Our Own Farm Girl

by Paul Hunter of Seattle, WA

As a kid Laura had often thought she must have skipped a generation, somehow slept through changing times like Rip Van Winkle. Missed some great upheaval like the Revolutionary War, when that portrait of the mad Royal George was touched up to become the fatherly General George. Her mother’s folks had been farmers, who stuck with it even when a freeway cut their place in half and gobbled nearly a quarter of their 456 acres to accommodate that confused yet bustling river of speed, noise and exhaust. The raised roadway forced them to run the tractor an extra mile and a half each way to the next overpass to work the other half of their place. They had once grazed and raised beef cattle on the far half, but now mostly grew corn and soybeans that didn’t need to be tended and watched so much.

Her mother’s parents had been grounded, and the genuine article. They made her as a little girl feel wanted and useful and at home. On visits they would welcome and call her “our own farm girl,” and would always find something for her to do that wasn’t just play, that meant something and felt serious. And the little girl couldn’t wait to do whatever it was–plant the seeds in neat rows under the strings that Grampa Edgar had strung up, or pull weeds from around and between the frail new plants in their first weeks of life, or feed the chickens and help find eggs. Which would get her pecked once in a while but she learned not to mind that so much. Her Grandma Ida had a basket of old wooden and porcelain doorknobs, some round and some oblong, that she would slip under hens who might get fretful from having too many eggs stolen out from under them. Ida told little Laura how it was calming for the hens, and gave them something to do, so their nest was never empty, always warm.

But then one evening a pelting late winter storm moved through. As the storm staggered back and forth between bursts of hail, sleet and snow in a blinding and blustering chaos, with winds that swirled and built to a howling pandemonium, an eighteen wheel tractor-trailer caught a sidelong gust and slid off the freeway, rumbled down the embankment, crossed the valley and crashed into their house. Seemed to draw a bead on the front door, lurched up the front steps and punched a gigantic hole. They had just finished supper on this dark chilly evening, had cleared the dinner table, put the leftover chicken, green beans and sweet potatoes away in the fridge, and were just about finished washing and drying the dishes when the truck tore through the front half of the house and came to a rest with their dining room table up on the hood of the Peterbilt. Luckily they weren’t still sitting there, though it was a narrow escape: the fridge lay face-down at their feet. They pulled the young driver out, also dazed but unhurt, then while staggering through rubble searching for the phone to call the State Patrol, they ground to a stop and finally saw: the little farmhouse had been gutted, knocked off its foundation, and was a total loss.

And Edgar and Ida, who had been so energetic and dependable, open and welcoming, such good neighbors out here miles from town, were forcibly retired. The couple who had seemed middle-aged, vigorous and cheery, were visibly diminished, suddenly old. After a third indecisive night of sleeping in one of the old barn’s box stalls after mending fence and rounding up stray calves, they were moved off the place by their three grown children, and into a retirement facility, where they didn’t last long. Even as a twelve-year-old, Laura could see why. There was none of the endless variation and bustle of the day-to-day to beckon them forward, no purpose for the future to declare, nothing to watch and visit like they’d always done in season, putting seeds in the ground or setting a hen to nest in the brood box to hatch out her fuzzy new lives. They were stuck with the old photos in an album arranged by their grown and citified children, with few shots of the fields, animals and garden, with not a tool in their tiny apartment more useful than the old wood-handled screwdriver and rusty fence pliers alongside the GI surplus dogleg flashlight in a drawer.

As for the farm, Laura’s mother Ellie had studied and taken her tests to become a real estate agent so she could be some help–and maybe exert some control—over what her parents did with the farm, and how they got rewarded. She had studied hard and soon got so she knew the whole county like the back of her hand. Through Ellie the grown children arranged to sell the land on one side of the freeway, but couldn’t find a buyer for both pieces. It turned out the working half of the farm with the old farm buildings had easy access to the freeway in both directions, and thanks to Rural Electric was hooked to the power grid. So they sold the land that still had a barn, a good well, a chicken coop and other out-buildings but no house. That side also came with a decent vintage set of farm implements–a tractor, a two-bottom plow, a mowing machine, a rake, a manure spreader, a ground-driven baler and a stake-sided flatbed wagon that could haul anything that could be lifted that high. They held onto what they all called “the far side” as an investment, though it was empty land with no improvements but for some fencing. Yet the manure from raising calves in recent years made its tilled ground quickly revert to the wild, with saplings all along the fence lines, with vigorous thickets and meadows of bluebells, daisies, fireweed and goldenrod.

On her last visit to the nursing home after Grandma Ida had passed on, Laura talked to Grampa Edgar again about the truck hitting their house that night. He said it was about all he ever thought about any more, and about that storm that could never make up its mind. Was it a hail storm or a sleet storm or a snow storm? The lonely old farmer said I guess it don’t matter but I always thought what would finish us off would be the global warming, and the freaks of nature it spawned. But here it turned out to be a human thing, a kid in a truck with bad wipers and bald tires. She had said that nature did blow the truck off the road, but then Grampa Edgar said in the dark the driver told them he’d been aiming for their porch light, the only human sign he could see in all that churning and blinding stuff. He said he ran his rig through several fences like they was nothing, that jumped at him outa nowhere, before he ran straight into us.

That day Laura told Grampa Edgar how much she missed it once the farm was gone. She said she still wanted to come visit every day. Grampa Edgar looked at her, and said he used to tell Grandma Ida “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.” But when he’d say that, she would shake her head at him and say “Out of sight, out of mind.” The girl had loved following the calves and chickens as they roamed around, chasing after a grasshopper or dragonfly. The farm had become a hole in her world, in her sense of what the world included and contained. There must still be farms, but where were they? The farm had been a place all but impervious to change, slow-moving yet stimulating enough–and alive enough—to include and welcome her. Those kind grandparents had had a lot to do with it, but all the lives of the place wild and tame had also taken hold in turn, and beckoned her.

Even as a little kid she had liked to be outside and would tell her mother she wanted to go out to see what the day was. She would stand still in the morning sun with her arms out, and wait for butterflies to come see what she was and land on her. Little Laura seemed to know the outside would always be different, with its smells and sunshiny patches and winds, with its little changes and sometimes big ones, like the trees after a rain shaking themselves off, or the still and silent blanket of a new snowfall. When it was raining on the farm she went to play in the barn, that she told her mother she liked because it was leaky, and always let the outside in.

Laura already knew by third grade that her thinking had always done better outside in the fields and woods, or by a rushing stream, always better than when she tried to think inside four walls with a floor and a roof and windows and a door. At school she could feel herself being held in and bouncing around. She felt confined and limited, right when she wanted to be open to the wind and be blown through, like the old barn that stood open and sighing on the farm.

When she was 15, one spring evening she gave serious thought to being a cowgirl, sat out under a tree in their yard in town and thought it all through. It was dreamy but exciting and real. She saw she liked and got along well with horses and cows. She decided a cowgirl would need plenty of room, a range somehow open as far as she could see. Her feelings gave meaning to the old song “Don’t fence me in.” She also thought she might need to see herself as eternally young and unattached, like some cowboys did, hobbled by poverty but still blazing with youthful energy even past middle age while they drove the cattle, whooping and hollering “Get along there now–we’re burnin’ daylight!” But she’d also been told by Grandma Ida that she was an old soul, which made her a little skeptical about her chances at happiness. So far she hadn’t met anyone like her, and she thought that what money could buy was mostly what poor folks called either a party or dumb luck.

Just about then her mom had called her inside for bed, and she realized that, except for a little beef now and then, cowboys didn’t really get to feed themselves in and out of season like her grandparents did. All those garden plants that grew up got to be cooked and made into dishes and sauces for supper, otherwise kept for later, frozen or put up in canning jars. All the dairy and cheeses and eggs they ate fresh every day. For the rest of that week she felt herself in her sleep wandering the old farm, dreaming all the ins and outs of it till her fingers itched to get started. And use the lessons she’d already got, like how straight you wanted to plow the rows and plant the seed, so you wouldn’t have to follow all those wiggles cultivating, mowing, harvesting.

Fresh out of high school Laura got a job at a fast food place but right away saw that the silly paper hat and simplified menu held no allure, much less an identity. For her it felt like she had already been looking forever for where she might fit in, daydreaming what she might do with her life. She took a couple of classes at a community college but realized her fellow students were mostly trying to get by, focused on learning one marketable skill that would land that steady job and let them quit thinking and worrying.

It was about then that Laura learned why her mother Ellie behind her parents’ backs had always belittled the home she grew up in, calling it a shotgun shack. It was the kind of place Elvis Presley had grown up in too, a long narrow house built a room at a time, added onto while it was lived in over many years. Usually folks wouldn’t notice the additions viewed end-on in a line from out along the road. The living room had originally been a one-room cabin or tarpaper shack, then the dining room was added, that had been a bedroom first. Then the kitchen and behind that two bedrooms all in a row front to back. Since she was a girl Ellie had never liked that label, that implied you could stick a shotgun in the front door and hit everyone who lived there with one blast.

By her early twenties the one thing Laura couldn’t quite reconcile with her ambition to live on a farm like her grandparents had lived, and have a life like theirs, was the thought of doing it alone. She had started dating, but hadn’t yet met anyone whose presence in her life made her feel joined and whole.

Meanwhile she was moving steadily along, and had happened onto an idea, that might even be called a plan. At a family dinner she had heard her mother, older uncle Ed and younger aunt Minnie grumbling about the property taxes on that other half of her grandparents’ farm, that its 182 acres was a burden they’d like to be rid of.

And Laura had moved on from the fast food place, and got a job behind the counter at a Tractor Supply, and over her first summer season on the job she met everyone with farming skills and connections in this end of the county. She made a point of asking every potential farmer where they had coffee and she soon dropped by the most popular truckstop on the way to work. But for all she learned from the gossip in the back room of Eddie’s All-Nite Diner, around their big round table she discovered that almost no one there was under the age of 50, much less nearing the mid-twenties like she was.

But then several pieces of the puzzle seemed to come together. She had stopped by her grandparents’ old farm and met the new owners of the southern half, Frank and Marjorie Powers, who were watching a crew stake out and build foundations for a set of 48 condos that ranged from studios to one and two-bedroom apartments. These were planned as starter homes for couples and new families, so not such a bad thing. She saw that the rusty old horse-drawn equipment and the green John Deere tractor with a coffee can over its smokestack were all still there in a row by the barn, and that the couple didn’t know what they might do with the stuff. When Laura offered to take it off their hands, they initially said What for? She said she was thinking of farming the other half of her grandparents’ property, what everybody since the freeway cut through had called “the far side.” And this equipment was all her grandparents had ever needed or used.

In the end they just gave her what Frank waved his hand at and called “all that rusty crap”–said it’s yours if you got any use for it. They even had a backhoe on site that their contractor used to load the plow, hay rake and mowing machine onto the flatbed wagon for her. Laura tied that equipment down, then took the John Deere’s battery home to charge it overnight. When she came by early next morning she poured fresh gas in the tank, squirted some ether into the air cleaner and the tractor fired right up. After work she made the first trip towing that flatbed wagon with its heavy cargo the mile and a half to “the far side,” and early the following morning made a second trip, towing the manure spreader that it turned out was full of her grandparents’ old spades and shovels, pitchforks, rakes, hoes, axes and other hand tools. Under the patina of rust and use the collection was still a valuable haul that made her feel unaccountably blessed. As she was about to pull out that morning, she stopped and talked with Frank and Marjorie a moment. She thanked them profusely, and meant it, said if there was anything else in their way on the place, she would be glad to take it off their hands. Just then Marjorie pointed to the hen house, now sadly empty, and said Do you have any use for that thing? Laura smiled and said she’d be back after work to haul it away, if the backhoe wasn’t too busy to lift it up onto the flatbed. Then she hurried back to the wagon on the far side, backed it up against a steep hillside and chocked the wheels, where she could use the tractor’s length of logging chain to drag the plow and mower and hay rake off the bed onto higher ground.

It turned out the old hen house was eight by sixteen feet, and the wagon was eight by twenty. So as one of her first projects, Laura bolted it down to the wagon bed, and planned to live in it for a few years while whispering “first things first,” saving all that rent money while she figured out where to dig in and start farming. In the evenings she’d sit out on the chicken shack’s four-foot-wide “porch”, that she’d hauled around behind the tractor till she found a level spot where the door to the coop could face the rising sun like she’d read the Plains Indians did with their teepees. She had made use of her grandparents’ carpenter’s level and pocket compass to position it just so. The hen house took more than a little work to make habitable, but she did it, a little at a time scraping and caulking, after a day with a rented power washer to blow out every last trace of her fine feathered friends. The one real change she needed to add was more head room, which she did by jacking the hen house up on one side at a time, and adding a 4 x 8 beam at the bottoms of the walls under the sill plates all around. Then she used lengths of threaded rod to bolt it all down. Eight more inches gave it a grownup feel, and nobody who visited her would have to duck their head to get through the door or crouch to look out the windows. With that done she insulated the inside, added basic wiring for battery-powered lights and a small vintage wood stove with an oven and room on top for four pots.

Of course as soon as her mother Ellie heard she’d moved into a chicken coop on the north half, she stormed out to confront her. She came screeching up in her SUV to find Laura there on a Saturday morning, swinging a rusty scythe with its smile freshly sharpened to cut a wide circle, making a clearing around where she’d parked the coop bolted onto the wagon. Her mother tried to approach her calmly, but soon she was shouting This isn’t yours! It doesn’t belong to you! But Laura stood her ground, leaned on the scythe, and answered, You may think you all own the land, but who owns the farm? You sold all that and split the money between you. I’m just rescuing the tools and whatever else might still be of use. My first farming goal is to pay those property taxes you’ve been complaining about. I will take that on myself, and if you give me the papers I’ll handle it. Ellie finally surrendered, said she would gladly turn the property taxes over to her to teach her a lesson, but then abruptly said Don’t think that means you own this land. It belongs to your uncle and aunt and me. When Laura asked her why, her mother said Because we’ve had to put up with it our whole lives. Put up with what, Laura asked. He mother said The smell and the stink and the work, the humiliation–the whole damn thing!

Then out of the blue on another Saturday in early spring, while she was on the tractor plowing a few acres to plant a garden and maybe a little hay, thinking somehow to get started, Laura was visited by a stranger she didn’t recognize. She shut down the tractor at the end of the field and stepped down. This steely-eyed clean-shaven man took her hand and said his name, Ben Jackson. When she looked puzzled he said he was the truck driver who had parked his rig in her old folks’ dining room. Which struck her as a curious but honest thing to say. So she invited him up to her chicken house on wheels. Ben Jackson seemed strangely young and uncertain as he sat on the edge of her porch for a mug of tea and told her he’d always felt guilty for that night, being what he called an irresistible force, and assured her it had never happened again. His was a solemn tone that seemed to quietly beg her forgiveness. He said the guy who taught him to drive big rigs had told him You carry a lot of weight in this business. It can get away from you and threaten to wreck everything. It’s easy to overload, and cook the brakes. So like it or not you’ve got to be responsible, and learn to take it easy. In the end there are no excuses. Sometimes even two miles an hour on black ice is too fast. She asked him Was there any kind of load that made him really slow down and get careful, and he said live animals, ‘specially horses. They can’t help it, they’d all much rather get out and walk–or give themselves a good shake and make a run for it.

Laura couldn’t help but ask Ben How’d you find me? He mentioned Frank and Marjorie Powers, the couple building that development on what used to be her grandparents’ farm. When he had asked, they seemed to know all about her, and also all about her people, the old folks who had lived there. They even told him they were hoping she’d make a go of this place, because somebody had to. At that Laura looked into him deeply, and seemed to see him anew. Then she asked what they meant. Ben said You’ll have to ask them. But I guess I shoulda told you right off, your grandparents that night talked about you. They both said what’s she gonna do here with no place to live? They were upset. I got a little upset myself, when I realized they probably couldn’t rebuild. While we waited for the State Patrol to arrive, I realized how much I’d wrecked their lives, and felt so damn sorry. I know, the freight company had good insurance, that eventually paid ’em for the house, and they had a good policy on the truck, but I felt pretty bad. And when the troopers got done with their report the bottom line was driver error, which is usually how it is, and it cost my job. But by then I was set to quit anyhow.

Laura studied him. He had jeans and boots on, and a blanketlined jean jacket with a snap- button cowboy shirt open to the sun. Clean and quiet. He always met her gaze, never looked away. She could see that even when she was 12 they’d have got along. Then she said So what are you doing now? He grinned and said Odd jobs mostly, a little this, that and the other. What some might call a handyman. I really came by to see could you use a hand with anything. Not for pay, mind you, just maybe some help getting going.

Over a bowl of chili late in the day she’d told him a dream she’d had recently, of firing up the tractor, hitching up and towing her henhouse all over the farm, in and out of thickets and groves of trees, stopping down by the creek and up on hillsides to try living in different places and see how that felt, what besides the view might change. She said It felt like that one night I lived many lives. To which he’d said Great, we should try it. So she backed up the tractor, he dropped the pin in the hitch and they did. They rode the late sun through twilight to dark and beyond, stopping to visit the henhouse to taste its magic.

Which is how the next day, Sunday with the plowing done and all that beautiful black dirt turned up steaming and shining, they were back at the other place, up on a ladder numbering the barn beams and pegged joints with a little can of white paint and a brush, so they could take the structure apart and move it in pieces to “the far side,” then set it back up, and put on a new roof and siding. Of course they’d have to take the hen house off the wagon awhile, then put it right back. Laura could see how Ben Jackson was taking little notes in a pocket notebook, making little sketches so it would all come together without a hitch. She smiled up at the sun to think of the two of them raising the roof on this old barn that soon wouldn’t leak a drop. This must be the next big thing she’d had a feeling about. She could also see by now that Frank and Marjorie had meant to give it to her all along, had just been waiting till she spoke about the need. Till she got up the courage to say how she loved that leaky old barn. Laura should have known all along they were the kind of folks like Ben, who could never bear to throw a thing away.