THE FARM

 Jess, Jeanette and I drove out to our old farm yesterday.  It felt surreal the minute we passed thru Missouri Valley.  I started getting bombarded with memories already.  When Mike and Terri came to visit I put up balloons to guide them starting from Missouri Valley.  I thought about Steve driving this distance every day to get to work and back. The dog "Spinner" that always ran out to his mail box and circled like he was chasing his tail as you went by. The place where I lost control of the car and spun out with Herbert in there car.  Magnolia was completely different.  Bigger maybe. All the way to the farm the streets now have real names! We turned off the paved road and passed the Garcelon place,  the place where badgers used to live.  The turn to go to John Henry's farm. The Klinkenbeard Farm and the Meek place across the road.  Our nearest neighbors a mile away. That last deadly S curve where I hit the mailman head on.  Then we got there, where you can either turn left into the farm or go down and impossibly steep hill, Peanut Hill. Herbert and me sliding down that hill on air mattresses in the snow.  The two grain silos were still by the road. We parked between where the house and garden were.  The main well was there looking dangerously out of use. We stood there trying to get our bearings, asking each other what was where.  Because everything else was gone.  The house, a long car port for tractors, two big barns, the chicken coop, the pig shed,  the white picket fence. No sign any of it was ever there.  Maybe we would have figured out where the cherry and apple trees were if there were any leaves left on the trees,  maybe we'll return one more time next spring? But the pond behind the house was there still. Where we I've slayed in our shoes.  Jess checked and said the tadpoles are still there 🙂. We walked back towards where "Bonzeehead" (a cow skull on a tree stump) but the land was completely different.  Some of it changed by man but most of it looked like natural changes.  So many things looked smaller.  The hill behind the house that the girls sled on looked half as big and that area didn't look eroded. All of us just somehow remember it much,  much bigger. The two silos out front.  I remember going outside and seeing that the girls had climbed them,  like little dots way up at the top and I couldn't breathe seeing them,  terrified they would fall off I called out to them,  just standing there frozen until they were down.  Surely those are different silos?? They are barely two stories high!! In my memory,  in their memories,  they were about four stories high!! They might ferment wrong because the were so little,  3 and 4 years old! but I haven't grown. Was I just so scared that I ferment them taller?? We stood where our house was.  Not even a dent that showed we had a basement.  I felt a deep grief. I told the girls that I felt like we had been erased and they understood.  Agreed. The was a short piece of wood, looked like a 10 × 10 stud, and half a brick. Nothing else where our house and a thousand memories were. In the back of my mind I have often thought that we could head here if there was a disaster and we had to flee the city.  I figured that the pig barn with the water pump in front would always be here. A place to survive.  No. It's not even land that we know any more.  We left before we were caught out there in the dark.  That absolute darkness city people never know.  I was still shook up from it when I got this message from Jeanette - 

"Seeing that today had to of made you feel like a badass. Like everything was hard, harder than it is now and you still did the most with everything."

And she put this on Facebook-

"As I get older I have so much compassion for my parents and appreciation for the childhood they provided. They made every struggle feel like an adventure while carrying and enduring every trauma they experienced without support systems and resources to help them. 

I didn’t know the difference between when we had less or when we had more because everything that truly mattered was always there. 

I do not have the same energy and I wish I did. My children always know when I’m stressed or struggling. However, I think I’ve at least succeeded in making them feel loved no matter what the conditions are. I guess that’s something ❤️

The house that built me is gone but the land is still there 🤗"

And POOF! We were Not ERASED!!!