Shelter From the Storm

I grew up on a farm in Oregon that was the original homestead of my Great-Great-Grandparents. I was very involved in 4-H and had every project imaginable: dairy goats, dairy cattle, rabbits, a market steer, a market lamb, pigs, and horses. Though my sister and I would attend an occasional high school football game, we didn’t hang out at the mall like most teenagers though we lived a short distance from Portland. Our social lives revolved around our 4-H peers. We would ride horses, play kick the can, camp in the woods, make forts in the hay loft, and fish for crawdads. Not just as children, but until we left for college. I became very involved with FFA while I was in high school which took me to numerous remote, farming towns in Oregon to compete in everything, from public speaking to livestock and soil judging. My friends were from towns of 20 and from places with public boarding schools because the landscape was so vast. The rural way of life was all I knew, but I never felt sheltered from the outside world. In fact, my parents were protecting us from it without us even knowing it. I did not realize, until now, what an immense luxury it was to be brought up that way.

                I went on to study Agricultural Business and Animal Science at Oregon State University,  where I was roommates with my sister and two of our childhood friends from 4-H. My senior year I was accepted to an intercollegiate exchange program which took me to Murray State University in Kentucky where I rode for their equestrian team.  Far from home, it was still the rural lifestyle and the like-minded that I was drawn to. The friends I made were daughters of tractor salesmen or cotton farmers.  I joined a sorority while I was there and came back to Oregon State to finish my final semester.  I moved into the chapter house back at OSU and felt like a fish out of water. It was my first experience with girls who were not farm girls. I offended many of them when I put a bull’s entire reproductive tract in the fridge next to their Garden Burgers and Slim Fast shakes. I further offended more when I held a study group in the formal dining room with my Wrangler-wearing cohorts from the Reproductive Physiology of Beef Cattle class in which we spread the tract out and studied it.

                After college, I accepted a job as a commodities broker buying Corn, Wheat, Soy Beans, and Milo and trading barges in Southern Illinois. I lived across the Ohio River back in Kentucky in a town of 200 that had once been a plantation. The house I rented had at one time been slave housing. Though I enjoyed the occasional fish fry at the Baptist church and the fried apple pies brought to me by my elderly neighbors, I moved back home to the farm less than a year later at the age of 22. I took my first leap out of agricultural employment and took a job waiting tables at a country club. At 23 I met a city boy and married him.

                We bought our first house in town and for the first time in my life, I had to look before crossing the street to get my mail. When we were looking to upgrade I dragged him to several modest homes on acreage, but we ended up in a house a few blocks from downtown. We were expecting our second baby, when I found our dream house.  A large, but in need of repair house on 3 acres in a gated community just out of town. A little bit of me, a little bit of him. It was situated on a pond and surrounded by million dollar homes.  I found my creative outlet through an immense remodeling project. When the last chandelier had been hung, I begged for a fence to bring my horse there, I grew a garden but the weeds won, I planted beautiful flowers but neglected to water them, and then I started a small business to save enough money to build the fence. I brought my horse “home” and rode him once. I found very little in common with our new friends. We joined the country club and I spent my days with our two young daughters at the pool with other mothers from big houses who I could not relate to. I was no longer the girl, I had once been. At the age of 32 my husband asked me for a divorce. Not knowing what to do or where to go, I packed up my mini-van and moved back to the farm with my girls, ages 2 and 5. I left the gate that opened and closed at the presence of my car for the one that must be shut or the cows will get out.

                We moved into a modest, studio apartment above the carriage house. We had a dorm room sized fridge, no oven, no stove top and no separate rooms. What we had was shelter from the storm, a place that felt like home for all of us. I learned to make hot breakfasts in a toaster oven and to only buy groceries that we would use that week. At night when the girls would go to bed, I would read so that the TV wouldn’t wake them up. We began having dinners at the table with my parents. My girls, my mom, and I put in the garden, though she did most of the weeding. My daughters took tomatoes, potatoes, apples, rhubarb, sunflowers, and zucchini to the county fair that summer and earned $14.00 each for their entries. They even entered the scarecrow contest, but were defeated by my sister’s son who lives next door.

                My children are now almost 5 and 8 and we are still living at Merrywood Farm. My sister and her husband bought the adjoining house that had once been our Great-Grandmothers. We would ride our ponies there after school, tie them to the apple tree and have cookies and tea. Now, our ponies are buried beneath that tree and my children walk through that same pasture to my sister’s house to play with their cousins. They play kick the can in the barn that their Great-Great-Great-Grandfather built, they romp through the woods and build forts where mine once stood, they fight over the first ripe strawberry, they wear vintage aprons as dress-ups, and they have become farm girls.

                Going through a divorce has been difficult and we all worry about the impact it can have on our children. Without the opportunity to come home, it would have been so much harder on both me and my girls. It is interesting that roots that run so deep are what will rise above us in times of trial and become our shelter.  I now know that the farm is as big a part of them as it is me. Both of them will forever be able to say, “I was raised on a farm.”