles on our faces and in the hands that I shake and the people I meet when I am dropping Indy off at school. Her love is everywhere. Planted in the life she lived. That we lived. And the story that we have told and are still telling. That kind of love takes root in the hearts of others, of people we will never meet. At least, this side of heaven.

  Joey would love that. To know that she’s made a small difference in the world. And a big difference in mine.

  Forty

  CHANGING LIVES ONE SIP AT A TIME

  I often say, “All the best things happen around a cup of coffee.” I especially say that to my buddies Chris and Matt who own Muletown Coffee—a little chain of coffee shops nearby in Columbia, Tennessee.

  But it’s true. As I mentioned, my first date with Joey was having coffee at Stan’s Truck Stop, and years later the idea for us to sing together would show itself over a cup of coffee on Edgehill Avenue, in Nashville. And then there’s Marcy Jo’s . . . the cup of coffee that spawned a million more cups of coffee.

  Joey’s record deal had evaporated a few years earlier, and with it went her dreams of getting the chance to be a singer. To follow in her hero Dolly Parton’s big, little footsteps.


  Joey had gone back to working as a vet assistant at Equine Medical, now the Tennessee Equine Hospital. She loved her job, but part of her wanted more. We had been married for four years by this time, and she was starting to come to the conclusion that maybe music wasn’t in the cards for her. That was hard for her to swallow. It was why she had moved to Nashville and why she had been born. Or, at least, for her it felt that way. But even she could read the signs. God had been closing doors before she could even knock on them. It was beyond disheartening.

  Still she trusted Him, that He had a plan. And she laid her disappointment at His feet daily. So when she and Marcy and I were having coffee one afternoon at our kitchen table and Marcy said, “You know, Jo, you and I should open up a little cafe in that little building down the road,” Joey thought about it for a minute, about all the doors that had been closed in her face, about the way our marriage had worked out wonderfully—even though we were scared and disappointed at first—and she said, “Okay, let’s do it.” And they did.

  We did, actually. I was recruited to do the plumbing and the electrical. That’s why Marcy Jo’s still has leaky pipes and water pouring all over the floor more than every now and then. They decided to do it in October 2006, I think. And they opened for business in mid-January 2007. They called it Marcy Jo’s Mealhouse & Bakery. Marcy for Marcy, and the Jo for Joey. Marcy would do the cooking and run the kitchen, and Joey would do the baking and wait on tables.

  My wife was nervous as could be about it. “I’m used to horses, not people,” she would say. “I don’t think I’m good with people.” But she was. She was a natural. My wife’s love language is “service,” and you don’t get much more “service-y” than slinging eggs and coffee to customers. And not only was she good at it, she loved it. And she loved the people, and they loved her. The first customer through the door was an older cowboy named Danny Smith. By the time his belly was full, Danny, Marcy, and Joey were fast friends. The next time he came in, he was carrying a new air conditioner, still in the box, from Home Depot. “To help keep the girls cool in that hotter-than-Hades kitchen,” he said. With the gift of that A/C, Danny stole my wife’s heart and the admiration of those girls for a lifetime. “He is a good man,” Joey told me when she got home that night. “All our neighbors are good people,” she said.

  I remember sitting at the top of the driveway with Joey about a month after they opened the cafe and her standing beside her truck in tears. Not the bad kind either. They were tears of pride because it was the first thing she’d ever done, she said, that was hers. The first thing that she’d ever owned, that she was part of building. And it changed her. It totally changed who she was and what mattered to her. She let the music go. She didn’t need it anymore, not the way she did before. She could finally open her hand and give it to Him. Completely.

  And I think it was then, and only then, that He could give it to her. The music. The dream she’d always wanted. To sing on a stage and have a million people watching and hearing her.

  He was about to give it to her.

  Only because now she didn’t need it.

  That’s when He does it sometimes. And He’ll do it in a way that you never expected.

  That’s what He did with us, anyway.

  Forty-One

  NOTHING MATTERS

  The things you think matter? They don’t. And the things you think mean nothing? They’re the ones that change everything.

  I’ve seen it happen again and again. In my life and in others. This book is filled with them. Or at least it should be if I get it right. And this was one of those times—when it shouldn’t have mattered, but it did. When I thought nothing was happening, but it was. A day that I thought was insignificant, but it wasn’t. It was life-changing. Two lives changing. Joey’s and mine.

  Like all days that change everything, this was just a regular, ordinary Thursday. I had a songwriting appointment with a guy at the farm. No big deal. He was a friend of a friend. I didn’t know him, and honestly, I wanted to cancel it. Stay at home and do something else more important. Less important. Whatever. But I didn’t cancel it. Thank God.

  John Bollinger was from Montana. His buddy Dave was someone I’d met a few years earlier, and Dave had asked me to write with John, and so I’d told him I would. And now John was here, at the farmhouse, and we were spending the day together, trying to write a song. John was a super guy. I knew right away that I liked him. Very funny and talented and humble. It’s my favorite character in people. Humility. In myself too. Or, at least, I hope it is.

  We spent the morning working on a song, and then at lunchtime I took him down the road to Marcy Jo’s. I explained to him that I had recently won the lottery because I not only got to be served by that pretty waitress who was refilling our tea glasses, but I was sleeping with her too. He thought that was funny. I introduced him to Joey, and we stayed for a long time visiting. He asked lots of questions about our lives and our little restaurant and farm. He and I had fried chicken or whatever special they were serving that day. Then we went back and wrote a little more, and he headed out. That was it.

  But that wasn’t it.

  John called me on my cell a week or so later. He wanted to know if Joey and I could come to Nashville and meet with him for coffee. He wanted to run something by us, and it needed to be soon. I thought it strange, but I told him we’d be there.

  The next day, John sat across from Joey and me at a little coffee shop just off Music Row. He told us that besides being a songwriter, he was also a band leader for a TV show called Nashville Star. He said he knew a lot of people in that industry, and a new show was about to go into production by the people who do American Idol, and they were looking for America’s next great country duo. And he said he told them about us.

  I said, “John, what are you talking about? Joey’s a singer, and I’m a songwriter, but we don’t sing together. We’re not a duo.” He just smiled.

  Then he said, “I’ve been doing this a long time and have met a lot of people. And you don’t realize it, but you and Joey—you’re the real deal.” He told us he thought it would be a good idea for us to audition for the show. I didn’t think it was.

  On the way to our truck, Joey asked me if I’d do it. For her. She knew that I embarrassed easily, and one of my worst fears was seeing myself in pictures and, even worse, on TV. But I could tell that this opportunity meant a lot to her. She was now thirty-two years old, and that’s old for women who are trying to have a singing career.

  Against my better judgment, I told her I would. And that would turn out to be one of the best bad decisions I would ever make. Period.

  As nervous and afraid as I was for myself, I believed in Joey. I had been saying for years, “It would be a tragedy if the world never got a chance to hear my wife sing.” I knew she had a gift and never really understood why God hadn’t opened the right door for her dreams. But He hadn’t. And I would soon find out why.

  He had a bigger plan. He always does.

  John said they needed to see something on video of Joey and me singing together. Just a song or two. I had a better idea. My cousin Aaron and I went to Best Buy and bought a little consumer video camera and made a seven-minute video that didn’t just show us singing a couple of songs but also told our story. I wanted the producers, or whoever would be watching it, to see how special my wife was and to know a little more about us than how well we sang together or what we looked like.

  Joey did her part too. She baked a pan of pecan sticky buns and delivered them to the producer along with the DVD that Aaron and I had made. A day or two later we found out that we were in. Way in. I wouldn’t know how far that little video and those sticky buns would carry us until months later, but one thing was clear. The producers saw something unique in Joey and me and thought that the people who tuned in to watch the show would too.

  We went all the way to the finals of CMT’s Can You Duet television show, and that led to a record deal for Joey and me. And the chance to perfor
m all over the country and halfway around the world, sell hundreds of thousands of albums, make music videos and television commercials, and, ultimately, have our very own television show that we would film at home in the big red barn beside our farmhouse. But the most amazing part of it is that it happened to us—not just to Joey. That in itself is a miracle. We had never considered singing together. And even when the doors that had closed for my wife started opening up for us as a husband-and-wife duo, I was still skeptical. I had never seen anything like it in the music business, and I had been in it a long time. Never heard of anything that wonderful and sweet and genuine happening to another couple the way it did for us.

  And that is a wonderful gift. Not just because we got to experience it but because it was very clear that it wasn’t something that we, or I, did. It was magic. Only God could’ve pulled it off. Joey and I stood on that stage each night, in awe of the opportunity to be there. To be there together.

  It became clear that when Joey heard or felt that still small voice telling her “He’s the one” at the Bluebird Cafe all those years ago, God didn’t just have a beautiful love in store for us. He had that and more in mind. A love story that He could share with others. A platform that would become bigger than words and music. Bigger than the songs we were singing.

  I believe—no, I know—He purposely let all those doors close for Joey and her heart be broken because He had something in store for her. Something bigger and better than what she, or I, dreamed of.

  And it all started with that one appointment I almost canceled.

  He made something extraordinary out of the ordinary.

  I love that.