The One With the Family Farm

I think most of you know this, but my parents divorced last month, just before their 27th wedding anniversary. This means that there was no use for the family farm, where I lived from age 9 until I graduated from high school. My dad sold it today. One would think that this would be a nostalgic post about saying good-bye to the farm where I grew up and haven't seen in two years. But it's not.

I did not like that farm. It was 80 acres, mostly original, unfarmed Kansas ground. The land was the best part. You could actually go out in the pasture and see old buffalo wallers, where the buffalo rolled in the ground to keep cool. There were two ponds, but they were never filled. Then, of course, there was the land where we grew hay and alfalfa. We raised pigs, chickens, geese, turkies and horses on this farm. There was also a pretty decent-sized garden where my mom grew vegetables and a small orchard with fruit trees. It was a mile from the nearest neighbor with a quarter-mile driveway that separated it from everything.

I just described you the nice part. The house was a dump. When my parents bought, we didn't have much money. The living room roof leaked everywhere. Mon can tell you about the time that my dad and cousins (white trash alert! white trash alert!) caught the field on fire on the Fourth of July and we had to run into the house to gather up the buckets to put it out. I can still see Mon's mom trying to pull the garden hose to the pasture when it was a mile too short. :) There was no second bedroom, so my brother and I slept on bunkbeds in my parents' walk-in closet. The wall of the shower was falling out and was held together with a couple of garbage bags. You had to use pliers to turn on the shower. I had to wear my contacts into the shower in the morning so I could see and kill all the bugs that would run across my feet if I couldn't see. The septic tank would often overflow in the yard. Half of the house had no electricity.

As the years went on, there were improvements. When I started high school, I got my own bedroom. My dad also built a second bathroom, but I never once got to use it. It was just completed before he sold the house. The house later got electricity and the second bathroom remodeled. The living room was expanded and got a new roof, though in the time that I was living there, it was never painted or had carpet. Before he sold it, Dad even painted the outside. I've only seen the new and improved farm in pictures.

My relationship with my family wasn't good growing up and I was never really happy in the small town in which I lived. So I can't say that I'm sorry to see that house go. It's just wood and nails. All of the memories I have from my childhood are what's important.

But this also means that I never have another reason to return to the town where I grew up. My dad won't be there, and my mom and brother live in Lawrence now. There's no reason for me to ever go back to the place I spent 18 years of my life. I guess that's a little weird, thinking about how I'll never eat at Carolyn's again or drive down Main St. or see the house where my grandmother used to live. Also doesn't really make me sad, but when you spend so much of your life in one place, it's definitely weird to think about never going back there.