Some of my earliest coherent memories are of my grandparent's farm in southeast Missouri. It was located a few miles outside the small town of Willow Springs. I lived there for a couple of years in the mid-1960s while my father deployed to Vietnam. After he returned, which I was too young to remember, we moved to Fort Ord, California, and later to Seattle. We relocated again, after Dad retired out of the Army, to North Carolina. Throughout the 1970s, we made an annual summer drive to the farm in Missouri. Usually we spent a week there before returning to Asheville.
My grandparents were not wealthy people. Herbert Miller purchased the property sometime in the 1920s and remained on it until his death in 1975. The land was mostly hard rock hills and ridges, suitable only for grazing, though at one time he did have a few grape vines. A small two-story farmhouse, a barn, shed, and a couple of what I know were small ponds made up the center of the farm.
There was no running water. A hand dug cistern was a few feet outside the screened-in porch. A concrete shell covered with a wood frame was above the ground. Looking down inside the sides were lined with field rock and descended into murky water. This was not a well, but a cistern. Rainwater was collected from the metal roof of the farmhouse and directed into the pit. The water was cool and apparently good to drink as we all survived.
Something that is almost completely foreign to Americans today: as there was no running water, there were no bathrooms in the house. Down the hill, about a hundred feet away was an outhouse, complete with a Sears catalog that came in the mail. Perhaps I misremember that part. It was a nasty smelling place, especially in the summer. Bathing was accomplished in a large, galvanized tub. That tub was moved from room to room as needed. Water was heated on the stove and then poured in the tub. You soaped up, scrubbed, rinsed, and got out.
I don't remember much about the barn, except the loft being full of hay and my allergies being awful. There was a long low shed that I remember my grandfather taking me to early one morning. He had one milk cow and did the milking by hand. I'm not sure why, by the 1970s surely it would have been easier and cheaper to buy milk in town.
The house itself had a screened in porch, kitchen, living room, and three bedrooms on the first floor. There was no foundation beyond piled up field rock. Also there was no insulation. I think my grandmother had a gas stove. Sometime in the 1950s electricity was provided to the county through a co-op started twenty years prior.
Besides the pond, the most memorable to me I think was the front yard. We could be out there without adult supervision. I was allowed to go as far as the pond, but not into the forest itself without an adult. There was small willow tree, just perfect for climbing, which grew along with me. It was past the cistern and opposite the path to the front gate. At our home in the city, I would sometimes sleep on the front porch. However, the sounds were completely different. On the farm, I would lay on a cot on the front porch and try to fall asleep. It isn’t always quiet in the country. Most summers on the porch were a cacophony of cicadas, whip-poor-wills, with the occasional screech owl in the mix. Eventually, though, I’d drift off.
These visits were not idyllic. Ada hated my father, and perhaps to a lesser extent my mother. Her for getting off the farm and away from the small town and him for marrying her. Things would be fine for a few days and then her hatred would simply come out. Much later, I figured she was mentally ill, but it is possible to be both mentally ill and mean at the same time.
Our last two trips to Willow Springs were the in the late 1970s about a year apart. First to see my grandfather, who was dying of cancer. He’d smoked a pipe all his life and cancer had settled in his throat. The doctors had sent him home essentially to die. This was before the advent of hospice. He was in the back bedroom.
At one point he called me back there with my parents and placed his old .22 rifle in my hands. Even at the time it was old, and I still have it. Apparently, this caused even more of a rift within my mother’s family. However, grandfather insisted and gave it to me. He died a few days later.
Six months or so later we were back again for my grandmother’s funeral. She also died of cancer, though I don’t remember much about it. Shortly after Herbert Miller’s death, my grandmother sold the farm to Ada for about a hundred dollars. Just enough to make it legal. However, Mom forced a sale of the remaining estate assets. The rift was final within the family. When we left, I did not set foot on the place for forty years.
Some time in 2009, I drove my mother back to Willow Springs for her 50th high school reunion. She had called ahead and planned to see her sister. We met
her at a diner in town and then followed Ada out to the farm. I remembered the gravel lane out from the county road well enough, including the sharp turn. Driving along after that turn there is a slight rise and the old farmhouse came into view. It had fallen into severe disrepair. The second story was leaning dangerously over and looked as if a good wind might cause the entire thing to topple. We found that Ada had sold the farm to a timber company, retaining a life estate. With the proceeds she built a small home behind the farmhouse, this time with running water. I did not go in but was told that it was full of trash. Certainly, I did not go into the old house, it did not look safe at all.
The visit was sad. Ada never left the farm and never married. She worked in a local factory most of her life and went to town on weekends for church and laundry. She reminded me of a Ms. Havisham, only without the wedding dress, choosing a life disconnected from others. We left after a couple hours, and I drove Mom home. Several years later I returned to Willow Springs with my mother for one more funeral. We picked up a couple boxes of things from Ada’s room at the nursing home. At some point the county administrator had established guardianship over her. There was no estate as the cost of care consumed whatever funds remained from the sale of the farm.
Time has a way of coloring our memory. As we age some moments are forgotten and others conflated with those which do not belong. Childhood and youth become over-idealized in the face of much evidence to the contrary. I deliberately try not to do this and have little time for sentimentality. However, when I think back on the old farm, I generally don’t think of the strife. I don’t think of the hard labor my grandparents went through scraping out a subsistence living on that hard ground. Hauling up water from the cistern and walking to an outhouse in the middle of the winter do not come to mind. That farm is long gone, as are the people who lived and worked the land there. The people have died and the farm sold off, such is the transient nature of Man. But within my memory are the warm summers I spent along the creek behind the barn, fishing in the pond, and climbing in the willow tree. And always present is the never-ending song of the whip-poor-will.
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