The Home Place

The Land Remembers is probably one of my family's all time favorite books. If you have not read it, I highly recommend that you do. It never gets old no matter how many times I read it. No story can make me both laugh and cry harder. Author Ben Logan says that:

"There is no neat and easy way to tell the story of a farm. A farm is a process, where everything is related, everything happening at once. It is the circle of life; and there is no logical place to begin a perfect circle. This is an unsolved Paradox for me. Part of the folly of our time is the idea that we can see the whole of something by looking at the pieces, one at a time.  Yet how else tell the story of a farm?"

Beginning with a quote from another story was not my initial intention, but after starting our story several times, I wasn’t really capturing the spirit of the farm quite how I wanted. So I pick up Ben Logan’s book. Its comfortable weight sits in my lap, and I read for a bit. When I look up it is way past my bedtime. Oops. But there’s one paragraph that stands out from several pages ago that I flip back to read again. I realize there is no better way to state exactly what I can’t seem to adequately capture than the first paragraph of chapter two. There are two big reasons for this; 1. Theres no logical place to begin a perfect circle and 2. The farm as a process. Both of these things are inseparable and make finding the beginning to my story hard. It is kinda like jumping off of a hay wagon while it’s moving. You have to come down running or you will get a face full of hay stubble. Not entirely pleasant.

Now let's jump and hope I don't get a face full of stubble.
 

The year before I was born, my Uncle went to a farm auction looking for tools and such. He informed my newly married parents he didn’t find the tools he was looking for, but the farm might just be the perfect place for them. Turns out was. My folks bought the place in 1987, and despite the accumulated piles of future projects some might call junk - it still is perfect.


The farmstead is nestled in the Kettle Moraine Region of southeastern Wisconsin, where there is dark fertile soil. You can see the types of soil changing colors in a plowed field rolling over the hills as you drive by. It looks like shadows that are cast on still water on a partly cloudy day. An organized crop rotation and a little TLC can keep it growing bountiful harvests year after year. Geologically speaking, our farm is a dream come true. While the surrounding farms are a sea of stones, ours isn’t. The farm is also wondrously flat-ish considering its location. There is a gentle slope down to the creek that runs through our pasture. It’s a small, unnamed tributary of the Milwaukee River, and my childhood playground. I spent hours and days building little dams, catching crawfish, pulling leaches off my legs, and learning the ups and downs of the plants that grew there. Mint is tasty and nettle burns like hell. At the far back of the property, across the creek is our only field on a hill. We call it the back field, or the side hill. Of the forty acres, about twenty is divided into fields, all of which are mostly flat except that back field.

Courtesy Vintage Aerial

The house and buildings are situated smack dab in the center. The white, squat farmhouse is the kind where the second story rooms have slanted ceilings under the roof. It was built in three sections. The center was built first, in a sort of timber framed construction like a barn. It’s the only section that was built with the second story as livable space and under the slant of that ceiling is my old childhood bedroom. The north section of the house was built sometime around the turn of the twentieth century. It houses the parlor, complete with interior double doors and a frosted glass front door leading to a neat little porch. Above it was the unheated attic storage space. Though I once had aspirations to turn this into my space and call it the "Garrett" just like Jo March, it never happened. To the south, the kitchen had been the last addition, probably the 1940s or 50s maybe. It still has a flat roof, a pain in my parents sides for years. Behind the kitchen there are clotheslines strung between the house and the black locust trees. We never had a dyer we used with any regularity and then we just didn't. Laundry took a bit of getting used to when I married and started running a household of my own that had no clotheslines. 


Out front is a huge maple tree. I like to think it was just like the one that stood outside Ben Logan's front door, up on the ridge his family called home. It did wonders to keep the house cool in the summers. (AC was never even thought about, despite it being over 100 degrees the day I was born). Under the maple tree is the best place to be with a cold glass of well water and a slice of watermelon after bringing in hay. It was also where the threshermen’s table was laid in the years we threshed. That tree had the best tree fort, and a nice swing looking down towards the creek. You can catch a cool breeze there almost always. One thing about the land being wondrously flat is that there is nothing to stop the wind. On almost any day you can stand in the yard and winnow grain with ease, the wind carrying away the undesirables. 

Other than that beloved maple tree there aren’t whole lot for trees around. A small willow grows by the creek, barely visible from the house to the west. There are a few poplar and boxelders on the west fence line, which was once home to another fort of mine. It was complete with a hammock, a swing, and hanging jars for fireflies. A line of invasive black locust trees stand behind the kitchen, and spread their offspring to inconvenient places. But those locust trees buzz with lively honey bees every summer when they‘re in bloom.

When my folks moved in, the original buildings consisted of a shop and adjoining machine shed, barn with a lean to and milk house, pig shed, and a corn crib. Pa turned the shop into a wood working shop with a little machine shop at the back. The shed portion was filled with a variety of machinery- mostly horse drawn. The barn is as any old barn in Wisconsin is. A field stone lower level opens to the east and banked on the west side. It has a typical timber framed upper. Pa fitted the lower level with slip stalls for the horses and a pen with a few stanchions for the cows. Upstairs is the grainery, north and south hay mows, and a lean-to on the north side that became home to a few plows and various other machines. The milk house on the south end of the barn became the hen house. Across from the there is a pig shed. In the beginning the horses were kept here, but eventually it would go on to house sheep, pigs, calves, and my humble playhouse (when not otherwise occupied). Lots of lumber as well. 


When I was about six, the building began. My parents added a log cabin outfitted as a blacksmith shop, the upper level of this also served as a fortress of mine for a time. “This cabin must be the oldest building on the place.” A newcomer comments. It isn't. The cabin was actually disassembled log by log, and moved to our farmstead where it was reassembled log by log. The red numbered tags on the ends of the logs with the numbers long worn off are the lasting impressions of the move. When I was thirteen, the saw mill was added where a corn crib stood. Pa gave Mama a chicken coop for Christmas a year or two later. It was framed of home sawn lumber. The outside was sided with slab wood that I painted ‘barn red’ one summer. Eventually a woodshed was also built of rough, home sawn lumber. Then, the year I got married, the new shop was built. Now the largest building there, and also coved in home sawn lumber, it has made it possible for Pa to put his many talents to use everyday from the comfort of the farm.

Today 40 acres might not seem like much for a farm, but there was a time when it was all you needed to keep yourself afloat. Our farm is a carry over from that time, and it does just fine. For us, the farm was not designed to be a huge money-making affair, but a place to practice an old style of self sufficiency that is often lost nowadays. The farm has evolved from the early years of farming exclusively with horses to the later additions of a sawmill and a steam engine. It continues to grow, change and adapt - yet with one leg firmly planted in yesteryear.

A Introduction to Our Farmstead

If there is one thing you should know about our farm table - it is that we are tea drinkers, and by default anyone who sits down at the table will become a tea drinker too.

Mama is a culinary magician. She can create a meal to feed an army with little or no notice, with a cupboard full of ingredients most folks would have no idea what to do with. If you happen to be anywhere on the premises at meal times, you will be invited to partake. Small town, midwestern hospitality requires this. Just try and talk your way out of it. I dare you.

After dinner, Pa will push back his chair, feed the dogs a few table scraps, and top off his tea cup - and yours. Then he will add a bit of honey. After a chat about the latest (by "latest" I mean old) and greatest piece of iron in the workshop, bits of history, or grand plans, Pa tops off his outdoor tea cup and heads back outside. He’ll take a stroll to the shop and work quietly there until the next meal or until his cup is empty - which ever comes first. After supper and another brimming cup of tea, he and Mama will head to the barn to feed and water the animals. Horses, cattle, chickens, pigs, and dogs are among the permanent residents on the farm, as well as a chap who needed a place to stay while he looked for a new place...and that was 24 years ago, but more on that at a later date.

Aside from tea, the other thing that powered our household, and continues to do so, is horsepower. Horses, steam engines, belt driven machinery, three phase motors, early tractors, but rarely anything new. Our farmstead breathes days gone by. My parents were - and still are - firm believers that ‘new’ doesn't necessarily mean ‘better’.  Just because coffee is the beverage of the "New World" (per its arrival to Europe in the 16th century - give or take) doesn't mean it is better than a good ‘ole cup of tea. 

I grew up on the cusp of the twentieth century, only I happened to be twelve years old as the world plunged its way through Y2K. Our lifestyle presented some challenges through the years (as you can imagine, it caused me some grief in grade school) and my childhood was anything but ordinary. But as I grew older, went to college, married, and had babies of my own, I’ve realized I wouldn’t trade it for the world. Usually met with a sort of curiosity, my stories differ from those of most gals in their 30’s (not that anyone is counting). Methinks I should put pen to paper - or rather fingers to keys - to record it all as best I can, because it is a story worth telling. For the record - my millennial self still likes avocados and my iPhone, but there is so much more to tell. The story of many cups of tea, many kinds of horse power, and all that goes with it.