"Mandy stood there with her old Nikon film camera, snapping photo after photo of the rural landscape. It was difficult to describe the wonderful feeling of there not being a single cell phone in sight; the only modern technology around was the faint blue glow of a cathode ray tube television in the window of a nearby house, and a few cars and trucks parked in crumbling gravel driveways. She was allowed to see this place, one that would likely be ruined by the 21st century as time went on . . . places like these were extremely hard to find these days. A world of wood-burning cookstoves and the way smell of Paraffin, laundry hung out to dry, rusty steel bridges over streams that reflected the bright blue skies, apple pies left out on windowsills . . . a world of hard work with very little to show for it aside from the sunlight beaming down on a proud community. And Mandy wanted to trap it all in her Kodak film rolls and rescue it from the future." ~ Rebecca McNutt
Innumerable games of Monopoly, gathering interestingly mottled stones on the shore of the Bay of Fundy, being chased by roaring waves on the South Shore, finding the quaintness or the high artistry of local artisans and crafters, being part of a community makers' swap, watching calves play with each other in a pasture, feeding carrots to the elderly pair of mare and donkey, calling 'the girls' with the cow bell and feeding them corn, checking several times a day for the arrival of an egg, walking the old rail trail to take photos of pigs rummaging in the brush or of a cow minding her sleeping calf, playing with the cat, helping to set and clear the table for a meal, eating whole foods and trying kombucha (yuk!). Travelling over an hour for East Indian food, gliding on the Annapolis River in an old whaler boat, seeing so so many cemeteries, swimming in an outdoor pool in the middle of a forest, talking to people at the farmer's market. Checking out all the unusual license plates, commenting on the lack of traffic (and also the number of road kill), helping to weed and set up a new garden, hauling stones for said garden. Trying to figure out how the hens get onto the fence to roost - they never do it when we are watching (consensus: there are only ever three on the fence - the fourth must hide the ladder). And hundreds and hundreds of photos taken with a single, old cell phone because everything is 'just so neat'.
Our grandkids have been here for the last three weeks. They are suburban kids, living in an area abutting a major, very busy and very expensive, city. We weren't sure how they would adjust to a period of time away from busyness, and constant and ubiquitous electronics, and noise. But I think they loved being here. Myself, I have felt that moving here is 'coming home'. But then I had a lot of rural experience as a kid. These two have had none of that experience. It was the little comments here and there that pointed out to me how very different life is here:
"I haven't been woken by sirens even once, Nana", says my grandson.
"People here don't call me names 'cause I'm fat, Nana. They don't even notice", says my granddaughter.
"There are no billboards on these country roads", they said - so we counted blue cars and watched for American license plates instead.
One day we passed a field with a pair of big Clydesdale draft horses in it and I told them the story of how, when I was a kid, spending summers on a farm, the draft horses were our diving boards. On hot summer days, when the chirr of the grasshoppers was at its highest and even the wind was down for an afternoon nap, we kids would go down to the river to swim. Grampa Crawford would put three or four kids on the backs of each of his big Clydesdales, slap their rears and say 'river'. Off they would amble at a slow sleepy pace, we kids on top with the first hanging onto the mane and each kid behind hanging on tightly to the one in front. We were in bathing suits and soon our legs would be rashy and itchy because of the coarse horse hair and the black flies would move from tormenting the horses' eyes to, instead, taking bites out of our bare backs and arms.
At the river the horses would clop clumsily through the muddy rocks at the edge and then move out into the current until they were up to their withers. There, they would fall asleep, their muzzles just at the water's surface; their snores causing ripples. Then we would dive from their backs into the river, bobbing and swimming about in a current that was just strong enough to cause a thrill, but not strong enough to take us more than a couple of strokes from the horses. We would use their tails to haul ourselves back up onto their backs and dive again and again into the water. The signal that we had better get back on was a loud snort from one or the other of Doug or Brew. No one ever missed this cue and got left behind in my recollection. The drafts would turn in the river and start back up the long gentle slope to the farm. By the time we arrived back we were more often than not dry as when we started.
I had always wanted to give my own sons a rural upbringing and while they were very small we were able to do that to a certain degree as we lived in a small town and had friends with rural property. So, for awhile, they got to play in wheat fields, and slide down hay chutes, and get bucked off of mean, little ponies. To wade in rivers and swim in watering holes. To sleep under star-studded skies and listen to coyote yip. But life happens as it happens and we had to go where the work was and so ended up in a big city. But I remember a time, when the boys were still small, when I was able to revisit my country life with them and, in so doing, give them a rich rural life memory.
Dust rose behind the pickup as I drove across the hay field, along the grooves that ran deep and permanent across it - originally made by wagon wheels hundreds of years earlier. Scars. Gophers watched from their mounds at the edges of the field, whistling piercing notes of warning before upending themselves into their holes, disappearing from sight with the flick of a black-tipped tail. The truck was a 1965 dust-greyed GMC with standard drive and windows you had to crank manually. One window dropped with a glassy thud a third of the way down; the other stuck on every turn. Once you got it down, you left it down.
I was helping friends bring in their hay - it was their truck. I drove slowly along and others hefted the bales into the back of the truck. Each load I drove back to the barn, two stories high, where others lifted the bales into the hayloft. I was driving back over the massive field after my last load. I wore an old denim shirt with sleeves rolled up to the elbows, worn jeans, my hair tied up in a messy, grimy ponytail. Occasionally I spat the dust in my mouth out the window. You can't be a lady when you are haying in the dusty heat of summer. Country was embodied in me - in the way I dressed, the way I moved, the way I didn't think twice about spitting out the truck window while I wrestled with its gears and stubbornness.
My two boys loved riding in that truck. The vast, slippery vinyl seat invited shoving and horse-play. Seatbelts non-existent. The window had a wide ledge and they hung their bellies over it, making themselves dizzy staring at the ground below. When they pulled back into the truck their faces were as dust-grubby as the truck itself. As the day wore on, back and forth, back and forth, they fell asleep in the dozy late-afternoon sun, piled into a corner of the seat like fagged puppies. Their hair stuck out at sweaty angles; there was a burnished redness to their cheeks, an extra freckle or two on their noses. Their lips were parched.
I stopped the truck at the top of a small knoll where there was an ancient medicine wheel, overgrown by hay and grass. As I sat, eyes closed, dust caked in my nostrils and sweat trickling down my back, I listened to the symphony - the country music of birdsong, grasshoppers, red-tailed blackbirds, cows lowing in the distance, and the low purr of a combine on the next farm over. The gentle snores of my sons and the zinging sound of the bluebottle fly battling with the windshield. A day of haying on a Western prairie farm - a day of heat and memory. A son smiling in his sleep.
Here, on Fat Hummingbird Farm, the birdsong may be different. The wind is different and the dust is made up of different rocks and pollen. But the silence is the same. The peace is the same. And here two kids visiting from the city got a wee taste of what their father had had when he was little, and what his mother and father had when they were small.
"The rooster on that other farm woke me this morning, Nana, and it was singing with the cow!"
