The Farm

“The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.” --Wendell Berry

What you're about to read is a story about remembering, un-remembering, and revisiting. While it's tempting to discuss the dwindling American farmlands in terms of suburbanization and subsidies, I won't, and can't. My experience with my family's farm has been surprisingly unpolitical, and keeping it that way is the only way for me to connect with the land and connect with myself.

This idea of self/land connection is definitely not my own. Wendell Berry argues that we are not divided or dividable from nature, and for me, such an idea is true. Place plays a vital role in most, if not all, of my personal stories, often operating as its own character in my head. So when my uncle died this past November and we started sorting through his things, I was shocked when I recovered photographs that sparked memories of being on my family's farm. It wasn't until I started trading stories with my dad and grandmother that I realized how much of my identity is connected to this place, so I knew I had to reconnect with it after about 12 years of being gone. As Wendell Berry says, to divide against nature “confines our identity as creatures entirely within the bounds of our own understanding, which is invariably a mistake because it is invariably reductive.” Despite the camping trips I'd made in my adolescence, I had kept myself away from the nature I knew as a child. I, and other members of my family, had divided ourselves against a nature that, for various reasons, was too difficult to deal with. What had I missed out on, not having continued my farm visits into my adolescence and adulthood? How might I have been different if I had let something bigger than myself—the nature of the farm—teach me? Of course I can never answer those questions, but I can focus on connecting again with myself and my family through the land of what used to be St. Lo Farm in Shelby County, Kentucky. This piece is the first of what will be many attempts to do just that.

The Farm: Remembering

The farm was dusty. Everything--no matter how many times dusted--had what seemed to be a high-definition coat of dirt. Slightly obsessive compulsive and severely allergic to everything, I honed in on those granules of dust and gave them a-talkin'-to: "Not today pollen. Not today ragweed. Just leave me alone today." I was convinced that this stern conversation worked, and until I was about 10 years old I thought the dust could hear me and refused to listen. But I understood its refusal. It must have had the same condition I had, a complex disorder my grandmother called “selective hearing.”

In hindsight, I shouldn't complain about the dust. Aside from a few million pollen pods, everything else on the farm was on my side. The cows politely mooed whenever I crept near to see their calves. Insects with stingers snickered as they passed by me on their way to torture my cousins (two rough girls who were always dirty.) Even the lay of the land liked me. In the recess of two ridges and behind a wall of cattails was a pond. Here, everything was green and mystical. During the day white fluff hovered across the water; at nighttime the glow bugs sponsored a light show far superior to those I would pay to see at the University of Louisville Planetarium in my teenage years. It was a place of magic, and when I spoke to the cattails, unlike the dust, they spoke back. It was my own refugee camp, a place where “the city cousin” could find safety and peace from the frustration of step-mothers and dirty cousins. It was the perfect place to “rest in the grace of the world.”

I'm not sure if I felt this sense of refuge then, but I understand now why I spent so much time there as a child. We went there to escape something going on in the city: for my dad and me, a broken home; for my grandfather, images of war projected from his mind into his living room; for my uncles, the accusing glares that mothers and businessmen give to alcoholics. It was only a matter of time before we started bringing the things we were escaping from to the farm with us.

* * *

St. Lo Farm was named in remembrance of the Battle of St. Lo—the bloodiest and most destructive battle of the Invasion of Normandy during World War II. Because it is a geographic crossroads in France, St. Lo was a pivotal victory for the Allied Forces. My grandfather's first military mission landed him in St. Lo only a month after D-Day. He was a company runner, and as I understand it, he crossed battlefields, literally dodging showers of bullets, to relay messages between infantries. It was a dangerous job, some say the most dangerous, and he was only 19 years old. Like so many WWII veterans, my grandfather's Post Traumatic Stress Disorder went undiagnosed. Decades after the war, he hung himself in the tobacco barn on St. Lo Farm. He came home from the war, but he never made it out of St. Lo alive.

* * *

The farm is located about 40 minutes east of Louisville in Shelby County, Kentucky. Although my grandfather bought the farm after his return from WWII, he never actually lived there. He worked for government employment services in the city and drove out to Shelby County after business hours and on the weekends. On 100 acres he grew tobacco, raised a few cattle for breeding, and kept some horses. But most importantly, St. Lo was a place for two generations of Mudds to learn, to grow, and to explore. Not unlike the the tobacco, my grandfather's kids seemed to grow faster in the sun. Old family photographs document my dad and each of his brothers at every age, traipsing through tobacco fields, fishing, and riding horses. As children they chased floating cattail fuzz like I would decades later—a different pond, the same refuge. As teenagers, I imagine they brought girls to St. Lo to admire the stars. In empty car shells they might have constructed cushioned nooks that afforded optimal boob-grabbing positioning. They covered all the bases out there on the farm, and the existence of my oldest cousins is proof. As adults, three of the four sons would bring their daughters to the farm, probably disappointed in the absence of the rambunctious disobedience promised by boys.

The City: Un-Remembering

I was raised by my dad and my grandmother in the most Catholic suburb I've ever ridden my bike in. St. Matthews, a neighborhood in Louisville, Kentucky, was an old suburb near, but not too near, the downtown area. We were suburban enough to lock our car doors as we drove downtown, but urban enough to criticize the materialistic attitudes of the rich families building houses in the East End. I loved living there, and even though the house I grew up in has since had an ugly renovation, driving by it evokes a nostalgia I used to worry I may only feel for St. Lo.

The worst period of my life, ages three to six, was spent living outside of St. Matthews. My dad had married a terrible woman whose insistence upon floral-print wall paper and an ideal family would quite literally scar me forever. She hated me because my dad loved me, and for a short time my dad hoped that acting happy might fix things. One step in his let's-act-like-everything-is-okay regiment was giving me and my step-brother awesome gifts, and the most awesome of the awesome gifts was the pet rabbits we got for Easter.

“I'm namin' mine Mrs. Clause.” Damn. My step-brother always stole my ideas. I had to think quick around him, and if I took too long to announce my new bunny's name, he would know he had succeeded in bursting my bubble.

“Charlie Brown. Dad, I'm namin' mine Charlie Brown.” Win. Success. No rainy parades today.

It wouldn't take long before we realized that Mrs. Clause and Charlie Brown were in love. Mrs. Clause climbed atop poor ole' Charlie Brown, cluing us in to our lack of gender sensitivity in naming them. Eventually Charlie Brown gave birth to eight baby bunnies. Then, Charlie Brown gave birth to ten baby bunnies. My dad said he had rabbits running out of his ears, so Grandad had to take them out to the farm so they'd have more room to run around. I hated to see the bunnies go, but my dad did have small ears.

I decided I wanted to go with Grandad to take the bunnies to the farm. I didn't care much for the babies, but I had to give Charlie Brown what my grandmother called “a proper bon voyage.” I had no idea what that meant, but she was always right. So I woke up just before the sun came out, went into the back yard, and situated myself on the swing-set near the creek. On the left side of the swing-set was a box-swing where two people could face each other, and I chose this as my waiting space. It was early in the morning, and despite the crisp air with enough chill to keep most eager children awake, I dozed off. I woke up to the sound of a truck door closing, and as I tried to shew away the sun circles that blocked my view of my grandfather, he backed out of the driveway with the bunnies. I had been overlooked, and no one inside the house wondered where I was. And now, instead of going out to the farm, I had to go back in there. A strange fear crept up my arm as I turned the doorknob to enter.

* * *

This story came up years later during a walk. It was Easter, and my dad and I saw a rabbit sitting on the steps of house somewhere in St. Matthews. I mentioned Charlie Brown and Mrs. Clause, joking that perhaps the rabbit sitting on the steps was one of their descendants. He didn't laugh, or even acknowledge I had said anything. But his eyebrows were pinched together, like he was thinking real hard. “What? Why would that rabbit be a product of Charlie Brown and Mrs. Clause?” he said. I refreshed his memory and even threw in the bit about getting left behind and how overlooked, disappointed, and scared I had felt.

“Samantha, that never happened. I never bought you rabbits.” He was very serious.

It wouldn't be until the following year that I would be diagnosed with disassociative amnesia. I have very few memories of living in the city before the age of seven and suffered from night terrors until I was 13. The story of Charlie Brown and Mrs. Clause has all the makings for a bad dream.

The Farm: Revisiting

After my grandfather's suicide we sold about 70 acres of the farm, leaving the remaining 30 acres as a reserve of land. I was about six or seven years old when he died, so I don't remember my dad squatting in the corner of the funeral parlor sobbing, or my grandmother's stoic face slowly twitching and crinkling into the face of a hurt widow. I assume they sold one acre for every one hundred tears they cried in public.

No one goes there anymore, so when I asked my dad to take me out to St. Lo, I was nervous he'd find the nearest corner, squat, and sob just like he did at the funeral I don't remember. But never one for unnecessary dramatics, my dad replied with a simple “sure,” and we headed east.

On the way to St. Lo Dad and I lamented our family's negligence, dreading the tall grass and weeds we were expecting to negotiate.

“Maybe we shouldn't-a-brought the dog,” my dad said.

“No. He'll be fine.”

A mile passed before he spoke again. “He might pick up some tics, or fleas. Shit's a pain in the ass to get off that dog.”

“Oh. Yeah.” We were both too busy roping in memories—his no doubt more vivid and painful than mine—to concentrate on making good conversation.

I fully expected this return to demolish the memories I acknowledge as parts of my identity: I watched a horse give birth there; I ate apples right off the trees there; for Christ's sake I talked to cattails there. But what if I made it all up, like Mrs. Clause and Charlie Brown?

* * *

My struggle in this project to understand the relationship between the landscape of my memories and the memories themselves is echoed by Scott Russell Sanders in “After the Flood.” This was the first piece I read that showed me how strange it can be to return to a place after years of being gone. His stomping grounds had been bought and flooded by the government, so while artifacts of his childhood memories would be flooded with water, mine would be flooded with much more negotiable weeds. Like me, Sanders entertains expectations about how the area will look and feel upon his return, but unlike me, Sanders experienced his lands' change. He saw the dam wall go up. He watched bulldozers collapse condemned houses. I, on the other hand, have been gone too long. Certain things are preserved in my mind, and I would be a fool if I expected them to be the same. I want to keep them preserved and, as Sanders puts it, “I can return to that drowned landscape as I can return to childhood, only by diving through memory” (5). So why revisit and mess with memories that are fine the way they are?

For a moment, I considered reconsidering my revisit. I have my memories and therefore access to those happy times and places.

* * *

We passed the gravel road that led to our land, so rather than turn around, my dad pulled his truck over on the side of US 60. It seemed so out of place—a rebellious act that suburban homeowners would surely throw a fit over. But he said it'd be fine, so I hopped out and leashed up my dog with a piece of twine I found in the truck bed. My fox-looking dog felt right at home in the tall grass beside the road, and once we turned onto the gravel path, I let him go. He ran just like he knew where he was going, and my dad laughed. If we believed in reincarnation, we'd assume at this moment that my grandfather had been begging us for treats and belly rubs for years.

I was unsurprised by the maintained grass and foliage surrounding the gravel road because that lot now belonged to someone else. And it seemed so predictable that once we hopped the black farm fence, we'd react the way you do when you see the pretty girl from high school donning an extra hundred pounds with lipstick on her teeth. “Oh. It's so sad the way she let herself go.” But it didn't happen that way. We hopped the black farm fence to find huge bails of hay resting on the greenest hill I've ever seen in real life.

“Who the hell's been bailing the hay?” I was glad to see my dad shocked too. We kept walking.

St. Lo was much more beautiful—and much less dusty—than I remembered. My grandmother had opted to keep the “back-left” area of the farm where we could measure our property by the number of ridges we could see in the distance. “That ridge, that ridge, and the one past it are ours,” my dad said. On each hillside the grass was a little overgrown with punches of yellow and purple wild flowers (some may call them weeds) acting as decoration. In the recesses of the hills were trees and creeks and, most reassuringly, dried up ponds. These were the areas that had grown wild in the ten years we'd been gone, with thorns everywhere and foliage so thick only the dog could squeeze close enough to the ground to pass through. Cattail fuzz still floated in the air of these recesses, and I about cried when we found a living pond behind a cattail wall.

* * *

Before we left we needed to know who had bailed the hay, so we pulled our truck into the front drive of Middleton Farm. The farm sign looked familiar, and so did the small house about a hundred yards back. I had been there before, but the fact that it remained unchanged for so long was more remarkable than its ability to resurface old memories. An old man rode up on a riding mower, eying us like foxes in a hen house, and rightfully so. My dad had used his shirt to dry off the dog, so he was standing in this man's driveway shirtless. As he put it back on I saw the incision down his belly that was turning into a scar, the ultimate battle wound from his recent fight against cancer.

“Mr. Middleton?”

“I've heard of him,” Mr. Middleton said.

“Charles Mudd. Paul's son.” He stuck his hand out for a good shake.

Mr. Middleton waited a while before he said anything. “How ya doin' boy?”

I let them talk alone for a while. I knew that Bobo Middleton had been the one to cut my grandfather down when he found him in the tobacco barn, and I wasn't sure if my dad had seen him since the funeral. I walked across the highway where a few bulls grazed near a pond. They stared at me for a while, and I stared back. When I looked over my shoulder and saw my dad smiling, I knew it was safe to wander closer to the conversation.

Bobo's face was wrinkled, but not saggy. Working on Middleton Farm his entire life gave him a nice tan, but the creases on his face looked like they were carved out of wood. He was never in a hurry to reply to my dad's questions; for Bobo returning to silence was less awkward than speaking. During these moments of silence he'd look at his shoes, or off in the distance, shaking his head slowly and pressing his lips together. He must have been lamenting something.

“Well, Wally died just before Thanksgiving,” my dad said. He was referring to my uncle.

“No kiddin'? He was young.”

“52.”

“Dang.”

“Yeah. Breast cancer.” It still hurt to hear this. It still hurt my dad to say it.

“No kiddin'?” Bobo didn't know men could get breast cancer. And my dad moved on, refraining from sharing his own recent victory against prostate cancer.

Middleton Farm had been around for generations. Bobo took over the farm from his father, and although you would never guess from his tiny house and dirty hands, he was most definitely a millionaire. You could tell by his shoes that Bobo agreed with Wendell Berry: the ability to do something is not reason enough to do it. My dad said that back in the 60s Bobo had a chance to double the size of his farm, but opted out despite the opportunity to also double his profits. Berry calls this “farming well” and says that knowing how to “preserve, harvest, and replenish... to make, build, and use, return and restore” will lead to a recovery of culture and nature. Bobo's unassuming intelligence and wisdom certainly belonged to a culture he had probably never contemplated. It was in him where I understood what Berry meant by these words.

We were back in the truck, feeling glad to have re-met Bobo Middleton. I was excited about his character, and talked about how great it is that he chooses a life of modesty, self-sustainability, and responsible farming. But my dad seemed annoyed with my enthusiasm.

“Yeah, well he was born into it.” True. Bobo never lived off of Middleton Farm. And it was quite clear that he never would. While he knew the frustrations, victories, secrets and politics of farming, he would never understand the intimidation and challenges a new farmer would experience. He'd never have to make an effort to get back to the land.

“So, does he know who's been bailing the hay?” Dad and I were both careful not to call the hay ours.

“Yeah. He's been doing it twice a year since we stopped doing it."

* * *

As we left Shelby County my mind was calmer, allowing me to look out the truck window and see. The old convenient store where my cousins and I ate ice cream sandwiches was still up and running, and aside from expected wear-and-tear, it looked exactly the same. Lots of new houses punctuated the hillside, and just before the Shelby County border a new subdivision called “[Something] Springs” had only a few empty lots left. Suddenly the East End of Louisville wasn't pastoral enough for the sprawlers. Most of these people will or do commute to Louisville, and unlike my grandfather, they probably have no land to cultivate. But of course I can't pass judgment on the sprawlers. I couldn't tell the complete story of my return to St. Lo without admitting I want to build a small house like Bobo's on St. Lo Farm and bring new life back to the place where so many memories—good and terrifying—linger like cattail fuzz in the air.

Standing on the highest hill of St. Lo, my dad looked at me and said “Someday this could be yours, Samantha.” We smiled at each other and I secretly rejoiced. In this moment I realized that whether remembered, forgotten, or totally made up, memories are what keeps us connected to a place, but also place keep us connected to our memories. In this moment, I finally felt connected to something.