The Farm (The Land)

We had a farm from the time I was a toddler until I turned 8. I say we as in my grandparents had a farm but I assumed it was mine. That’s because it was. Our farm was rolling pastures and tall evergreens, climbing trees and out buildings where no animals lived but a little girl lived big and free.
The farm was about an hour away from where we really lived but we traveled there for weekends and get-aways whenever we could. I never wanted to stay home when it was time to head to the farm because it was the best home I’ve ever known. Our farm was in a place called Cold Water because many years ago an Indian stuck his big toe in the river and said “Oh That’s cold water ” and the name stuck. My grampa told me so. Please don’t consult local historians for confirmation, it’s not necessary.
So up the dusty road we’d drive and then there it would be on our left, the long drive up to the farm. In winter time you’d hold your breath and have a knot in your stomach if the snow was deep because maybe the car wouldn’t be able to make it up the hill. Then the men, my dad or my grampa would grumble and say “Ahh ” and stomp up the hill to clear the way. In the summer-time it was easier because you just swung right in and there you were, gravel crunching up the hill toward the green-gray house that had been just waiting for you. That crunch of gravel under tires was the sound of coming home. Today when I hear that sound I have a moment when in my mind, I can see the house at the top of the hill and the barn on the left.
Up the hill with the walnut tree pasture and barn on your left, house and little stand of trees on your right. A right turn and you are in the yard around which the house, garage, barn, corn crib and pig sty are arranged. Pastures around and beyond in every direction cradling you in their 20 acres. The drive spread into a gravely circle and we’d pull up to the garage. The only sidewalk at the farm was a little walkway up to the back door with a tree on the right and the grassy expanse leading toward the garden pasture on the left. Under the tree to the right was the cement rooster and baby chick painted and crackly. I could ride the rooster when I was small but when I got older my grandparents had added an old carousel horse that leaned against the little tree. It was made of iron and painted white and crackly like the rooster and chick. You could sit on that too, but you’d have to balance with your feet on the ground because the pony was fashioned in mid-gallop and minus it’s pole on the merry-go-round couldn’t stand on its own. If you attempted to drag the pony away from the tree it would leave tracks in the grass with its little hooves because it was too heavy to pick up and carry.
The yard to the left was cool and shady with the giant climbing tree. The tree towered over a side patio from the kitchen’s sliding glass door where there was an old metal patio table, cocktail style. My gramma had children’s chairs available and this made a perfect kitchenette for me to host summertime picnics furnished with the plastic dishes and cups from the pink plastic basket she kept on hand for me. Sometimes there were cats or puppies in attendance, sometimes just me and often my gramma.
Beyond the side yard the wire fence had an opening through which my grampa would drive the loud green John Deere tractor. If you were in the house when he started it up you could hear it and then look out the door or run outside just in time to watch him tall in the seat bouncing toward the garden. On the best days, which were often, he’d stop and let you climb up onto his lap. Then bounce, bounce, bounce until your teeth chattered and your stomach leaped off you’d ride into the garden. The tractor was giant and rough but my grampa or my dad could turn it on a dime up and down the garden rows and around the perimeter of our garden to the far side of the pasture where wild raspberries grew on the fence we’d ride. I had a small metal John Deere tractor with a detachable wagon and a workable steering mechanism. On the real tractor, the black plastic steering wheel would be hot from the sun and ridged to fit your fingers and my dad and my grampa would always let me steer it with their big rough hands warm on top of my small ones to ensure we didn’t flip. To this day a John Deere dealership makes me smile and I’ve yet to find an amusement park ride to equal the sheer joy of a ride on the tractor with hair flying and no need for talking because the engine was too loud anyway.
Our garden was big and square with corn reaching to heaven on the left, pumpkins swelling from fuzzy stalks on the right and vegetables of every kind in between. Here I learned to pick green beans from their waxy vines and clean them with my mom and my gramma on the side patio. Then they’d be served at dinner with onion and bacon and never was there a better taste. Our green beans. My grampa and I in particular loved those green beans and family legend has it that before I had teeth he’d feed me green beans from his own mouth. Those who cringe at the thought don’t understand the unreasonable love between family that finds no part of its children un-lovely. As I grew into an adult, with the farm and gardens long memory; my grampa and I would buy pounds and pounds of green beans from farm markets in the late Michigan summer, simmer them on my gramma’s stove and enjoy them with the same passion as the farm days. It was our unspoken pact that should either of us be so fortunate as to find fresh green beans, the other would be immediately notified to share the bounty. One never bought just enough fresh green beans for oneself and never ate them alone. And always the stories of baby Sara, eating green beans from Grampa’s mouth. He was no less delighted all those years later than the first time he shared the magic of farm grown beans with me. Stringy or not, green beans mean my grampa, my farm, my summers.
The back pasture behind the corn crib and pig pen was untouched and had grass that grew waist high in the summer. This pasture was especially good for rides in the John Deere jostling up and down and looking down at the flattened grasses as they rushed under us. Once my gramma and I walked all the way back to the property line of that pasture and that’s when she told me that we had 20 acres. I didn’t know what 20 acres meant but it has become the perfect size for a farm in my mind. I rarely walked that pasture on foot though, because of its untended state there was a chance of snakes or other critters that I preferred to keep at a distance. I was only a part-time farm girl after all. But from high on the tractor seat, all was safe.
Speaking of critters, my grampa maintained a vigilant woodchuck hunt for all the farm years. I don’t know what his particular problem was with the woodchucks as his only explanation to me was, “if a woodchuck could chuck wood, how much would a woodchuck chuck?”. In the pondering of this dilemma, I never pursued the reason Grampa had to vanquish the poor woodchuck from the farm. After all, he was only trying to chuck wood, whatever that meant. But off he’d go, shotgun in hand to rid the farm of the elusive woodchuck. I don’t recall ever actually seeing one except in the distance, a fat brown rambling thing that I was always surprised was not wearing a flannel shirt. I figured if he was so smart as to attempt to continually chuck wood, he would not be so primitive as to run around the pastures stark naked.
The corn crib was tall and towering with slatted sides and when you were inside of it, the sun would stripe you as it shown through. The pig pen was dark and musty with aged wooden floors and it made the perfect playhouse, small enough to decorate but large enough to feel like you were inside a real house, made for little girls. The idea that it was a pig pen never seemed like anything more than just the name, like Tara or Monticello.
The barn, oh the barn. Glorious and looming and red with bright white Z’s on the doors. The large main doors were heavy and you had to push and push with all your might to open them. That’s where the John Deere tractor lived. It too had aged brown wooden floors with scattered hay in the corners and old tools hanging from the walls and in my grampa’s work room. You just knew what you could touch and could not touch. On the left was a wood rail, probably waist high for an adult that I imagined would have housed horses at some time in the past. If you ran your fingers along the railing, you got dark brown splinters from the aging wood. It still had the faint smell of animals and hay and the outdoors and diesel from the tractor and gasoline from the riding lawn mower. It was always dark and cool inside the barn and your footsteps would echo and the damp dust would stick to your bare feet. On one end of the barn was the silo which my grampa and gramma said would be used to store grain but for us, was empty. I rarely went inside the silo but if you stood at the bottom it went up up up; a circular tower and the sky was all you could see. Your voice would echo and you were glad to get back out into the sunshine and feel the warm grass on your toes.
The front yard of the farm was somehow more tame and dignified than the grounds at the back. It had towering trees so dense that the sun would dapple through in rays here and there reminding you of the rungs from Jacob’s Ladder that the angels climbed up and down for old Jacob in the Bible. The trunks of the trees were dark and mossy and rough under your fingers. The front yard was deep with the house sitting way back and the front porch was made of brick with a curving brick hand rail but no sidewalk leading to it. We never used the front door anyway. It was a back door house. Once I was digging around at the front of the yard near the street. The house sat so high that if you went to the foot of the drive it seemed to be built at a sort of cliff, you could see the front of it from the dirt road. I was playing around and digging and thinking about how you could touch the roots of the trees from this perspective when I found a treasure. It was metal and ornate and buried near the corner of the lot at the driveway. I ran to show my grandparents and they said it was a fence post Some time, a long time ago, that front yard must have been enclosed with a fancy iron fence and this was all that remained I wonder what ever happened to that fence post? It seems that I would have saved it but I have no idea where it went after that day. Maybe some other child has found the other posts. If they did, I hope they saved their’s.
As for me, I have saved every inch of that farm’s land in my heart. I have laid on my back with nothing but clouds and sunshine to entertain my child’s mind. I have felt the dry dusty dirt of the garden and picked up clumps to crumble in my hand and thought, “this is our land”. I have run my fingers up prickly stalks and watched impossibly bright orange pumpkins emerge where last week there were delicate white flowers. I have cleaned green beans in the cool shade of the climbing tree to feed my family, all together for just a few moments in all of time.
I have taken off my shoes so my toes could better grip the gnarly trunk of the climbing tree and gone to bed with dirt still in the scrapes on my shins. I have been forced into a white tub and bathed in smelly “hard water” to get the barn dust off my feet. I have pulled down the silky stalks and rough sheaths from an ear of corn still on the stalk to see if it was “ready”, my mouth already watering. I have entertained farm cats with tea parties on the grass and hoped the woodchuck in the flannel shirt would get away one more time.
I’ve ridden cement roosters and iron carousel ponies and even a plastic duck on four purple wheels. I’ve ridden a John Deere tractor and a riding lawn mower.
I’ve worn the too-big shoes of my mom and my gramma outside because they were next to the door and didn’t slow me down with laces or buckles and then left them outside all night long. I’ve eaten green beans from my grampa’s mouth.
I was Sarey, a little girl of privilege.