This Old Farm

Out the window the yard is glowing in brilliant spring sunshine.  The wind (which never seems to stop blowing on the hill) has a decided chill to it, but it is too beautiful to stay inside.  The men are busy spreading fertilizer in the hay field in front of the house.  As soon as they started I began to worry that they would crush the late buttercups that bloom just over the hill.  They try to straddle them but in the big picture of expensive fertilizer and needed hay, my buttercups will be sacrificed if need be.   As soon as they finished I wandered out to see what damage had been done.  To my delight I was greeted with the sight of pale yellow blooms nodding in the breeze.

These buttercups are part of the flowers that were planted around the original home on this site.  Over the years with freezes and thaws, plowing, digging varmints, and various other reasons for the dirt to shift, they have migrated from the top of the hill to the middle of the hay field.  Instead of the usual bright gold trumpets surrounded by a single row of petals of the other buttercups in the field, these have a triple row of surrounding petals in a pale yellow, making them look a lot like a tiny peony bloom.   For some reason, while the foliage is always thick and healthy, they manage to bloom only occasionally.  Some years they bud, but never open.  Sometimes they just grow and don't bud at all.  This is evidently their year.

As I stood, surrounded by their blooms I looked back up the hill at the farm house and thought about all the people that had lived, loved, laughed,and cried, on that land.   Our little church in town will celebrate it's 250th anniversary this year.  The actual church building isn't quite that old, having been built slightly over 200 years ago.   That shows that the town was a thriving community, able to support the building of a fine brick church, by the early 1800's.

I love our little farm house but since it was built in the late 1940's or early 1950's it's a relative newcomer to the land.  When we remodeled several years ago we discovered that parts of the house pre-dated the mid-1900's style.  A little questioning uncovered the fact that the house we live in had been built after a tornado partially destroyed the previous house.  The family had just incorporated parts of the house left standing into the new home.  When we excavated for an addition we discovered huge foundation stones that probably were from a structure even older than the one hit by the tornado.   Logical, since the farm was originally part of a land grant given to a Revolutionary War soldier for his service.

For at least, 200 years farmers had been raising livestock, cutting hay, planting crops, and living on this land.  They had loved it, cared for it and left it, hopefully better, for those who came after them.

 So as I stood in the sunshine gazing across the farm, I wondered which farm wife had ordered the bulbs, planted the flowers, and enjoyed their beauty.  How many people had enjoyed their bright blooms on a spring day before me?

What I really wonder is, will our husbandry of the land leave such an enduring sign of our passing?