Bonzer Words!: Once A Farmer
Ellen Fisher recalls her father's life as a farmer and his relief at leaving the land.
My Father achieved one of his fondest wishes, giving up farming when he was in his late fifties. He’d inherited his farm when he was fourteen and his father died young and unexpectedly. It fell to my father as the only male child to work the farm and support his forty-year old mother.
His father had homesteaded and designed the farm as a work of art. My grandfather had not tried to make his living from it. He was a popular county bureaucrat. He’d planted a carefully designed orchard, grape vine. The barn even had hardwood floors in the haymow. The front porch was built of stone and a work of art. It wasn’t designed to support a family.
A brief recap of my father’s forty years on the farm included marriage to a girl from Detroit, who knew nothing about farming, five children, several illnesses, one almost catastrophic, a wife who divorced him many times and his inability to make enough farming to support his family. When the day came that my brother agreed to take over the farm and its mortgages he burned up the gravel road getting out of there.
He toured the United States in a beat up Pontiac with lousy brakes and met and married a 'little old lady from Pasadena'. I know LOL from Pasadena is a cliché but it was true.
I received a phone call from him several years later while I was living in San Diego. It was the first I’d heard from him since I’d left Michigan fifteen years before. He wanted us to visit him and his new wife at her house in Pasadena and yesterday couldn’t be soon enough.
Farming is a bitch. That is the sum of what I remember. No matter how ill one is, the cows have to be fed and milked and mucked out. Even in the winter the work is unceasing. When one wasn’t planting, weeding, fertilizing or harvesting there were fences to be mended, equipment to be repaired and the pastures to be 'brushed out'. Brushed out means adzing out all the baby trees and other vegetation that encroaches on the fields that were so laboriously hacked out of the forest only a hundred years or so before. Adding to the 'farming is a bitch' is the fact that the wind, weather and markets seem to always be against one. I was happy to hear that he was out of it. Maybe he had a comfortable old age to look forward to.
The following Sunday my husband, daughter and I headed out for the three hour drive to Pasadena. The address he gave us led us to a street of large houses on a tree-shaded street. Everything seemed well maintained. The lawns were large, well kept and usually surrounded by flowering bushes, trees and shrubs. That is except for one. This house was large and the grounds tidy. But it looked as it a tornado had selectively taken out every living bit of vegetation, not a blade of grass survived. There were just stumps where bushes and trees had once lived. Sure enough, it was my father’s house.
My father and new stepmother greeted us cordially and after the greetings and tea was served my father commented on his handiwork.
'The house was in good shape when I married Ida but it was the very devil to get the place "brushed out".'
I couldn’t look at my husband and he was busy examining the bottom of his shoes.
© Ellen Fisher
