The Farm House
I could hear gravel cackling under the tires of my mother’s minivan. A dust trail snaked behind us like a comet's tail. It persisted, a clear wake revealing the path that took us here. The rocky road was caged by white fences on both shoulders. I’m sure I remember seeing donkeys grazing in one of the pastures along the way. All of these sights were familiar to me, although everything I saw were still just memories spliced in my head. I hadn’t been back to this place since I was six years old. Seeing it again then, I must have been thirteen or fourteen.
It was half past two in the afternoon, or at least that’s how the sun felt, when we came upon it. My old childhood home stood maybe a hundred yards up the hill. It was a castle watching over its dominion. My mom eased the car to a standstill, and shifted into park. We idled on the road, caught between two empty fields. The rural highway was open for miles. She rolled down her window, and looked at the pasture lying just under the house’s throne.
Short yellow grass and weeds had overtaken the field. The sun beat down on its grounds and I could see where the earth had been scorched by a bonfire. The dust smelled dry, and grains of it irritated my eyes. I coughed. My mother turned the van off, and let her back melt into the seat cushion. Her breathing was wobbly, like a spintop about to topple over.
“Well…” she stammered, “Where are the trees?”
It wasn’t really a farm house, my childhood home. We didn’t cultivate crops or raise cattle. That’s just how I choose to remember it. We did have a horse though. She was a white and grey pony my brother and I named Merry Legs, I suppose because we thought we were clever. The house began as a fixer-upper, and became a homestead, built by my father and his brother-in-law, finished by the time I was born in the summer of 1994. By 1996, my brother arrived, and there was a pool out back. Its foundation had been poured on a five acre patch of land.
Some details often are lost in translation or are forgotten by time’s engine (heck, I’m probably forgetting or misremembering several while writing this), but I do remember that this was a house for my mother.
She had an ancient Mercedes Benz from the ‘60s or ‘70s parked inside a two story red barn adjacent to the house. My brother and I used to get inside and imagine we were undertaking epic road-trips (perhaps in preparation for the real adventures we embark on today), but the Benz would never start when I turned the key. It just gave a slight chug, and then the low-battery warning light would flash on the dashboard. When I was four or five, my parents gave me a junior toolbox for Christmas, so I decided I would repair my mother’s Mercedes. Young was the night when I stepped outside, wielding my tiny hammer. I raced to the barn, and proceeded to shatter each headlight and turn signal, and smooth out every dent I could find. By the time my father caught me, the moon had risen, and I was only halfway through my violent repairs. My mother was livid. I’m sure my punishment was swift and severe, although I can’t remember. What I do recall, however, was listening to her call my pediatrician, desperately looking for assurances I wasn’t becoming the next Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer. Isn’t it funny how memories work?
Growing up in Oregon, only a hop away from the sea, left its mark on me. I am a child of the Cascade range, and the icy Pacific ocean. I love going back; weaving my way up the winding mountain roads until I catch the endless expanse of water in my gaze. I feel tranquil on the beach, and serenity walking the pine forests.
My childhood house was my homebase, a station to rest and recharge, before going out into this world again. I knew the globe was a big place, I had learned that much in kindergarten. Yet, to me, all that existed was the beach, the forests, and my childhood home. My mother raised me with nature as my nanny. I remember one year when the Oregon rainfall had become so severe, all my brother and I wanted to do was stay inside, and play with our lincoln logs. We were negotiating a peace between the cowboys and Cherokee tribe in our five year old fantasy. But my mother grabbed us by our sleeves, a big grin was shining above her chin. She told us to come outside with her. On the patio, a deep puddle grew with each drop of water. The clouds were relentless. My mom had dressed us in our matching rain boots and raincoats. My brother and I were inseparable. She didn’t say anything, we just watched as she opened up her arms, and let the rain fall into her. It looked like fun. My mother was laughing and waved us over. So we imitated her, and then we ran around in the mud, and then we sloshed in the puddles. My brother dug up worms, and became depressed when my mom agreed to only allow them in the house until dinner time. We were taught how to love the natural world from our mom. She showed us the way.
There, I feel a sense of home.
It’s the sound that really got to me. That gentle whir and indistinct chatter of verdant blades rustling with a temperate whisper; it wrote movements that I could not, for the sake of my life, commit to paper while commanding my feeble pen. Sometimes it breathed life into me, like a newborn baby, a music so serene that I lost myself within the bonds of a gifted peace, other times its perch reflected the thunderous bellows of a freight train barreling down upon every lonesome fear I possessed. The rows gobbled me up, then consumed me, became me, and spun me around until my eardrums, beaten by the gales, had no sense of what was right and what was left. It was the authority in its tremendous voice that sang tactile sensations through the strings of every lumbering limb. How could it cry a deafening racket, and subside, then, to hum a balmy hymn? That really got to me. They were silent creatures by design, but after one breath of fresh air, together they could roar up a symphony! Each swayed like a conductor, leading the others in an orchestral concert. And at the edge of their viridescent and burnt-clawed stature, I was their humble audience.
The orchard out back stretched for miles, at least it seemed that way to my tiny legs. My mother used to tug my brother and I in a wagon, under the pear trees, through long undisturbed grass. It had both our initials painted on the side, and we imagined it was our spaceship. We navigated passed asteroids, comets, and settled on the surfaces of new planets. Almost all of these new worlds had pear trees growing above us. She would set up a ladder, and carry us each step to the top, so we could pick our own ripened fruit. Rotten pears littered the ground, and wild animals used to borrow my mother’s fruit. She never tried to scare them off or limit their catch. Sometimes she would saddle up Merry Legs, and my brother and I would cowboy up our adventures and trot through the orchard (my mom was, of course, leading our trusty steed from the ground).
The orchard reflected each season by its scent. Winter was a frosty branch, spring a rainy breeze, summer beat down the rotting pears so it always smelled sweet, and autumn, well, that one is for me.
My mother was always smiling, I remember that much. Somehow she seemed to find the joy in life despite its apparent indignation toward her. My mother is not a victim. She has never played the sympathy card. But you have to wonder if after an absent father and pathologically lying mother, a stepmom who told her she wasn’t college material, the abandonment by her alcoholic stepfather (the one person who she considers was her best parent), the passing of her first husband when she was only 22, and her baby daughter's type one diabetes diagnoses in 2006, when my sister was just five years old, that maybe my mother deserves some compassion.
Back in the van that day, I watched my mother cry.
The orchards she had given so much for, fought so hard to protect and love, were devastated by their new proprietors. Not even stumps remained as ruined headstones. The owners had felt it necessary to tear them from the earth. I now wonder, today, how much effort they expended just to be the proud landlords of an empty field of dying grass and dirt. Gone were the wild animals, gone were the rotten pears, gone was the summer scent and, I assume, each seasonal smell the orchard brought with its yearly trip. What stupid idiot would ever rob themselves of all that an orchard could bring?
That day, though, I didn’t have the comprehension to help my mother. That is something I regret, even today. But, in many ways, I think she understood. In the face of overwhelming pain, my mom always found the door to selflessness.
Amid her tears, she found herself comforting me, as if I were the victim of this horrific crime. I locked hands with her, it was all I could do. She managed a smile, though I knew it was put on. My mother would not be okay for a long time. She grabbed her phone, dialed my father, and told him about the trees.