Blog Prompt #1- Farm Home

              The time and place that one enters the world, and is then nurtured through childhood/adolescence has always affected human beings. It is something as fundamental to the construction of who you (the person) are as the DNA that made and crafted your bodies physical features.

               

               I think of the landscape of my birth and the culture of that place. I grew up in a family of 4, on a 180 acre of cattle farm in the rolling hills of central Pennsylvania. Honesty compels me to tell you that my family literally had no part in maintaining or working the land. We simply paid rent and enjoyed the ground. Anyway, I remember it as being a landscape of cliché, something  you would see cross-stitched into stretched fabric with autumn colors. I affectionately call this home/landscape the Farm (I know, it sounds like something out of a Stephen King story. Don’t judge).

                 

               We rented half of a two-story house; the white paint was wearing on the sides, a winding porch that wrapped the walls like a belt, and a “smallish” red barn cattycornered to the front door (a place filled with mystery and tractors, a place the children were not allowed). There were apple trees in the backyard, lilac bushes lining the driveway, hay bales towards the top of the ridge, a manmade pond where we never swam, and lots of cows (maybe hundreds, innumerable like the stars to a child’s eye) lassoed in my an electric fence.  

                Aside from the basic aesthetics of the farm landscape, something that is typical when living on a large piece of land (not populated by many) is a culture of isolation. The farm had a beautiful aspect of separation to me; it existed outside the “normal world”. It was ours in so many ways, and there was nothing to fear.

                I don’t know if I ever felt as much a part of a community as I did growing up on the farm. The idea of “cooperative living” keeps jotting up in my head. I remember living a very cooperative life, not only in a human to human basis, but more of a developed cooperation with nature. Like I mentioned before, my family rented our house and did not own any of the property. I remember my parents instilling in my brother and I this idea: that the ability to explore, play, and run around on the farm was a privilege and should be treated as such. I am not sure if it was the fact that we didn’t own the land (and the fear that their two boys could, a whole host of ways, ignite an insurance nightmare) that prompted my parents to relay the importance of respect towards the landscape or not. However and for whatever reason, the lesson stuck with me and to this day it is both reflected in and affecting how I interact with people and place.

                 

                Growing up on the farm I developed an overwhelming sense of community with the landscape, a reciprocal give and take to life. I was an active part of that population; everyone who occupied that ground was alive with it. It was that community that built my very notion of family and defined the idea of home. What is a person’s body, family, community, landscape (in pieces or in its wonderful entirety) if not a home? And even though it has been 15 years since we loaded the house into a truck and left nature sitting in the fields, that home, is still with me.