Friday, April 18, 2008

This is where I came from

This is where I grew up....not literally, but in a sense it will always be identified to me as home. It's my family farm from the back side, where I spent every Christmas and Fourth-of-July from before birth to last year. Our large extended family returned to its homeland twice a year, the accomplished aunts and uncles reverting to their country ways and a flock of barefoot, dirty children running through fields, staging lawnmower races, and enjoying tractor rides aplenty. Forget the idea my society aunt-in-law had about this "wonderful pastoral experience" for the children. To me, it was home just as much as my own was, enhanced by the freedom to explore hay lofts with adventurous cousins, get dirty without getting in trouble, name scores of barn cats, eat endless popsicles without reproach, and wish I could stay there forever. Grandma's hugs probably helped.

We're selling the farm.

It seems a bit strange that this place that is so firmly identified as "mine" will eventually be ceded to a developer to turn it, one of the last vestiges of the town's rural heritage, into a subdivision. I've watched the desolate corner up the road turn from two crop fields, a fruit stand, and an abandoned building into a Kroger complex, brand-new library, Mobile gas station, and subdivision. I miss what it meant to me more than I miss the building, as in recent and older years the idyllic summer days and winters spent huddled by the Christmas tree have turned into a shadow of what they once were, reunions and holidays being celebrated more because that's what we always did than for any want or reason to continue the tradition. Many members fail to return at all, and every year our reunions seem emptier and more fragile. This year, my family didn't go back for Christmas at all, and family feuds are making a family Fourth, once a certainty, seem unimaginable.


The thing is, what I'm sad about isn't that the farm will be sold, or that traditions are changing, or that our family is not the all-loving group it once was, or more likely seemed to be like a sugar-fed eight year old. It's not that the tradition is dying or that the family is growing apart, and that we're all having to choose sides. It's not anything I can define, really.

Looking at this heap of junk, the "remnants of the years" of farm life left to languish in non-use, it seems to speak to this sadness, to shout out, "we know how you feel!" And to represent my sadness at the dissolution of a piece of home. There's not really a good or bad side to that, just the knowledge that most things end up here, back to the earth, remembered by few, their usefulness forgotten. I don't want it to go down like that, decaying, left to rot. Bring on the bulldozers, McMansion developer. Let me preserve it. So I will remember the farm.

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