Yesterday's Farm
Simple, Scary, Unforgettable
I’ve been thinking about the profound cultural and technological changes of the past two decades. Some of those ‘advances’ make me worried about our collective future and I made myself remember an era when just about everything seemed simple.
That journey sent me back into childhood to Sundays spent on a farm in rural Wisconsin where my great Aunt Mary and Uncle Phil lived in the Spartan self-sufficient style of the pioneers. Their white wood-framed house stood on the crest of a hill at the end of a steep, eroded dirt driveway. It was there the adventure began, as my Grandpa took us through a ditch that threatened to swallow the car. The tension inside our 1953 two-toned Chevy sedan was thick.
“Now take it easy, Frank,” my Grandma would order from her navigator’s seat. She braced herself against the dashboard. “We’re not in a hurry.” We slipped and bobbed over deep ruts and potholes the size of a bathtub. My Grandma muttering a prayer and clutching her rosary.
From there, it was a steep and slippery climb to the house where the barnyard animals struck up a dissonant concert. Where my Grandma’s sister stood waving a white handkerchief welcome.
After submitting to hugs from my Aunt Mary, a robust and soft woman never seen without an apron, my little brother Mark and I were free to roam the homestead. There was a chicken coop in a dilapidated shack that yielded eggs, chicks, and various (and vicious-looking) birds with sharp beaks. I was timid around them, having the impression that virtually everything on the farm would attack children.
There was always a passel of wild kittens, fluffy balls with flesh-piercing, talons, living under the front porch. Useless kittens, I felt. Because if they weren’t for petting, what good were they? The cow was similarly unfriendly, and Uncle Felix, while he sat on a bucket and milked her, would tell us how one kick from Bessie would, “Put a hole clean through a man’s belly.” Added to this working-class menagerie was Shep, a collie that not only barked but also bit; dozens of bats; stealthy snakes hiding in the outhouse; and killer wasps that only stung children.
Inside, where nothing resembled life in the 50s as we knew it, the adventure continued. My Aunt Mary cooked on a wood-burning stove. Her house was illuminated by kerosene lamps and heated by a potbellied stove. There was no telephone. A cast-iron pump in the yard filled buckets and pots with water for household needs. Beneath the one-bedroom house was a cellar, too scary to explore, and above, an attic. A haunted attic. I’d look up the wooden stairs and knew that should I venture high enough, I would be sucked into the belly of a spirit too evil to contemplate. Sometimes, I could feel it following me as I made a circle from the kitchen to the dining room and through the bedroom with its shiny brass bed.
I was grateful that Aunt Mary had hung crucifixes in every nook and cranny. I treasured the images of saints she’d pin to the wall and dipped my little hand into the Holy Water containers she’d placed throughout the house. The artifacts were talismans to ward off the demon in the attic. They were also, oddly enough, scary in themselves.
By late afternoon, I was filled with fear, anticipation, curiosity. Then Aunt Mary would disappear into a tiny pantry stuffed with canning jars, bright white eggs, and sacks of sugar and flour. She’d shove paper and wood into the top of the stove, and later in the day, there was hot, home-baked bread, sweet corn, churned butter, fresh vegetables, and one vicious chicken as a main dish. Finally came the grand wedge of chocolate cake, rich with butter and cream.
It made me forget the kitty scratches, the rebuffs from Shep, the evil eye from the chickens, the mean cow, and the devil in the attic.
Later, she’d hug us goodbye and hand us a Holy Card. She’d say, “I had a dream. I saw the Virgin Mary, and you were at her right hand, and Mark was at her left. It was real as day.” For some reason, that scared me all over again, and I could barely wait for the next Sunday to roll around.
After goodbyes, we’d navigate down the winding dirt drive and onto the paved country road. Just around a bend, we’d stop and look to the top of the hill. Aunt Mary stood like a country version of the Statue of Liberty, waving her embroidered handkerchief in the air, holding her glass-beaded rosary in the other, sending us safely home to a different time and place.
Thanks, as always for spending time with me and to my learned Friend Karen Duncan who often proofreads my work and makes me look better and smarter than I am.
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