04.|. FARM

When I was little, most summers my parents would pack up the car for the long drive to Uncle George’s farm. Hours would pass counting out of town license plates and making up stories from the view out the back window of our station wagon until finally arriving at Brier Hill; somewhere between Montreal and Toronto on the USA side of the border. Population 6, Uncle George, Auntie Gay, Aunt Frieda, the postman and a couple of the many farmhands. 

Once settled in, my parents would leave, abandoning myself and sometimes my older brother to fend for ourselves.  Our handler was Aunt Frieda whose handy pancake turner readied in her right hand for the inevitable trouble we might get into. Being typically an overly curious me, it was in continual use. 

The big house was a source of excellent play material as it had been built centuries earlier and therefore had small windows meant to hold in the winter heat and keep out any significant amount of light.  It was therefore most definitely haunted and full of divine family secrets worth investigating. Especially the attic which we were warned was completely off limits and bolted shut. Excellent fodder for assumptions of every kind. 

Late night sneaking around the house was out of the question as the floorboards would creak out warnings to Aunt Frieda that trouble was afoot. 

But most days began with the dawn warmth of Aunt Frieda up early to make homemade donuts and a feast of breakfast delights for 8am when the dairy farmhands would come in after the milking of the cows. Huge men.  8 or 10, sitting around the long table making short conversation about the days work between grumbled voices of pleasure and the nodding of heads in approval. Aunt Frieda could cook. But remained a spinster as her only marriage proposal was because of her culinary ability.  Or so the story goes.  

I frankly questioned that particular family fable, as she seemed to me to be a most frighteningly large women with a fierce sense of propriety who scared me to death.  But each day after that miraculous breakfast, I was sent off to the chicken coop to collect the eggs for the daily baking.  I would amble off inspecting the various activities around the farm as the lows of the the cows and the burring sound of tractors heading out to the fields seemed much more interesting than a visit to see a bunch of somewhat evil hens who were not at all willing to get off their nests to allow me the microsecond of time necessary to grab their precious progeny.  Sometimes I would stand there staring at them for a long, long time, hoping that with my mere presence I could move them away, and avoid the pecking of those sharpened beaks.  Sometimes I would talk to them, usually with a somewhat raised voice to convince them that I was larger and therefore a threat to their very livelihood.  Usually in the end, it would take way too long to collect up the eggs, and the classic question of “what took you so long!” was expected.

[shot from a crop duster, photographer unknown]

Another time I wandered off after my egg collecting adventure to see what was happening in the dairy barn, and noticed that the silo was empty.  The layer of hay of the base was exactly the same level of the barn floor, so I assumed I could walk across it to the other side of the cow stalls so I could talk to them and pet their noses.  Instead, as I stepped onto the seemingly solid floor of hay, my foot continued downward until I was standing knee-deep in water.  My red sneakers and socks, soaking wet, but even worse, I was now in a position to interrupt the baking in the kitchen. I already know that Aunt Frieda was going to pull out that pancake turner and I did not venture into the silo again.  Though I do remember wondering exactly what was so terrible about my mistake before considering that my handler had no children, and thus no barometer to know exactly when the pancake turner was to get used.  All infractions were possible bait.

Our farm life stories continued for several years, and eventually we started visiting Uncle Vincent and Aunt Scharlie’s farm so as not to leave them out of the summer visits. That was a much smaller farm as Vincent was getting on in years.  He has a dairy barn, one farm hand and a field of corn which I can remember running through over, and over again, searching for nothing in particular.  

I was 13 at the time and Uncle Vincent’s farm hand was not much older than me… 17 at most.  But with nobody else to speak to all summer long, he became my friend.  We would spend hours with me perched up on his tractor listening to Alice Cooper on his 8 track plugged into the battery, and naturally, I asked him to teach me how to drive.  And even though he never let me drive it alone or near my Aunt and Uncle who would have been most disappointed in him, it was a new freedom unimaginable.

The day my parents arrived to drive me back downstate was a sad day for me.  I had a feeling that my visits to the farm were at an end, and it turned out that I was right.

Sometime in the early 70s the big house burned to the ground. Somewhere in the ashes were the remains of the forbidden secrets held in that locked attic. It was the family’s uniforms from the civil war, the revolutionary war, the original paperwork of arrival to America of the Schermerhorns. My Dutch ancestry up in smoke. But in my mind, I still see the ghosts we imagined lived there, and realize we were right all along. 

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