A Very True Reminisce of Grandmother's Life Told in Snippets and Smiles
Taking on the Farm
It was the tomatoes that convinced us.
"All summer," my father said, "thousands of fresh tomatoes. Just pick, salt and eat."
For every year of my then twelve years we always had a garden. My father always planted tomatoes which his children ate while pouting for the rest to turn red. Now here we were promised endless tomatoes and all that was required was for us to move from the city of our birth to a fifty-seven acre farm.
It sounded good to us, three children who spent their childhood endlessly riding hotel elevators and hitching free trips via the bumpers of metropolitan buses. Living on a farm would be child's play. Nothing could go wrong on a farm, could it?
I admit I was an urban child and foolish with my perception of acreage. In my childish mind I envisioned fifty seven acres as an endless expanse of waving wheat fields. In no way was I prepared for the rocky, muddy and thorny mess that was to become our "farm". In reality, only three acres was actually clear. The other fifty-four consisted primarily of rocks and wild blackberry bushes.
Our new farmhouse consisted of a living room, kitchen and two bedrooms. The non-mention of a bathroom is very intentional here and not for real-estate listing. There was a bathroom, only it was outside and had a half-moon on the door. There was also no running water. Forget a telephone. We did, however, have electricity.
A tractor was included as part of the farm purchase and this was opportune because the first thing required was to fashion some sort of road that would allow an automobile down into the small hollow from the nearest asphalt road.
Our father asked that we learn how to use the tractor because with a hitch of big logs used to drag the brush and rocks, designing a passable road would be a small task. Urban children all, we were undaunted to learn driving a tractor.
My sister drove the thing straight up a tree.
This is not an exaggeration but a simple statement of fact and if you don't think a tractor could possibly climb a tree I have pictures of this mechanical preying-mantis shaped object, sister still in the seat and holding on, as it lurched forward, backed off then lurched forward again, all in an effort to climb the tree.
As my sister screamed for my brother and I to stop this crazy thing, we could do nothing but laugh. Even if we could, which we couldn't, we would not have stopped the thing because how often, I must ask, does one get to see one's sister trapped in a tractor seat, parallel to a tree and perpendicular to the ground?
It was one hour before my father returned from work and for one hour my brother and I watched our sister go slowly insane as she fought the tree-climbing tractor.
Then the tractor would attack yet again as if tree-climbing weren't quite enough. We were clearing the rocky road. A cavalcade of huge logs was strapped together to form a raft of sorts. The log raft was tied to the tractor for the purposes of dragging the logs along the road and smoothing the bumps. My sister was again at the tractor wheel. I stood on a crossbar right next to the seat. My brother was supposed to be on the other side of the seat only he decides he wants to ride on the logs.
So what's wrong with riding on logs as opposed to the bumpers of the MTA buses? There's that little matter of rope slack, unpredictable with the lunges and lurches of the ancient tractor. Which is exactly what happened when my sister, swerving to avoid an imaginary tree, caused my brother to fall off the log raft to have it run directly over top of him all the way to his neck. I witnessed the accident and screamed for my sister to stop all forward motion. Which she did. My brother was trapped under the logs. I told my sister to back the tractor up. Which she did. Only this didn't cause the log raft to also back up. In fact, my sister almost ran over my brother's head, the only part of his body not yet completely crushed.
Fortune had it that the earth was so soft that the weight of the logs merely pressed him further into the mud. No bones were crushed and he recovered nicely. Had I known of this outcome, I would have instructed my sister to run over his head.
We really did do some farming eventually, just as soon as we finished installing a bathroom and running water. And the garden was full of huge and delicious tomatoes as promised.
There was that matter of the marble-sized potatoes.
Not that they were planted with this intended result, mind you. The "seed" potatoes were carefully cut from heirloomed spuds left by the farm's former owner. We were careful to leave three "eyes" for proper growth.
The largest potato we grew was, at best, the size of a golfball. Our father, a thrifty fellow, commanded that we peel our potato harvest, such as it is, and serve as if a proper vegetable.
We also had livestock. It was a country tradition those many years ago, for local farmers to donate a few head of cattle to new neighbors. We were given a set of Hereford bulls for our "farm-warming" gift. Only they were babies at the time of the gift and this required us children to trod sleepily up to the barn in the wee hours of the morning and feed the bulls from a bucket with a nipple attachment.
We kept forgetting to lock the barn gate. And the bulls kept getting out. This made my father mad.
Besides my father's anger, having two bulls frolic about a household with no restraints created a few surprises. On one occasion the farm quiet was pierced by the sharp shrew scream of my sister. The whole family hastened to what had to be a fresh murder scene. As we, first father, then stepmother, then brother, then myself, entered the arena we were greeted by a scene too bizarre for our human eyes.
For hunched back against the stove was our sister, big-eyed and pointing to the horror at the kitchen table. For their part, the bulls were only enjoying some leftover spaghetti and did not appreciate all the noise and bother.
Then our stepmother gets all into a tizzy because one of the frisky bulls butted her as she hung the wet clothes on the line. The worst happened to my own self who just the same afternoon had exited my school bus to the hoots and jeers of fellow passengers. I scanned the horizon for the source of their points and laughter, then cringed. There, at the top of our road to meet me as if pet dogs, were the two Hereford bulls. They waited patiently and munched some grass. As I trudged the mile down to the farm house, they loped lazily behind me.
The absolute worst was my father's announcement that the bulls would be slaughtered and, get this, we were expected to actually EAT the things. He needed to grow a brain and fast.
The bull pets were slaughtered and packaged into neat parcels that filled our proper farm freezer. Each of us, children of our father all, refused to eat the meat from the bulls. Still my father instructed my stepmother to prepare meat meals, sure that we would give in.
Not a one of us did. Eventually, even my father refused to eat the meat. After three years in the freezer, all the meat was finally tossed out.
We lived on that farm for four years. We had to be the worst situation comedy farmers that would make Eva Gabor look like Greenfingers. And it isn't as if someone, somewhere wasn't trying to tell us something. The farm house itself burned completely to the ground the first year we lived in it. Snakes regularly shed their skin in the pump house and occasionally coiled themselves around a chicken for a poultry snack. The septic tank forever backed up into the house. Many nights would find us all digging up the septic tank, in the middle of the night, as sleep in such odiferous conditions was impossible. For several months we had some ducks, but one night a pack of wild dogs descended and ate every one of them. We never did get a telephone.
"All the hard crabs you want," my father promised us. We were all game. Just think, we would soon be moving from the farm to actually living on the water! My father had purchased a huge home directly on the bay and soon, we would have all the hard crabs we wanted, netted right in our very own backyard! Nothing could go wrong on the waterfront, right?
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