The Farm

My daughter who inherited her mother's family's ancestral farm has finally managed to sell it.  It has been pretty much an albatross for her over the past decade, ever since her mother died, at which time she inherited.  Previously she had been part owner, as a way of helping her mother finance buying the property from the estate of her grandmother. who had laid an emotional charge on her daughter in asking that the property stay in the family without leaving any money for its upkeep.  By this time divorce had removed me from the scene, but I kept up with all the details, since I had remained friendly with my former mother-in-law.  Truth to tell, I was emotionally bound to the property; the divorce and the prospect of being separated from it hit me hard.  I grew up in a small Midwestern town, and when my mother sold the large house in which I spent my first sixteen years to move our considerably diminished family to a small property in the newer section of town I not only missed my siblings long gone onto Eastern colleges and the Army, but I could never relate to my new physical circumstances; it was another psychological betrayal like my father's death when I was six.  Fast forward to a twenty five year old widower--that's me--who is courting a fellow graduate student at Harvard who invites him "to the farm" for a weekend.  Two hundred fifty acres of forest in New Hampshire, a large pond, a field, an early eighteenth century farmhouse, a giant barn, this was what I beheld when the car went around the last curve.  It had been in my fiancee's family ever since built; the owner had led the boys from that town to the charge at Bunker Hill. I immediately fell in love--with the setting, the history--and I yearned to belong.  From that moment forward I always thought of the place as my homestead; "going up to the farm" whether my parents-in-law were in residence or not was an exercise in fausse nostalgie that grew with time.  Eventually my ex wife inherited and my daughter lived there so I continued to visit and feed my fantasies.  Walks through the woods, swimming in the pond, chatting up the neighbors at Sunday church services, oh, my God, was I "home!"  A marriage for my daughter, employment in the Boston, a disinclination to worry about freezing pipes and the attendant problems of an intermittently visited property made a sale imperative.  Most of the land was put into conservation, so there are trails for the animals and the neighbors for miles and miles.  We will all miss it.  I choked up the last time I visited, standing on the rise of land, looking down at the pond, remembering my kids and their friends swimming like tadpoles all day long.  I guess if I had let my fantasies carry me on and on in this vein, the sound track of "Gone With The Wind" might have come up in my brain.  I can still remember the sound of Gerald O'Hara in a voice over saying "Some day this will all be yours, Katie Scarlett.  Land, it's the only thing."  or something like that.  I sometimes fantasized winning the lottery and buying the place, where in reality I would only spend a very few months, I mean, the mosquitoes, the ice and snow.  But October and November, autumn in New England, beautiful!, and I would have gone "home."