Chapter Four
Wedding Pines
WHEN MY HUSBAND, Clarke Owens, and I first moved to Ashland County in 1993 for my job at a local university, we bought a ten-acre spread in order to stable Kestrel, the one horse I owned at the time. Carved from a larger farm of more than three hundred acres, the place lies in the rolling countryside of Green Township in the southern part of the county. Six miles to the south in Mohican State Park and Forest, the earth convolutes itself into hills and steep watersheds. To the north, the glacial till stretches as far as Lake Erie; southeastward, the once-forested hill country reaches to the Ohio River. The area lies south of the Firelands—about five hundred thousand acres now in Erie, Huron, and Ashland Counties—and is contained in the Western Reserve (part of the Northwest Territories), sold by the state of Connecticut to the US government in the Ordinance of 1787.
In a sense I have returned to a place that I once knew fairly well. Although residents call me a newcomer in spite of my having lived here twenty-five years (it is said that you cannot be a “local” unless your family has been here three generations), I had visited this place many times before and knew the area: as a child with my father I visited Amish farms in Holmes, Knox, Richland, and Ashland Counties; in my twenties I hiked and camped at Mohican and Malabar Farm State Parks and went canoeing on the Mohican River.
We live on a county road of working family farms, although only two of them operate with no second income: a wife and husband run a dairy operation with seasonal help about two miles south of our place; a little farther toward Loudonville a man cultivated six hundred acres mostly in grain until he was ninety-one. He died a few years ago at ninety-two. Although he once told me that if he had a second chance at his life he would not choose farming, I cannot believe he was sincere, since even in his late eighties he leaped with the agility of a young man onto his tractor and with one hand threw hay bales weighing forty pounds high into the mow. His animals and fields were immaculately cared for, and the hay I bought from him was always of very good quality.
We cannot call our place a “homestead” because we did not build the house. Even though we do not cultivate the land and produce crops, I refer to it as a “farm” because we own the house, barn, and two outbuildings of the original farmstead; because the place is surrounded by farms in all directions; and because it is recorded as a farm in the state census. Since ten acres is large enough to be classified as a farm if all of it is tillable or in pasture, every year I am required to fill out a twenty-two-page form sent by the Ohio Department of Agriculture detailing how many acres are in tillage, pasture, or conservation reserve; how many animals I keep of each variety (dairy and beef cattle, horses, lamas, sheep, goats, pigs, rabbits, turkeys, chickens, ducks); how much fertilizer, herbicide, and insecticide I apply annually and in what locations; how much water I use for irrigation and whether its source is a spring, lake, or well; how many bushels of fruit (and what kinds), vegetables, corn, oats, wheat, sorghum, lentils, and soybeans I produce and whether I sell them at farm markets or at auction; how much hay I put up annually and how much I buy from other producers; how many people are resident on the farm, how many of those residents are employed in nonfarm labor, and how many nonresident people I hire to work here. I must even record the tonnage of my truck and the horsepower of my tractor. In spite of this chore (which I perform with alacrity because doing so makes me feel important), I do not presume to call myself a “farmer,” which is defined as someone who produces more than the family consumes (and incidentally works harder than I ever will). Those whose families consume most of what they produce may be called “gardeners,” but that word connotes a grower of plants for sale or designer of landscapes. I am not even a hobby farmer, as I no longer raise foals for sale or sell produce in the farm markets, as I did years ago.
The sense of place here is underwritten by history. In 1812 the Shawnee village of Greentown, five miles west of my house and one mile north of present-day Perrysville, was destroyed by settlers in retaliation for the murder of two farmers. The village (and the present-day township) was named for the Tory Thomas Green who migrated west after the Revolutionary War and lived with the Shawnee. The pioneer horticulturalist and Swedenborgian philosopher John Chapman, known as Appleseed John, lived and planted trees near here.
Our little spread is rectangular, with longer road frontage than depth. The house faces west and sits high on a rise with four large trees in front—Norway spruces about eighty feet high, a cedar, and a pin oak. Two old box elders had to be cut down as they were dropping large limbs close to the house. Tradition has it that the husband and wife who built the original cabin planted the spruces to celebrate their marriage; the trees became landmarks, and descendants named the farm (incorrectly) “The Wedding Pines.” I wanted to change it to “Windhover Farm” but finally decided that those trees bear witness to a history longer than ours. The county road forms the border on the west side; beyond it lie the neighbor’s pasture and woods. Locals call the road “Honey Creek” because it runs parallel to a stream of that name a quarter of a mile to the east. According to the story, a bee’s nest fell into the stream, after which the water always tasted sweet.
To the north a hayfield rises to the neighbors’ new house about a half mile away. Separated from the lawn by a line of varied pine and spruce, the bright green of my riding area ends at the border of their thirty-acre hayfield where the alfalfa grows dark green and, just before cutting time, bends like waves before the wind. On the south side, our land slopes suddenly downward into the pasture that takes up most of our acreage. The southeast corner was cut out of the property when the original farmer gave an acre to a son to build a house. A row of tall Norway spruce demarcates the boundary. A spring-fed stream crosses my pasture from the west, flows into a drainage ditch on the township road, and ends in Honey Creek. Our watershed comprises no fewer than 250 acres, so we never have water problems except in the hot summer of 2005 when our cistern went dry and we dug a new well that taps into a deep aquifer. Just below the stream, a small farm pond, originally dug when a pipeline was laid under the lower pasture, is gradually filling in—due, I suspect, to the process of eutrophication. Partially surrounded by cattails, it is home to frogs, turtles, red-winged blackbirds, and sometimes Canada geese. I put up a birdhouse there for tree swallows—the only songbirds, I have read, that will build over water.
The best view lies to the east, where the land slopes gradually toward Honey Creek and then rises again. Trees line the deep, swift-flowing stream that is home to snapping turtles, beaver, great blue herons, noisy kingfishers swooping for their catch, and, in the last year, a pair of sandhill cranes. Long, slender branches of ancient willows with silvery leaves reach to the water’s surface. There are eastern hornbeam, American beech, white ash, northern red oak, black oak, sumac, and black cherry, with two massive white oaks reaching above the others. On the far side of the creek, bands of contour-plowed fields measure out the hillside to a township road, beyond which three wooded hills rise. As I walk to the barn every morning throughout the year, I watch the changes the seasons bring—the various greens of spring and summer; the red, yellow, and orange of autumn; the blue, gray, brown, and white of winter.
The farmstead that once boasted at least five outbuildings (verified by pictures taken before the 1960s) now includes only the barn, henhouse, and garage (a converted carriage house). The main dwelling sits on the foundation of a Civil War–era log cabin using some of the original beams. County appraisal forms indicate that the monetary value of the place is difficult to ascertain since there is no comparable property in the township. Although no one is really sure when it was built, the house is dated 1901; wooden pins in the rafters of the upper attic give evidence that the structure is over a hundred years old, and the walls in the living room, upper landing way, and three bedrooms still bear the pegs where people hung their clothes, built-in closets being a later invention. The cellar is a dugout and crawl space where we store potatoes in winter. The tiny kitchen opens into a large dining room spanning the length of the house. The farmwife must have done the extensive canning that would have been required in old days either in that dining room or on the wide back porch that has since been enclosed for a sunroom. An antique Hoosier cabinet that used to stand in my grandmother’s kitchen lives there now.
Two staircases leading to the second floor give evidence that the house was probably intended to accommodate multiple generations. One of them leads to an L-shaped landing big enough to house four book cases and an antique wardrobe. The previous owner of the house created a large master bedroom by tearing out a wall that separated two smaller rooms, although he left in place two rough support beams, which, along with two newer wardrobes constructed by Amish carpenters and two old bureaus from my grandmother, give the space its character.
The one-room third floor, probably used as a dormitory-style bedroom for children, contains even more of the history of the house than the other rooms. The chimney, built of brown stone, rises like a pillar in the middle of the room and in the attic takes a nearly right-angle bend. Newspapers that I collected from under the eaves date from 1896 to 1940. Yellowed pages of The Loudonville Democrat from February 6, 1896, tell of O. E. Holley, sent to the penitentiary for two years for horse stealing. Another column on page one describes the Tri-County Teachers’ Institute held in the Hayesville Opera House (which still stands) and the program that began with entertainment by the Emerson Quartet and an invocation by Rev. T. Struggles. “In point of numbers,” the article begins, “interest manifested and attendance, the meeting of the county institute held here last week was considered the most successful ever held, and Superintendent Scott and his faithful assistants are to be congratulated upon the success they made of the affair.” Paragraph three related State School Commissioner Corson’s admonition to parents “about what they should expect and what not to expect of teachers”: “He said that while many parents could not control one child at home, yet parents expect school teachers to control this one and thirty-nine more… . It is much of a wonder that they do as well as they do. He also advised the people to obtain the teachers’ side of all controversies, reported by scholars, before drawing conclusions.” The quartet and invocation would be absent today, but the message retains its contemporary relevance.
Among the papers, I found editions of The Perrysville Enterprise from 1901 and The Ohio Farmer from 1908. The front page of The Cleveland Press from April 4, 1913, had stories about teachers in Lorain who had convinced police to crack down on dealers who sold tobacco to minors; twenty missing girls—immigrants from Poland, Denmark, Norway, and France, none of whom spoke English—thought to have been kidnaped from a Baltimore & Ohio train in New Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and sold into slavery; Edward S. Smith, former Socialist candidate for secretary of state, who was imprisoned for resisting arrest saying that “the small town police courts” had become “weapons of revenge instead of the tools of justice”; the accidental death of a former Clevelander, Charles Pennington—once a gold prospector in the Yukon and contractor in Chicago—who had entered the wrong apartment and been shot as a burglar; British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst’s sentencing to three years of penal servitude for “malicious destruction of property” in connection with what was termed the “Lloyd George explosion” at Walton Heath; German airmen arrested as spies in France; the impending recognition of the Chinese Republic by US Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan. The house, remote even from small towns, had nevertheless been connected to the world.
The original builders were German immigrants named Weirick, and their old steamer trunk still sits on the third floor. Descendants occupied the farm until the 1960s, and, in a century and a half, only four families have actually owned the place, three of those in the last thirty years. Several visitors have claimed to be descendants of the original owners and live now in Mansfield, Baltimore, and London. They talked about their grandparents’ orchards and gardens, outbuildings that no longer stand, and games they played in the barn and fields. I do not tell them of things I have found in the house and barn—children’s clothes, a milking machine, broken garden rakes, slats, window frames devoid of glass, old curtains, a plastic dish drainer, even a bathroom sink lying on its side in the attic. I do not mention that every spring on the site where a corn crib once stood I find the detritus of earlier times: pieces of glass and metal, cans, nails—evidence that, as the structure crumbled, its owners used it as a dump. The place would have been the kitchen midden that archaeologists come to study, but I have thwarted them and cleaned it all out. What I could not donate or recycle I burned even as I kept shovels, posthole diggers, old ladders, wooden planks, or wire, which have since been put to use. I do not tell all this to my visitors, however, for they do not want to hear about the changes I have made. They want to tell me what it used to look like so that they might fix in their minds their own pasts. I ponder the question of why these descendants, who seem to care so much, allowed the farm to be sold.
One man who now lives in Mansfield told me he spent many days standing on the front hill overlooking the road perfecting his throw by pitching rocks into the ditch on the other side. Another who lives in London wanted to see the granary where he and his siblings wrote their initials on the walls, which still bear penciled calculations about how much hay was put up in certain seasons. One of our first visitors, also a resident of Mansfield, arrived on his motorcycle and was peering into the garage when I went out with Colleen—who had not yet grown used to strangers—barking and straining on her leash. I asked if I could help him.
“My grandparents used to own this place,” he answered. “Calm down.”
“I’m quite calm,” I replied. “It’s my dog who wants to tear your leg off.”
He proceeded to get even with me, telling me his grandmother had grown roses where I had gravel and his grandfather had an orchard where I had grass. Most of our descendant visitors are kinder, and recently several thanked us for taking good care of their grandparents’ place.
The owners before us (who were not Weiricks) lived here only three years and did not remodel so much as redecorate the house, and we spent our first ten years redoing what they had paid incompetent contractors to complete. We replaced the house and barn roofs, both furnaces, and the shower; insulated the attic; and installed new double-pane glass in each of thirty-two windows. I spent many hours stripping purple, iridescent green, and flowered wallpaper from living room, master bedroom, and study walls while Clarke read aloud to me. I had learned the technique of stripping wallpaper from our first house, also a fixer-upper, in Granville, in Licking County, but had not been prepared for six layers that I removed from the back staircase of our present house. It was worth the work, but to this day I cannot look at wallpaper anywhere without wondering what poor person will be stripping it off after twenty years.
Realtors advise buyers of old houses to expect to spend another 40 percent of the purchase price on upkeep, an adage which has proved in our case to be accurate. At the same time, well-maintained older houses tend to hold their value longer than newer ones. I feel that the house talks to me, telling me what it needs to stay sound, but not always in language I can understand. It resembles a living thing for which one change affects all other parts. We discovered, for example, that leakage into the second story had been caused by water vapor condensing not on the roof, as in the old days of coal-burning furnaces, but inside the chimney because newer, more efficient gas furnaces do not lose as much heat as older ones that would have forced humid air outside the chimney. Birds had also built nests inside the chimney, eventually blocking some ventilation. We solved the problem first with chimney liners and later with a high-efficiency furnace vented out the side of the house, but when I tried to discover why the leaking had not happened when the gas furnace was first installed, no technician could answer. A colleague of mine who teaches philosophy and who has worked on his own house asked what else we had done that might have caused the condensation. We solved the mystery: by replacing the old windows we had eliminated air leakage on the third floor which had previously carried away the water vapor. Technicians provided the solution, but it took a philosophy professor to explain the reason.
The garage has undergone a transformation as well as the house. Its sliding wooden doors refused to budge when the foundation settled. I hired a carpenter to build new doors, but when a storm in 2009 blew the entire structure off its foundation, we knew we were in for some major renovation. The structure, it seems, had not been grounded or cabled properly. When the contractor dug out the foundation, the concrete floor buckled, and we were in for even more repair. The finished garage, grounded and cabled, sports two state-of-the-art spring-loaded doors.
“You’ve moved up in the world,” a visitor remarked.
“My bank account hasn’t,” I replied.
Most of our furniture is old, much of it inherited from my parents and grandparents, all of whom were antique collectors. The house I grew up in, which my parents occupied for forty years, was also an original farmhouse, although it was not as old as the one I live in now. The wardrobe, according to the story, traveled disassembled in a wagon over the Cumberland Gap, but this could not be true as their ancestors migrated across Pennsylvania. Our dinner table and a china cabinet served my maternal grandmother’s family for sixty years. Our bedstead, from my Grandmother Fleming’s house, was the guest bed where my sister and I slept when we visited as children.
Both sides of my parents’ families, descended from English and Anglo-Irish immigrants in the eighteenth century, seem to have come from Massachusetts, my father’s paternal ancestors having originated in East Anglia and Worcestershire and having traveled west after the American Revolution because of their Tory sympathies, his maternal ancestors (named McKirahan) having emigrated from County Wexford, Ireland. The two sides of his family were farmers in Jefferson and Logan Counties. His mother lost her father when she was eighteen to the flu epidemic at the end of the Great War. The only photograph I have seen of her when she was young shows a very beautiful woman with a thoughtful expression. Her widowed mother worked as a janitor to support two daughters, both of whom obtained teaching licenses from Miami University when one year of study was sufficient to teach elementary school. The younger daughter stayed in Logan County and eventually married a farmer; my grandmother taught school near Steubenville while she completed her degree at Kent State during the summers. Her marriage to my grandfather ended her career since the school district in those days did not allow married women to continue teaching. The son of a farmer turned dairyman, my Grandfather Fleming was one of the early flyers of single-engine propeller-driven airplanes and transported mail until he lost his plane in the Depression. I still have the cap, scarf, and gloves he wore when he flew and a picture of him as a young man wearing jodhpurs. On the transept over our kitchen door I keep a quart-sized glass milk bottle with a cardboard cap that reads “J. W. FLEMING AND SON, 3% BUTTER FAT OR MORE, FOR BABIES AND INVALIDS, SEAL KAPS PAT NOV. 2, 1920, OTHER PATENTS PENDING,” all that remains of the dairy also lost in the Depression. Nearby sit three other antique glass jars, none so venerated as that one, probably blown in one of the factories along the Ohio River that used to produce the famous Fort Steuben glass.
The family of my mother’s paternal grandmother migrated down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers on a raft and ended up in east Texas. The other branches of my mother’s family traveled southwest to Bell County, Texas. Her parents met there and moved in 1920 to Ohio to find work in the factories. Both had grown up in the country, my grandmother on a farm that produced cotton and sugar cane and my grandfather on a goat ranch. The only famous person among all relations I have ever discovered was my maternal grandmother’s second cousin, the most decorated soldier of World War II turned actor and songwriter, Audie Murphy.
When my parents retired and moved from their house, I inherited many books and boxes of letters, primarily because I was the one who had space enough to store them. As I delved through the contents, I felt like an anthropologist discovering cultural traditions of bygone times. Among my father’s things I found a watch engraved with the name “Oral Windham,” my great-grandfather who died in the influenza epidemic of 1918. In the closed library shelves on the landing, I keep antique books that tell a story not only about one family but the times they grew up in. Grandmother Fleming’s copy of David the King, published in 1946, cost seven cents to mail from the publisher. In another book of hers, the Jones Third Reader, she practiced her beautiful penmanship with round flourishes in capital letters as she wrote her name, Eulah Windham. The book’s history was inscribed on the inside front cover: “bought Sept 13, 1910” and “bought Jan. 18, 1911, age 8 years.” Published in 1903, the year of her birth, the tome had apparently lasted through eight students. Among the other books is Peck’s Bad Boy Abroad, published in 1905 and given as a Christmas present to my grandfather “James Harlan J. Fleming from his friend Perry B.” The pages of a copy of Hawthorne’s Twice Told Tales are brown with age but bear no date; the book is stamped with the name W. W. McKirahan, my great-great-grandfather.
Other books, of unknown origin, include Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Port-Folio, a collection of sentimental short stories by an author calling herself Fanny Fern and published in Cleveland by the Burrows Brothers in 1882, and Pearls of Thought by Maturin M. Ballou published in 1880. This one turns to be a dictionary of words like “knowledge” and “discernment” and definitions from great writers such as George Eliot and Leo Tolstoy. I wonder whose hands in what year placed the red maple leaf I found tucked away between two pages. There are several old Bibles with tattered black covers. Books inscribed by my father include the illustrated Treasure Island published in 1911 (fifteen years before he was born); John Martin’s Big Book, published in 1931; Modern Story Book, also dated 1931; The Dog Book by Albert Payson Terhune (author of Lad: A Dog), published in 1932; Children of Other Lands, sporting a drawing of an Arab boy on a horse, dated 1933; and Last of the Mohicans, published in 1938. He took good care of his books and toys, as I also inherited one of his trucks and a model plane. I have my mother’s 1949 copy of War and Peace, the edition I first read when I was fifteen.
Besides the books, I found a Christmas Ideals magazine from 1959; a coverless book about surveying; Yankee magazines from the 1940s containing a good deal of war propaganda; 1951 Ayrshire breeders’ manual; a pamphlet dated 1937 on the history of the Northwest Ordinance; Holiday magazine from 1949 featuring articles on horse racing; a commemorative issue of Time magazine with Native Dancer on the cover dated May 1959; and The Farm quarterlies from the 1940s and 1950s, including one from 1953 with an essay by Louis Bromfield whose Malabar Farm is six miles to the west.
One gem that gives me a window into the past is Sheldon’s 20th Century Letter Writer, “an up-to-date and accurate guide to correct modern letter writing,” dated 1901 and inscribed in beautiful calligraphy by my great-grandmother Alice Grafton Fleming. The introduction includes advice on punctuation, grammar, titles, contractions, capitals, penmanship, postscripts (to be avoided unless absolutely necessary), style (“Natural language and originality of sentiment are all that is required in good letter writing”), and even posture: “The POSITION which you assume in writing is very important. To bend or contract the body is both inelegant and injurious. Sit erect and let your paper be before you, slightly to the right… . Do not touch the pen itself with the fingers, but allow the ball of the index finger to rest lightly about half an inch from the point of insertion of the pen into the holder.” The different chapters present examples of types of letters which the writer should follow: social and family epistles include “Letter from a Mother to her Daughter at Boarding School” and “A Brother’s Warning to a Sister,” alerting her to the ignoble character of a man with whom she had gone out riding; missives of condolence, congratulation, and introduction (including “One Lady Friend to Another” and “A Hero of the Spanish-American War to the Secretary of War”); love letters, such as “A Declaration of Love,” “A Second Attempt to Win a Lady’s Favor,” and “To a Lover Who is Dissipated”; wedding announcements, valentines, invitations (even a special form for an invitation to a German), acceptances, regrets, notes of ceremony and compliment; business letters; miscellaneous (such as asking a friend for a loan and requesting a salary increase of an employer); and letters to publishers from both professional and amateur authors.
The examples are exhilarating. “Introducing a Coachman to a Prospective Employer” contains the information that “The bearer … has been in my employ for two years and has always given entire satisfaction… . I recommend him heartily as a good driver and one that is kind and faithful to horses.” “On the Marriage of a Bachelor” begins “The tidings of your marriage were wafted to my ears an hour ago, and now that the spasm of surprise is over I am beginning to realize the full meaning of what has happened. I congratulate you with all my heart, while I look at you in awe. How in the world did you ever manage it, old fellow? … do tell me, ‘pon honor, have you been obliged to quit smoking, or does she allow you to still enjoy your weed, and in the glory of her presence?” A letter of condolence on the loss of a fortune conveys the sentiments, “I am deeply grieved to hear of your loss, but bear up, old man; there is a good time coming; you are still but a young man, and pshaw! what is money? … surely the care of such a fortune as yours must have been very wearying.” If these letters are to be taken as satirical, a love letter from a soldier ordered to service is not; he writes to his beloved that he is to be sent to Cuba, for when the book was published, the last conflict the United States had been involved in was the Spanish-American War. I try to imagine the world my great-grandmother inhabited, and indeed my grandparents for a short time, without the two great conflicts of the twentieth century, the Holocaust, space exploration, and the Civil Rights movement. The great enemy was not Germany, Japan, the Soviet Union, China, al-Qaeda, or the Islamic State, but Spain.
The real epistles tell other stories. My mother saved the correspondence of four generations of her ancestors whose names I had never heard of and who lived in Oklahoma and Texas. The letters date back as far as 1887 and often begin in the style of the time such as “Mother, I take pen in hand to answer your kind letter of March 11. Please let your heart be eased with the knowledge that I, your fond son, am well.” I found envelopes as small as three by four inches with stamps costing one and two cents and addresses giving name, town, and state only. One folder nearly disintegrating with age contained the deed, title, and tax statements of my great-grandfather’s ranch, along with accounts—dated in the 1940s—of several purchases of additional acreage. (Reading it, I wonder how my great-grandmother felt when her husband sold the homestead they had built together—whether she regretted it, as my Weirick visitors seem to do, or whether she was relieved that they no longer had to work hard to wrest a living from the land.) My mother’s paternal great-grandmother seems to have been something of a hypochondriac. Letters to Mrs. S. E. Sparks of Bell County, Texas, on stationery of the Lloyd Chemical Corporation of Saint Louis diagnose illnesses she described by letter and prescribe medicines they sold, such as Alaxo for constipation. None of these people, whose voices are now silent, could have known that a descendant they never knew would read their correspondence one hundred years later in a farmhouse in the Ohio countryside and wonder about the absence of laws against pharmaceutical misrepresentation.
Voices still speak to me from my mother’s diary of the war years in which she records the progress of the Allied forces against the Fascists. Another diary, written by my father’s aunt on note paper, includes her descriptions of travels to the Sewanee River, Appalachian Mountains, and Virginia. The person I knew as eccentric, xenophobic, and racist had also been a lover of nature, an environmentalist before that word existed, who worried that pesticides might kill the honey bee population and oysters in the Chesapeake Bay. In spite of her prescient concern for the earth, she and her husband, a physician, sold the mineral rights of their farm in Jefferson County, which was subsequently strip-mined and then turned into an industrial park.
Family photographs preserve a kind of history with their visual narrative of the transformation of individuals, but also of families. One shows a set of great-grandparents surrounded by six children with spouses, their eleven children and spouses, and thirty great-grandchildren. Studying it, I am aware of a strong sexuality pervading the record of a family reunion. At the same time, I ponder the illusion of unity represented by photographs: in this picture, as in most, almost everyone is smiling, yet I know that conflict, more than harmony, shapes and reshapes families and generations.
Not hoarders of new things, my mother, father, and grandparents were nevertheless compulsive savers of old things besides letters, books, and antiques; their houses were always filled with clutter, including many items they never used. (As a result, I am a compulsive organizer and value space on which I can lay a book, open a newspaper, or set down a burden.) The slogan “Waste not, want not” characterizes the saver’s ethos, but the feeling goes deeper than that. I do not remember a single visit to my maternal grandmother that I did not hear about how hard things were in the Depression of the 1930s. She never mentioned the Great War that raged during her adolescence, claiming on the contrary that those were her best years, and seldom talked about the Second World War except to describe the food rationing. Grandma Fleming, on the other hand, never talked about the Depression or either war but often mentioned that when she and her sister were children they received only one new present each (at Christmas) and one new dress per year. Her back staircase was so full of packed boxes that it was nearly impossible to climb the steps. The impulse to save may go further into the psyche than memories of subsistence farming. I suspect that keeping things, with the claim that one day these items will be needed, is a way of hedging against the one inevitability of life, as well as storing against ruin.
Clarke and I do not hoard, but we reuse or recycle all we can. When wheelbarrows rust out, I take them apart and employ the wooden handles as tomato stakes. Old sheets and towels beyond mending become cleaning rags. Torn quilts and blankets cover saddles in the barn. Nevertheless, in emptying out trunks and boxes, donating things we don’t use, and organizing file cabinets, I acknowledge my mortality. Sometime I will not need these things, and someone else will have to deal with them. We are known in part by what we leave behind.
Set back from the house about a tenth of a mile from the road, the Dutch-style bank barn, called “fore-bay” by agrarian architectural historians, is literally built into a bank, the upper story reaching out over the lower one. It faces east toward the sheltered side, as the weather always comes from south, southwest, or west, and occasionally from the north, but never from the east. Long metal pipes reach not through the great beams holding it in place, as with the carriage house/garage, but from underneath the barn far into the ground on the upper side to stabilize the structure and keep it from falling forward. The foundation is made of indigenous stone, the upper part local wood. The builder meant for it to last: every carpenter I have hired reports to me that it is well built, having twice as many beams as would have been required. Those beams still wear their outer bark. Inscribed on foundation stones are the year 1878 and the name of the original owner, Weirick. We have replaced aluminum downspouts with steel and the original slate roof with tile; upgraded all electrical wiring and lightning rods, and had the whole barn painted dark red. Otherwise, it remains unchanged.
The hayloft takes up most of the upper story and could hold an estimated three thousand bales. Even when I had five horses, I did not put up more than several hundred, so I use the rest of the space to house equipment. The third level I leave to the bats and owls that occupy the high rafters, although one summer I mustered the courage to climb up there to sweep out old hay and guano. A hay rake still hangs suspended from the highest rafter, left over from the days when this farm was several hundred acres in size and produced enough to feed a herd through the winter. Narrow gaps separate the boards to allow air to circulate around hay, which if wet or even moist can generate heat and cause fires.
The feed room sits underneath the third level at the front of the granary where five stalls indicate that oats, wheat, and corn were probably the main source of livelihood for the farm. I have turned the granary into a tack room and storage area for cat food, bird seed, and anything else that must be locked away from raccoons. There I store an army saddle dating from the Great War and an ice cutter and old weigh scales left over from my Grandfather Fleming’s hatchery business, which failed in the 1960s. Hay forks, a potato fork, and several hoes and rakes that I still use came from my great-aunt’s basement where she kept them after her father gave up farming. I also have his collection of wooden-handled tools. They remind me of generational continuity and the fact that, while many farming methods have changed, many have not, as I do much of the work on my place by hand.
Wooden stairs lead from the feed room to the lower level where the horses live. A raised concrete dais extends more than halfway down the middle, from which the farmer would have fed cattle or hogs in troughs along the side. Six double doors look out toward the east. Instead of building stalls, I put up gates, which I close only when I need to separate one horse from the others; most of the time the horses walk about freely.
Once, a woman came to ask my husband whether we would allow our barn to be part of a self-guided agricultural tour. People came every year from several states to view the barns of Ashland, Richland, and Wayne Counties. They wanted to feature ours because of the granary. My husband told her, “You will have to talk to my wife. That barn is her baby.” She remarked to me that the old-growth forests of Ohio are contained in its antique barns. Although ours did not become part of the tour, I hope I am preserving something of the state’s ancient heritage.
When we first moved north from Granville, I paid an acquaintance to trailer my mare from the place where I boarded her to our new farm. Getting out of his truck, he remarked, “Boy, Debbie, when you move to the country, you move to the country.” We are six miles from the nearest market, three miles from the nearest encampment where there is a post office, and fourteen miles from the nearest settlement that might be called a town, yet the traveling purveyors of religion find us out regardless of how far out of the way we live.
The first time an evangelist strode across the lawn it was summer, and I had just dragged the rototiller out of the garage. The elderly but spry and determined woman opened her Bible and read a passage about people being punished with war and plague.
“Now doesn’t that sound like today?” she asked.
I disapprove of scholars and intellectuals putting these people down with their superior knowledge of Biblical exegesis, and I was flattered that anyone cared about what I thought, but I wasn’t going to be preached at.
“It sounds to me like thirteenth-century Europe,” I remarked.
“But doesn’t it also sound like today?” she persisted.
“I don’t know of a time in history when there wasn’t war and disease,” I answered.
“Don’t you think it might be a wake-up call to the people of today?” she countered.
I made excuses about having chores to do, and she left.
The second time, the preacher brought reinforcements. Four women of ages representing adolescence to veneration drove up to the house, parked, and walked to the door. I saved them trouble by suggesting immediately that they work on more promising souls.
The third time, a well-dressed, good-humored woman approximately in her forties came to the door and greeted me exuberantly. She wanted to talk about something, she said, and reached into her voluminous bag.
“Is this about religion?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said cheerily. “Does that bother you?”
Her optimism and friendliness were too much for me.
“I’m an unregenerate heathen savage,” I replied, smiling. “I’m a hopeless case, and you will never succeed.”
As she walked away laughing, I wished she would convey my message to all her confederates who would know that at my house they would not find a soul ready to be saved. I did not want my soul to be saved, and I would not let them save it no matter how hard they tried. I wanted it to stay here with the great blue herons, eastern box turtles, and tiger swallowtails. Nor would they enlist me in their fight to save the human race, as I did not think the human race worth saving.
The fourth time occurred on a late-summer Sunday morning after I had ridden my horse and then picked tomatoes under a slightly overcast sky amid the warm breeze of early autumn. The world could not have seemed more beautiful when an immaculately clean Buick full of people pulled into the driveway, all the way down to the end near the garden. A well-dressed woman got out and stepped toward me with caution as she was wearing high heels, which do not work well on gravel.
“Do you need directions?” I asked naively, ready and wishing to be helpful in those pre-GPS days with all I knew of the scenic township roads roundabout. When she pulled a copy of Watch-tower out of her bag, I suggested that she go away. I was disappointed that I had not been able to be helpful and mystified that she felt impelled to educate strangers in the religion that already dominates the culture rather than showing by example and sharing her considerable resources with people in need.
One day the disciple was a man who came to the house and was greeted by Clarke who has a quicker wit than I do.
“Jesus is coming,” the man began.
My husband countered with, “Tell you what: if you see him, you let me know. Or if I see him first, I’ll call you. What’s your phone number?”
The disciple turned on his heel and hastened toward his Thunderbird.
My last visitor (and it has been a long time) was a pleasant-looking elderly lady who came not to the side door, as most people do, but to the front. A car waited for her beyond the mailbox on the county road, where cars travel infrequently but swiftly, and a driver heading south cannot see the driveway from beyond the rise.
She wished me a nice day. “We’re visiting people who might not know about the love the Lord has for them,” she said sweetly.
“I know about it,” I answered. “By the way, you might not want to park your car on that road. The pickups fly pretty fast over those hills.”
“With all the problems in the world today,” she persisted, “we want to show people a way to change it.”
“I like the world well enough the way it is,” I replied. “I wish people would stop trying to change it.” The poor woman looked troubled.
“I’m a pantheist,” I explained, trying to save her time. “I honor solstices and equinoxes, sunrises and sunsets, the phases of the moon. Everything is God.”
Looking perplexed, she told me her name and headed toward the car where her companion waited. As they drove northward, I felt downcast that I had disappointed yet another would-be missionary. Then I realized why these people inspire in me a feeling verging on resentment: they are not interested in me but in themselves; they do not knock on my door to meet and talk to me but only to convey their version of what other people should think. If some itinerant, leather-clad John the Baptist walked from the coast bringing news of conservation easements or John Chapman emerged from the woods teaching the philosophy of Swedenborg, I think I might listen. My miracles are the constantly changing clouds driven eastward by the wind, fruit ripening in late summer, rain filling streams and ponds, butterflies tugging nectar from blossoms, gray features of the moon looking on the earth as it has done since long before people ever stood upright and dreamed their anthropomorphic gods into existence.
Pictures of the farm taken in the early nineties show small trees and wide expanse of grass behind the house. Now the lawn is mostly shaded with white pine, locust, cottonwood, birch, walnut, maple, blue spruce, and hemlock. The windbreak to the north of the house contains a double stand of blue spruce, red spruce, and white pine, three feet high when we moved here and now thirty feet high and cacophonous in spring with sparrows, wrens, robins, and orioles and in fall with sparrows and woodpeckers. Although twenty years are a long time in the life a person, they are a mere second in the life of the land which owns us more surely than we will ever own it.
Belonging is not a static but an active state achieved through the small tasks of daily life as well as the larger ones—mucking out stalls, raking leaves, cleaning the house, making the place daily more mine than any printed deed in the county courthouse can. The land has also come to know my being and habits; although we have our differences, we communicate in a grammar of intimacy. At the edge of the garden are stones marking the graves of twelve cats. Colleen is buried beneath a rectangular limestone slab shaded by a white pine. Shio, Kestrel, Xanadu, and Montana are buried at the top of the hill in the pasture, their graves unmarked except for the milkweed and thistle that regenerate every summer. Still, the place was also home to pioneers and generations of Weiricks who farmed the land, as the trunk in the attic testifies. The detritus of their habitation still rises to the surface with the spring thaw. I am more caretaker than owner. Whoever occupies this place when I have gone will change things but will also be a traveler as well as inhabitant.