R. M. True | Founder, Managing Director

In April, my grandfather Bobby Knox True passed at 90. He was abrasive, proud, and always smelled of Futurity tobacco, but he was great man—unyielding in his service to family and community, and foundational to the blueprint I now follow. His influence, both direct and quietly embedded, helped shape my character and resolve and, ultimately, The Kentucky Steward LLC.
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As Fall colors the trees over the bluegrass landscape, perhaps most vividly today–which would have been your 91st birthday just six months after your passing, I cannot help but think of you.

On your farm stood an old sugar maple—towering, listening, rooted. Beneath it lay your garden, and beneath that, the soil that held many of our stories. I’ve long imagined that tree as a sentinel, absorbing our banter, taking notes on our humanity. With each quip or joke, the tree would shake in laughter. With your iron sharpening mine, its bark would only harden, its roots reaching deep and outward as if reaching out for a firm, Kentucky handshake.

In its time, perhaps its fondest memories of life align precisely with my fondest memories of you. Sowing sunflowers in as straight as lines as could be managed with dragging a hoe in hand, and using the Goliath seeds of yesteryear’s bounty; the wisdom from generation to generation, if it’ll take.

You afforded me near-limitless wisdom, and though it wasn’t always delivered in a gentle way, it transferred to me all the same.

How could I avoid recalling Dr. Suzanne Simard’s research on mycorrhizal networks: how trees share “forest wisdom” through fungal pathways? For it gave language to what I’d always felt: you, like your sugar maple, transmitted wisdom through unseen roots.

To where?

Of course, last May I purchased my own farm. In its front yard stands another sugar maple—larger, more vibrant, spared by storm and time, though unquestionably younger than yours a few dozen miles away. As your maple resembled you—a hardened sentinel with but few hidden soft spots under your bark, it is easy to see my maple feels like a continuation, a living metaphor, of myself.

And although I had only cared for the tree for just shy of a year before your passing, I could have sworn in your last months it grew larger, more vibrant, more resolute. Clearly, my visits with you this last year were especially fruitful, even our time shared with no words spoken.

No longer does my sugar maple fear the storm. It has held onto its leaves mightily despite this season’s inevitability.

When I embrace its bark and look up to its canopy, there is a moment I feel I am beneath your tree and hearing one of your stories or absorbing your wisdom like a bee pollinating one of the many sunflowers we planted together.

But I know this cannot be. I am left only below my tree.

Just after you were laid to rest beneath your tree it began to rot; rather, it had been rotting unbeknownst to me and others that received your wisdom for quite some time.

In the summer, your sugar maple fell, missing your gravestone by a few feet.

Now, only my maple remains.

I believe your forest wisdom has passed. You afforded me, and so many others, every drop you could transfer until your roots were dry.

When I take hold of my own maple’s bark, now with two children at my feet—even more eager than I was to learn the ways of the sun, the soil, and the goings on of a home, family, and community, I am left to envision how I might transfer some of my wisdom, and some of your wisdom through me, to their roots.

In my doing, they might be as upright and colorful as you.