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.
No comments:
Post a Comment