Clearing Land Legacies of the American Farm

Excerpt fromClearing Land: Legacies of the American Farmby Jane Brox. Copyright 2004 by Jane Brox. Published in September, 2004 by North Point Press, a division or Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved. I INHERITANCE Horseman, pass by, I used to whisper as the sirens made their long way down the road from the center of town. Now: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven gone out of a generation--my father, both his sisters, four of his six brothers. They had possessed a collective strength that gave definition not only to the family but to the farm itself, to the hundred acres of woods and streambeds, fields and orchards we have called ours that lie across the worn coastal hills north of Boston. I know time itself helped to establish a sense of security, time in place, time and a generation's fidelity to each other. Even as six of the brothers married and moved on and the care of the farm passed to my own father, there was a particular bond among all those siblings that lasted their entire lives. In their later, quieter years, though the farmhouse was no longer the gathering place for the extended family at holidays, all of my uncles were still in and out of it, often almost daily. In the years before his death my father lingered long at the table by the kitchen window, exchanging the news of the family, of the day. I can see him there still, bent over the local paper, talking with his sister Bertha. That no one in the family lives in the old farmhouse any-more may be the strangest thing about all these passings. For almost a hundred years its nineteenth-century forthrightness had been at our center, and had so worked into our imaginations that, more frequently than I look at any of the pictures of my ancestors, I contemplate the 1901 photograph of the farmhouse with its linkage of buildings: summer kitchen, carriage house, barn. As I study the blades of the windmill above the roofline and imagine the silo just out of the frame, the world appears sturdy against a backdrop of sober daylight. A patient horse is swaddled in ropes and harnesses. Men and women look up from their work in the muddy yard. However it is in some other world, their uncomplaining gazes seem to say,I know that this is the way in ours. Farming in New England was already in decline, with woods growing up on long-cleared lands as the mill cities and prospects to the west pulled people away from this countryside, but it was still the common life, wide open under a big sky, and one farm's holdings adjoined those of the next and the next all down the road--pasture and field and orchard extending as far as the eye could see. Scrawled across the back of my copy of the photograph in my father's hand isBrox Farm 1901, so for a long time I'd imagined it to depict a moment just after my grandparents took possession of the place, after their emigration from Lebanon, after peddling wares in upstate New York, and briefly enduring tenement life in the city of Lawrence six miles to the east of the farm. Even when I learned that it actually captures the last days of ownership of the family who'd lived there before my grandparents, it hardly seemed to matter. My family had simply taken over a way of life that had been acumulating for centuries, and there was little enough difference between last days and first. In the years after my grandparents came into possession of the farm, the windmill blew down, the silo burned, but one after another child was born, the size of the milk herd increased, and their halting English became more certain. In time, teams of ordinary horses gave way to tractors as the farm steadied into the one I knew where irises and roses flourished at the fence, full-grown shade trees tossed high above the roof peak in the storms, and my entire extended family--thirty, forty of us--would gather at the farmhouse during the holidays. Aunts,Brox, Jane is the author of 'Clearing Land Legacies of the American Farm', published 2004 under ISBN 9780865476493 and ISBN 0865476497.