The Official Website of Robert Slatt
Mid January 2006 In the days after the trial, Dad slipped into a quiet, distracted heaviness I had never seen in him before. Normally he was outgoing, engaging, the kind of man who walked into a room with a smile on his face. But now he drifted through the farm in a solemn, introspective haze….
January 10, 2006 The Walk Into the Courthouse The morning of the trial carried the kind of heaviness you feel in your bones. We arrived early, stepping into the courthouse like people bracing for a storm they couldn’t stop. A friend from our small group church came along—quiet support in a room where everything felt…
January 2006 The first week of January felt like one long exhale we never quite finished. The days were short, the sky a dull sheet of gray, and life on the farm moved along in that slow, practical rhythm winter demands—hauling feed, stacking wood, keeping an eye on the weather like it was another neighbor…
November 2005 – December 2005 I took the month of November off from work to focus on classes and to help get the alpaca barn ready before our end-of-year deadline. My dad needed my help, and with the amount of schoolwork piling up, something had to give. By the end of October, the papers had…
October 25, 2005 Late October had held onto its warmth longer than usual, and the farm still looked more like late summer than the edge of winter. Many of the trees stubbornly clung to their leaves—some even stayed green. We knew cold weather would come eventually, probably sometime in November, but not now. Not tonight….
September 2005 – November 2005 The end of August was hectic. Classes at Fairmont State started in a week, and I still had to enroll. Campus was buzzing with students buying books, carrying stacks of papers, and trying to figure out where their classes were located. Parking was impossible. I spent hours poring over the…
June 2005 – August 2005 June marked a month of major transformation on the farm. The weather helped—sunny days, surprisingly low humidity, and that early-summer clarity where the air feels clean. We spent those warm mornings tearing out the last remnants of the old property, the old bones of a farm that had lived many…
Memorial Day Weekend 2005 While living on the farm, I still kept in touch with my friends from South Carolina. The one I talked to most often was Courtland. He and his sister had trained as missionaries with New Tribes Mission, and we frequently discussed his impending departure to China. Around that same time, a…
March 2005 – May 2005 To recap, over the winter, we focused on work inside the house, and we actually got a lot accomplished. The place had felt cold and empty for months—just beams, studs, and bare sub-floor. It was the kind of environment where you were always stepping over a stray two-by-four, dodging a…
March 29, 2005 – CSU Convocation Center – Cleveland, Ohio I was an ’80s kid in every sense of the word. I had an original Walkman clipped to my jeans pocket and a stack of Garbage Pail Kids held together with a rubber band. My toy box was filled with Masters of the Universe, Transformers,…