Deep roots

Fifty plus years ago, I was a little girl of three or four and remember traveling a long, long way to my grandfather’s farm. There he had two enormous Belgium draft horses, chickens, milk cows, and kitties. The house was lit by a kerosene lamp, no phone, and no indoor plumbing. I now believe my grandfather (my grandmother’s 2nd husband) was a Mennonite. Sitting out on the landscape of his farm, and as far as my little eye could see, was his farming machinery. Nothing mechanical, all manual labor, just him and his draft horses.

After each visit, we would travel a long way back home and then, before I knew it –we’d travel back to his farm once again. Finally, one day, our travels ended, and my mother married a farmer and I lived on my own farm. Lost in an abundance of land and places to hide and hay mows to lie in–my roots grew deep. Every building, every field, every corner of our barn, every season is intimately known to me. The farm that I grew up on was my sanctuary. In the loneliness and unhappiness of my childhood, the farm was a balm. A balm that soothed my tears and torments, and calmed my soul. Cats were always my people. It feels, as I look back on childhood, as if I spent the entirety of it loving, caring for, and nursing back to health a dozen cats or more. Preparation, it would seem, for the 21 years I worked in healthcare and the 16 years and counting that I’ve spent caring for our Gabe.

When I left home for college, I found myself longing for country life and cows so badly, while living in the big city, that I ended up quitting school and moving back home to the land of farms filled with Holstein cows. I’ve been there ever since–forty-three years, to be exact. When I retired from healthcare at 39, I found myself working at a dude ranch, because, yes, I missed living on a farm. Working on one wasn’t exactly what I thought it would be, but, I enjoyed it nonetheless. At 42, when my drinking was once again a major issue in my life, I quit with the idea in the back of my mind that someday I would own a piece of land with an old farmhouse on it. I needed to be sober, and I needed to save money in order to realize that goal.

Here I am at 60, a Master Gardener, influenced partially by my ag roots, a gardener who has learned how to grow fruit, veg, and grains in adverse weather conditions. I don’t know if we’ll ever own land with an old farmhouse on it, but I will grow things–be it eggs, produce, even meat. If I know anything, I know this much, and that’s my true north, where my authentic self can be found, is anywhere that my life can connect with a farm.

Ironically, when I was 17, I left the family farm, never to return to it. I also left behind the chance to marry a farmer because I believed that I wanted more out of my life than to be a farmer’s wife. That was true, I did. I didn’t feel at the time that I wanted my entire identity to be wrapped up in the family farm; helping my husband and working the farm beside him day and night. In the 70s, most women weren’t regular farm helpers in the sense of working the farm. Rather, they ran errands, or, due to lack of funds, grew everything their family ate off the land. In the 80s, more women had to help with farming in order to keep the family farm afloat–unless there were hired hands or children old enough to do it. Not having come from farm life like that–my mother didn’t garden, didn’t help on the farm, and all of our food came from the store. I was hesitant to become involved in a life that to me looked like nothing short of constant hard work and poverty. Farms in the 70s were being foreclosed on left and right and many, many farmers moved away from it to live and work in bigger cities.

I don’t have any regrets about the decisions that I made back then, but, I do wish that throughout my life I wouldn’t have been so hasty in other decisions that I made. My home, the farm that I grew up on, isn’t my home anymore. It once was, when I was young. I felt at home when I was growing up. I felt connected to that place in every way one can be connected. Unfortunately, even though I do have some good memories growing up there, I am not connected to nor did I ever feel connected to the family that I grew up with. All that’s left is a faint memory, the farm no longer, its occupants nearly all gone, and from what I last saw several years ago, a mere shell of what it once was. I will forever cherish the memories of this place that I loved.

My roots grow deep and even though I can never go home– They can always be found in the Midwest, in farmland, farm life, country life, home. I can’t deny it. I struggled all my life trying to find myself. Trying to find out who I was and what I was and where I came from. I came from a place, long-lost to me now, that I shall always remember. My roots are deep. My roots are deep.