Category: sadness

Here’s the orchard someone else will tend to.
And the crawl space beneath the porch
of the house where someone else’s barn cat
will slumber through the summer nights
dreaming of long-tailed mice in the high grass.
Over that field, the light dips and refracts
through the broken glass of the muck pond
where a catfish will take someone else’s bait
and hook—that it might meet the refined
heat of a skillet. The ghosts of a thousand
head of cattle walk through the woods at night
in someone else’s dream while the windows,
cracked slightly, let a mild breeze pass
through the empty rooms like an appraiser.
There is no death that cannot be undone
by simply turning the compost with a pitchfork
or by scattering scratch in the dirt for chickens
who sing each time they lay, but every repair
is only a gesture against the torment of slow
winds and steady rain and heavy sun. It will be
someone else who grows too old to climb
the ladder into the barn’s cool loft or the flight
of stairs that lead to and from their own bed.
It will be their hand weighing the mortgage.
It will be their face forgetting its smile. Listen,
if the well pump kicks to life at dawn, it will be
someone else drawing a bath for the last time—
joints relaxing as their form submerges, body
recovering and failing in the same held breath.
~Travis Mossotti “Missing the Farm” from Apocryphal Genesis

Well-away and be it so,
To the stranger let them go.
Even cheerfully I yield
Pasture, orchard, mowing-field,
Yea and wish him all the gain
I required of them in vain.
Yea and I can yield him house,
Barn, and shed, with rat and mouse
To dispute possession of.
These I can unlearn to love.
Since I cannot help it? Good!
Only be it understood,
It shall be no trespassing
If I come again some spring
In the grey disguise of years,
Seeking ache of memory here.
~Robert Frost from “On the Sale of My Farm”

Someday – we fervently hope not anytime soon – someone else will be living here and managing this farm, not us.

This land, originally all forested, provided game and native berries for the inland coastal tribes who lived here. When white settlers arrived and homesteading began, it was clearcut and the land became grazing pastures for livestock. Orchard trees were planted and crops produced and sold in nearby towns. Hundreds of similar small dairy farms in this county managed to feed their families and neighbors for nearly a century.

We purchased this land from the Lawrence family after they had farmed here over 80 years and they were so sad to leave. We are now in our 34th year here. We want to stay for another decade but we’re aging and our physical limitations are becoming increasingly apparent.

On a recent hot summer evening, my husband piled a wagon high with hay bales for the winter, with the help of the sons of the teenagers who helped us buck bales a generation ago. It won’t be too many years before someone else, not us, will be putting hay in the barn.

This land is where we feel we belong, just as those others who lived here were attached to this ground – but for how long? Will our non-farming offspring feel the pull to return home back to the farm?

We don’t know what the future may hold. What we do know: there is no such beauty as this land where we have worked and loved.

Yes, we feel we belong here.

For now. Until then.

Tell me, where is the road
I can call my own
That I left, that I lost
So long ago?
All these years I have wandered
Oh, when will I know
There’s a way, there’s a road
That will lead me home

After wind, after rain
When the dark is done
As I wake from a dream
In the gold of day
Through the air there’s a calling
From far away
There’s a voice I can hear
That will lead me home

Rise up, follow me
Come away, is the call
With the love in your heart
As the only song
There is no such beauty
As where you belong
Rise up, follow me
I will lead you home
~Michael Dennis Browne