Relative Something

This may be a bit random, but here are some excerpts of thoughts I have written about the farm and my childhood memories:

When my family finally moved from my grandfather’s farm property, I was about 8 years old. I don’t recall many opportunities to wander the property unsupervised during those years. When my Dad would set about the protracted chore of managing the growth around the house and driveway, such as cutting back overgrown shrubs, my brother David and I would lose ourselves playing in a dirt hole. We would create a world of our own, driving toy trucks up and down a road carved out of the edge of the hole. I remember losing all awareness of what anyone else was doing outside of our play.  

This property that I completely took for granted at the time, was once graced by a lush garden around the house and the nearby tennis court. The long driveway with the circle to the living quarters was paved in cement and trimmed in stone similar to sites landscaped by the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) and late-depression era work crews. As the driveway continued toward the barns and the garage that was dug into a hill, the cement ended and it became packed gravel. I haven’t found anything to indicate those work crews had anything to do with this stonework, or not, but there were significant retaining walls out of this stone. Along one, near the front entrance to the wrap-around screen porch, there was a trail that led down to the cement tennis court.

By the time I had grown old enough to wander out and play, most all of this had begun to fall to disrepair; unknown to me, due primarily to the fact it was soon to be sold to a developer for an industrial park. The farming activity had stopped by the time I was born. My playground was like a rich kid’s retreat next to a farmyard, yet in a ghost-like state. There really was nothing we could hurt, because it was all doomed soon anyway. There were barns full of a variety of past pieces of the grand machine. There was still some hay up in the loft of the big barn, where I recall there being a rope swing that had been rigged up on which the bigger kids would play.

For a while during the years I remember, there was a man who boarded a horse in one of our barn buildings. I would pull fists full of tall, wide grass blades to feed through the mesh of a window to the stall for the eager lips and chomping teeth. I also remember the extreme drama of the temper of this animal and how he would kick at the doorway wall of his stall. One day he did get out and there was all sorts of excitement on the property. Just behind the back barn there was a divided four-lane expressway, unfenced to the traffic, and that fed the greatest of fears, I think, that the horse might run that direction. Outside of the barn this animal appeared HUGE to me. The fact that he continued to display a fierce temper, rearing up on hind legs, and eventually stomping on the foot of his handler, may have something to do with my tendency toward apprehension around the animals to this day.

I remember running down dirt trails to the chestnut tree to climb and play; a favorite place, just off the area of the tennis court, to while away the hours. Sometimes we rode our bikes and tricycles on the old cracking court surface, but that meant we had to haul them down there. It was much easier to just ride around on the long sloping driveway, and around the circle. There was just enough hill to be very entertaining, but not enough to be too hard to climb back up. Riding around on that driveway was another way I remember getting so lost in my imagination of the games we were playing that there was no other world around…