Perhaps it is because I’ve moved so many times in adulthood (a couple of dozen) and so few in childhood (once) that place has less of a hold on me than it used to.
It’s not that I don’t have fond memories of special places in my life, it’s just that those memories are more about the people I associate with those places. That most of those people are dead makes the places less, not more, special for me.
The most special place for most of my life was my mother’s parent’s farm in South-Central Illinois.
If I looked at that land simply as a piece of geography and valued it on its topographic qualities alone, it would be the antithesis of my ideal. As a Missourian, I like hills, hollows, rivers, and streams. Hiking through deep woods; on top of a mountain watching clouds float by; or at the ocean experiencing the tide are where I feel the most affinity with physical places.
The Farm, as my family has always called it, is table-top flat. If you set a ball on the ground there, no amount of kicking or coaxing would get it to roll. Yet, I remember pulling up in front of the two-story house that had been home to my grandparents and great-great-grandparents and thinking there was no place on earth I loved more.
I had sat for many contented hours at the big kitchen table listening to stories of misery and mirth about the people who had lived there or nearby.
There had been 12 children born to the first family members who lived there. Six lived to adulthood. I know them all by the stories passed to my brothers, cousins, and me at that kitchen table.
I could take you to a small country cemetery a couple of miles away and walk you by headstones, telling you the life stories of many of the people buried there — most of whom I know only through those stories.
My great-great-parents had originally owned a place many miles north of the farm. It was there they paused one day to watch Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train take him home to Springfield.
They had planned to move to Oregon when they left their original home. Their wagon loaded to the hilt, they made a farewell visit to Great-great-grandma’s sister. It was too much. She said she could not leave, so they bought the farm.
(Note to wife: To this day men in my family continue to make great sacrifices for the women they love.)
The farm was sold after my great-great-grandfather died. A couple of his children used their proceeds from the sale to finance their educations and became doctors.
When my grandfather returned after World War One, he married my grandmother and they brought the farm back into the family. My great grandmother, who helped engineer the purchase, had settled on the adjoining farm and was apparently overjoyed to have her daughter and son-in-law as neighbors. (See what I mean about making sacrifices?)
I can take you to the farm today and show you the place my grandfather went to his knees when he suffered the first pangs of a heart attack that felled him on the porch a few feet away,
He had gone to an outbuilding to gather some pieces of weathered wood. He intended to make a frame for a family picture my father had taken that Christmas. On the way back to the house, his knees buckled and he went to the ground, then got up and took his final steps. My uncle followed grandpa’s tracks in the snow and showed me the spot where he fell.
Every family member contributed to his eulogy. For my part, I wrote, “His last steps were taken as were his first, with a purpose and a will. And his way was marked by mended fences and healed hearts.”
My grandmother spent most of her remaining years at the farm. She died about 10 years later at my uncle’s house. Her last trip back to the farm was to be buried beside my grandfather and among those long-gone relatives, she had told us about at that kitchen table.
My mother sold her interest in the farm to my uncle, who took care to tell me I was always welcome there. That is a courtesy my cousins extend to this day, though I haven’t been there in over a decade.
I spent many wonderful hours with my uncle at the farm reminiscing about the people we knew from shared memory and from the memories those people had shared with us.
When my uncle and, a few years later, my aunt died, they were brought back to lie among those many loved ones who were known to me in life or by legend.
Once the farm had been a gathering place for holiday celebrations, idyllic youthful summers, and a getaway for a single dad to take his children. However, with the pull of different tides, my generation drifted away from the farm. It became less a tangible place and more of a memory.
Often when I traveled, I would drive within a few miles of the farm. When my uncle was visiting, I always veered from my route to spend a night or two with him there. After he died, I always sped on my way. I did not want to go there to sit in empty rooms.
When the house burned several years ago, I was surprisingly relieved. It meant my cousin who had been tasked with caring for the place was free to focus on her children and grandchildren. You should not be tied to a place or thing when there are lives to be lived elsewhere.
The land is still there. Crops are planted every spring and harvested every fall, but the work is done by people who rent the land.
Like the crops of a bygone season, the people I knew, who seemed planted at the farm, have all been harvested. But, unlike gathered plants, those people continue to grow in my memory and in my heart. They are not moored to a place. They are with me wherever I am. And I plant the seedlings of their lives in every story I tell about them to my children, nieces, nephews, and grandchildren.
This essay originally appeared in Crow’s Feet