Home on The Farm

A Sad Day - Leaving The Farm for Last Time in 1965

          The wind blows unhindered across the small plot of land where I spent my childhood. Unlike Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, I can never go home. The farm buildings, fences, and trees have been gone for many years now, the soil returned to cropland by some other family or agribusiness. The only Norrises remaining from our branch of the family rest peacefully in the town cemetery. 
     Many years ago, I began to document my memories so that my children and grandchildren would have a glimpse of an era long gone, a way of life remembered by only a few of us lucky enough to have experienced life in rural America during the mid-Twentieth Century.

    Authors of farm nostalgia books have noted that every farm family has/had its own special story. Collectively, our writings paint a picture of the rural Midwest during the '40s and '50s.

     Our 80-acre farm, inherited by my paternal grandmother in 1906, was very small even by 1950 standards. My father, her youngest son and the only one not married at the time of my grandfather's death, became the farmer he was never meant to be.

     Daddy was an off-Broadway stage actor by avocation, a self-taught intellectual who preferred reading, listening to classical music, and studying the Sunday New York Times, front to back, each week.

    My mother was a Registered Nurse, raised on a successful dairy farm in New England. Both Mommy and Grammy, my paternal grandmother who lived with us, died within a year of each other when I was eleven years old, leaving my fifty-year-old father with small children, a poor plot of land, and no close relatives within 100 miles.

     Although our circumstances were less than optimal, I remember a childhood filled with wonderful, happy moments. I have been eternally grateful all of my life that my father chose to keep our small family together during those hard times to experience an upbringing rich in community, love of land and nature, and the values of hard work, honest, and humility.

     The differences between the years of my youth and the childhoods of my children and grandchildren seem enormous. During my lifetime, I have experienced both farming with horses and travel by airplane, reading by kerosene lamplight and cursing at computers, communicating by telegraph and party-line telephones and iPhones, and obtaining care from doctors who made house calls (taking payment in potatoes, if necessary) and Emergency Rooms that turn away patients who have no insurance or cash.

    The population shift from rural to urban living has increasingly expanded and depersonalized our existence. We are more separate from one another in many ways in spite of the current social networking craze that creates or maintains relationships albeit primarily at a distance.

Our lives are more comfortable and convenient today despite our current economic circumstances, but modern convenience has come with a cost. We often fill our days with frenetic activity, flitting mindlessly from one task or event to the next with little time for reflection or introspection.    Our increased mobility has decreased our connection with neighbors and community.

     In the rush of our modern lives, oral history and traditions too often have a lower priority. As families, we frequently do not share our daily meals, entertainment, and schoolwork, a foundation needed for our children. Seniors in our North American culture are less frequently regarded as a source of wisdom and life experience, deserving of respect. Sadly, more and more of us live in isolation, particularly the elderly.

While these observations seem gloomy, I am actually very hopeful for the future. We have all heard the old adage that if you live long enough, everything repeats itself.

     I read with delight about the slow shift from huge mechanized agribusiness back toward a sustainable agricultural life style in which God's creatures that provide our food and other necessities are treated in a more humane way.

     Many urban communities now set aside land for individual garden plots as some of us city dwellers return to growing our own produce naturally with fewer pesticides. For the first time since I gardened with my Grammy as a child, I was back in the garden last year tilling the soil and tending the plants. It was a wonderful experience that we are repeating this year.

     While we can never return to the one-room country schoolhouse, thought by some educators today to have provided a high-quality education, newer methods of teaching our children recognize the individuality of each child, striving for low student-teacher ratios and consistent parental involvement. Perhaps we are moving back to the future.

     In the posts to follow, I will share my memories. I will focus on my childhood feelings and impressions rather than accuracy and precise details. Given that my memory is sometimes faulty, those who have passed on before me would probably argue with some of my facts. Those who remember these times with me, my siblings among them, may have very different memories and reflections. They will have to write their own memoirs if they wish to set the record straight.

      It is my sincere hope, however, that I can help preserve, if only in words, a time rapidly fading from our collective consciousness, a way of life soon to be lost from the fabric of our nation.

      Life goes on and time plods forward relentlessly.