The previous post was written earlier this year, prompted by a picture of that red barn. Now, some weeks later, I have been to that 850N/New Richmond road corner of the world. Since 1993 I have driven past the farm three or four times, but this time it was different.
My vision of the farm reflects the way it looked for four decades, probably longer counting the years before I remember it. Gradually over the last fifteen years, buildings have disappeared: the chicken house, the woodhouse, the smokehouse, a corncrib. As new people (not Taylors) have moved into the house, lifestyles have changed. Such buildings have become irrelevant and since they are not used, they deteriorate into eyesores and hazards. But this time the barn was gone.
“But” is a big word in looking at that bare spot where the barn used to stand. It was a focal point, like a royal throne from which a king kept watch over his lesser subjects in their less stately chairs. It is not a question of acceptance; what is not there is not there. Perhaps I wanted to see the farm to feed nostalgia even though I know that I do not yearn for that life for myself now.
I am thinking about the difference between nostalgia and memory. I do not need to recover life at the farm; I just want to remember it. The older I have become, the more grateful I am for the roots that I had growing up. It occurs to me that roots are underground, not displayed on the surface. My roots are not in the bricks and boards that have disappeared; memory goes deeper than that.
I will never go back to the farm. There is nothing for me to see now. I will visit through my mind’s eye, photographs, and remember-talk with friends and family. This is not a melancholy choice because what I remember is so much richer than what is there.
Saturday, June 16, 2007
The Farm
The setting of the story of my family is The Farm. The Farm is most easily located at the at the intersection of county road number 850N and the New Richmond blacktop, Montgomery County, Indiana, USA, Northern and Western hemispheres, the world, the solar system, the universe. (Citation to Thornton Wilder.) The center of the farm was a half mile down gravel road 850N, going due west. Two houses, the barn, and outbuildings were clustered there. If I stand in front of the big house, at the edge of the road and stretch my arms the half mile east and the same west, I will grasp the boundaries of the farm; if I pivot ninety degrees to the left and hold out my left arm, I can trace the north edge. It is a "land of perpetual flatness," as Vic calls it.
I cross the road to stand in Gordon Miles’ cornfield (every other year, soy beans) and look directly at the farm. The mailbox connects us to the world, rural route four. Behind it grows a graceful maple tree. Its limbs reach toward the sky in winter; in spring and summer leaves obscure the branches and provide shade across the yard; in fall it is pure gold and after the leaves drop, they create a golden carpet. There is a hole in the tree about nine feet up the trunk in which an albino owl keeps residence; he observes all activities on the farm from his vantage point. A swing with a board seat, hangs from a lower bough. My mother cut a vee-shaped notch in each end of the plank to keep it steady on the rope. The farmhouse is white clapboard, two stories, with a brick front porch and a window, so big it cannot be opened, facing the road. The twelve inches at the top of the window are leaded into ten columns, each topped by a four-inch diamond shaped piece of stained glass. Behind the house stands the windmill, taller than the roof, the coalhouse, the smokehouse, a green-shingled doghouse, an outhouse (no longer used, but notorious as the site where my Uncle Jim was caught smoking on sixteen millimeter film), and across the driveway past the barnyard gate, the chicken house. Set back from the house, beyond the board fence, is the big red barn trimmed in white. There are corncribs and silver silos to the right. A backdrop of dense woods stands tall above the other farm buildings. Fifty yards east of the house is the little white house, built for my great-grandmother in the early 1950’s. It was one of the first National Homes; labeled prefab, it went up in less than a month. This place is the cocoon and the cosmos of the Taylor family.
My mother’s thirty-seven acres was at the 850/New Richmond road corner. She was always adamant that this field was Her thirty-seven acres. I do not know how this ownership came about, but it was clearly an important designation. The bluegrass was on the opposite end of the farm. This field, about twenty-five acres, was never cultivated, but left in bluegrass for the horses. My granddaddy would drive out there in his Oldsmobile (the only cars he ever drove) and chase the horses in his car. He could observe which ones were lame, which mares were in foal, which yearlings were ready for breaking. It was a sort of roundup, a wild ride; the car bumped along, occasionally bounced, and he turned the wheel sharp to herd the horses in the right direction.
My great-grandfather, Charles M. Taylor, purchased the land in the 1920’s. He lived in New Richmond, and my grandparents, Donald and Mabel, lived on the farm. My father, Richard, was born there in 1927. I went to live there in 1948. The farm belonged to the family until the last decade of the century. Finally there was no one among the thirteen grandchildren interested in farming and living on the land so the family sold it.
When I think of the farm (it was designated THE Farm by my first cousin Jamie Sue), I remember the land itself. My favorite time to look across it is the spring. After plowing last year’s crop under in deep furrows, the disc breaks them into fine clods, and the colors are on display. Black soil drifts into deep brown and then flows into a lighter tan, all rich, all fertile.
I remember the family there at Thanksgiving and Christmas, sometimes on Memorial Day. On November, 24, 1963, the whole family gravitated to the farm, without anyone calling one another, to mourn the assassination of John Kennedy. Together we witnessed the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald on television, a remarkable event. We gathered for celebrations: graduations, engagements, births. Women gathered for work: making jelly, jam and juice, canning vegetables, dressing chickens. Men gathered to discuss crops and livestock, especially horses.
The family gathered again in June, 1993, to clean out the house and say goodbye to our home place. The last family member to live there was Mabel. After she died, the land was sold and her home, our home, divided among us, her three surviving children and thirteen grandchildren.
In my mind I still swing under the maple tree, play house on the brick porch, hide beneath lilac bush, and make hollyhock dolls. We Taylors have never left the farm; our life as a family is captured in that setting.
I cross the road to stand in Gordon Miles’ cornfield (every other year, soy beans) and look directly at the farm. The mailbox connects us to the world, rural route four. Behind it grows a graceful maple tree. Its limbs reach toward the sky in winter; in spring and summer leaves obscure the branches and provide shade across the yard; in fall it is pure gold and after the leaves drop, they create a golden carpet. There is a hole in the tree about nine feet up the trunk in which an albino owl keeps residence; he observes all activities on the farm from his vantage point. A swing with a board seat, hangs from a lower bough. My mother cut a vee-shaped notch in each end of the plank to keep it steady on the rope. The farmhouse is white clapboard, two stories, with a brick front porch and a window, so big it cannot be opened, facing the road. The twelve inches at the top of the window are leaded into ten columns, each topped by a four-inch diamond shaped piece of stained glass. Behind the house stands the windmill, taller than the roof, the coalhouse, the smokehouse, a green-shingled doghouse, an outhouse (no longer used, but notorious as the site where my Uncle Jim was caught smoking on sixteen millimeter film), and across the driveway past the barnyard gate, the chicken house. Set back from the house, beyond the board fence, is the big red barn trimmed in white. There are corncribs and silver silos to the right. A backdrop of dense woods stands tall above the other farm buildings. Fifty yards east of the house is the little white house, built for my great-grandmother in the early 1950’s. It was one of the first National Homes; labeled prefab, it went up in less than a month. This place is the cocoon and the cosmos of the Taylor family.
My mother’s thirty-seven acres was at the 850/New Richmond road corner. She was always adamant that this field was Her thirty-seven acres. I do not know how this ownership came about, but it was clearly an important designation. The bluegrass was on the opposite end of the farm. This field, about twenty-five acres, was never cultivated, but left in bluegrass for the horses. My granddaddy would drive out there in his Oldsmobile (the only cars he ever drove) and chase the horses in his car. He could observe which ones were lame, which mares were in foal, which yearlings were ready for breaking. It was a sort of roundup, a wild ride; the car bumped along, occasionally bounced, and he turned the wheel sharp to herd the horses in the right direction.
My great-grandfather, Charles M. Taylor, purchased the land in the 1920’s. He lived in New Richmond, and my grandparents, Donald and Mabel, lived on the farm. My father, Richard, was born there in 1927. I went to live there in 1948. The farm belonged to the family until the last decade of the century. Finally there was no one among the thirteen grandchildren interested in farming and living on the land so the family sold it.
When I think of the farm (it was designated THE Farm by my first cousin Jamie Sue), I remember the land itself. My favorite time to look across it is the spring. After plowing last year’s crop under in deep furrows, the disc breaks them into fine clods, and the colors are on display. Black soil drifts into deep brown and then flows into a lighter tan, all rich, all fertile.
I remember the family there at Thanksgiving and Christmas, sometimes on Memorial Day. On November, 24, 1963, the whole family gravitated to the farm, without anyone calling one another, to mourn the assassination of John Kennedy. Together we witnessed the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald on television, a remarkable event. We gathered for celebrations: graduations, engagements, births. Women gathered for work: making jelly, jam and juice, canning vegetables, dressing chickens. Men gathered to discuss crops and livestock, especially horses.
The family gathered again in June, 1993, to clean out the house and say goodbye to our home place. The last family member to live there was Mabel. After she died, the land was sold and her home, our home, divided among us, her three surviving children and thirteen grandchildren.
In my mind I still swing under the maple tree, play house on the brick porch, hide beneath lilac bush, and make hollyhock dolls. We Taylors have never left the farm; our life as a family is captured in that setting.
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