The Old Farm

The Old Farm

I drove out to the old farm, some ten years after my father had died, from Houston where I then lived, traveling through a long American landscape to cross the border into my past. Somewhere, one evening, tired after a long day's driving, I stopped at one of the buffet places found along the highways. I scanned the long board listing foods and prices that hung on the wall behind the cash register and ordered a baked potato, wanting something light to sleep on, and a coffee.

In the middle of the main dining area, on the numerous serving counters, huge hinds of beef sat on great cutting boards, alongside whole hams and turkeys and slabs of ribs, and trays of deep fried chicken, and deep pots of gravy, mountains of mashed potatoes, sweet corn, Brussels sprouts, beans, salads, a variety of soups, rows of cakes, pies, puddings, ice cream machines, caramel and chocolate sauces. There were tables and tables of food, steaming, lit from above. Lines of people went for refills, ate, got up again, filled plates with more ribs, more cake, more and more to fill a void that craved another food. Maybe another slice of pie, another bowl of ice cream… So elusive was the sought after final fullness and so compelling the drive to reach it.

What set of circumstances, what sets of what people's decisions, over what stretch of time, had determined that here was so much and elsewhere was so little and yet elsewhere was nothing but hunger and death.

A young man, wearing the uniform of the place, came to where I sat alone in this huge space filled with people.

"The order of baked potato includes all the fixings," he said. He looked at me smiling.

"Thank you," I said.

The fixings table held sour cream, bacon bits, chopped ham, crumbled egg, melted yellow cheese, chives, broccoli and I forget what else. I put on sour cream and bacon bits.

The young man came to me again when I was done with the potato.

"The coffee includes everything from the pastry tables," he said.

The kindness of strangers is a warm gift, not so much in what is given but in that it is given. How did he see this woman that I am, that he felt moved to offer what we both knew was not included with potato and coffee.

"Can I have the fruit instead?" I asked.

"Yes, of course. Enjoy your meal."

He held the door open for me when I was leaving.

"Have a nice evening," he said, smiling still, and I wished him the same.

Bienvenue au Quebec. My heart dissolved and my eyes misted over. With the sound of the French Canadian voice of the customs man I crossed the threshold into home. It took a day, a night in a hotel, and another day to reach the small parish where we had lived. So much had changed. The woods where I had stopped with my mother along route 48 to gather wild mushrooms for pickling had been cleared for housing subdivisions. New developments lined both sides of what once had been a country road. Miles further I took the turn that led to where the farm was. I drove up the rise I had walked and driven so many times. And then I got out of the car and stood looking at what was no longer there and seeing it still and wanting it back.

Someone had come and dismantled my childhood. Where the two story house had stood, with its chimney that howled with the storms on raging snowy nights and where the winter frost painted white ice gardens on the window panes in my room under the sloping roof, and the immense cast iron stove in the kitchen, the very heart of our lives, heated the house and the water we used, and baked my mother's lemon meringue pies and whole wheat bread and roasted capons stuffed with homemade sausage meat, all this was gone.

A long ranch house now pressed its modern belly to the ground in its stead. The ancient apple tree, on the steep hillside across the road, that had given us apples with transparent golden centres running with sweet juice, the tall skinny trees that grew below, the wild ferns that thrived there, on the black wetlands where no one could walk because the soil was so waterlogged one sank to one's knees in the bog, all this had been razed by the advance of progress.

The stables and the barn all had been taken down. The maples that shaded the house in the summer and dressed in scintillating diamonds after ice storms, so brilliant and fine that I could not stop looking at them, mesmerized by so much beauty, these same maples that we tapped for maple water in late spring, not even stumps had been left to show they had been. A blue spruce now grew in a wide expanse of tended lawn where I had once played.

I had watched my father emerge here from the woods where he had gone to cut trees. He stood, planted solid on a pile of logs that were tied to a flat sleigh pulled by two horses going at a trot. There was the smell of horses' sweat when he reached me and of pine resin. The sun came and went between shreds of cloud. Melting snow formed into one main stream with many tributaries branching off along the slope of the land.

He had set up a mechanical rotary saw and sawhorses and he set to cutting up logs into firewood. I collected the small chunks of wood that fell from the logs in the cutting and turned them into ships. I was master (not mistress) of this domain and my fleet of ships sailed downward along the rivulets to faraway unknown lands and I was the five-year old captain of each ship.

Story ID:	2776
Written by:	Zofia Danute Barisas (bio, contact, other stories)
Story type:	Family Memories
Writers Conference:	$500 2007 Family Memories Writing Project
Location:	Ajijic Jalisco Mx Mexico
Year:	2007