Franklin — He was the third Rosser Bryant born into the family.

But he was the first and only Boots.  His beads of sweat, dusty face and rough, mighty hands raised peanuts, corn, cotton, soybeans, hogs, cattle . . .  and his daughter, Susan Elaine Bryant.

She was his little blond princess who jumped on his giant work boots with a contagious giggle to hitch a ride or plunged her feet into his coat pockets as he carried her.

Five decades later, Susan is carrying him — his spirit imbuing her heart after he died Sept. 19, 2022, at age 86 of thyroid cancer. Boots lost his world when his beloved wife, DiAnne Hurdle Bryant, died in 2019.

Boots was a big man with a big heart — a 6-foot, 200-pound man who cried tender, quiet tears whenever he stepped inside his abandoned childhood home at the end of a long dirt lane. This was where his parents, Rosser Barrett Bryant and Rowena V. Darden Bryant, raised him in a remote country community originally named Handsom, on the Virginia/North Carolina state line. Their enormous rambling farmhouse, built in 1832 by a French forefather, sheltered five Bryant generations on 500 acres of Sleepy Hollow Farm in Southampton County.

Boots's fun, lively parents entertained visitors there from across the land amid bountiful laughter. Perhaps that's how their son developed his trademark laugh— throwing back his head with a big belly laugh and clapping his hands. And he didn't move far from his mother's wide, constant smile and his father's Tennessee walking horses. He built a small brick house in 1963 for his bride right across the street.

That exquisite bride he met on the Virginia Beach boardwalk on a blind date and proposed to her six months later. Those fleeting six months with DiAnne stretched into 54 years. Amid those five decades together, they attended New Hope United Methodist Church and Barnes United Methodist Church. Boots became a founding lifetime member of the Ruritan Club in Como, N.C.; a 30-year board member for Community Electric Cooperative in Windsor, Va.; and president and founding member of Como Farmers Hunt Club.

In his younger years, he served with the Franklin unit of the Virginia National Guard after attending Newsoms High School and Chowan College. Quail called him to the fields and woodlands, while fish lured him to the river and lakes. He always relished relating the exact number of his last catch.

His wife, DiAnne, liked to say that Susan was the love of his life. And he eventually fell in love with the family's little cockapoo, Jingles, which he resisted at first. But perhaps his change of heart was not surprising. Even as a pup, he was obsessed with bird dogs, especially the queen of them all . . .  appropriately named Queenie.

"My daddy loved horses, and I loved dogs," he said not too long ago.

Just as he bred championship field trial beagles, he was bred too — to farm, to hunt, to fish. He harvested from the earth, the sky, the sea — all merging into one horizon.

And on that horizon, the sun would rise and set as he toiled in his fields that were passed from four generations before him. As the cicadas pulsed, the late-afternoon golden sun basked the crops as far as his eyes could see. In the fall when pine needles cushioned the earth, a harmony of crickets, frogs and the comforting drone of the farm's drying bins hummed his family to sleep at night.

And now Boots sleeps forever, gone fishing in his infinite dreams.

* A private joint celebration-of-life luncheon was held in December in honor of both Boots and DiAnne.