This August, in the loneliness of quarantine, I sold the farm in Yamhill County where I had lived for almost thirty years and moved into the city. The fruit trees my toddlers helped me plant were in the bountiful glory of their maturity. Livestock sheds, pasture rotations, and manure management had all been honed to clockwork function. Planning and labor and more than two decades of growth had brought the farm and me to the time of harvest, but instead of pressing cider and filling the basement pantry with jams and pickles, I filled two dumpsters with the odds and ends a farm and family collects.
I had thought I would always live there, and I relished the accumulation of seasons and my ever-growing intimacy with the old forest at my back. But my children grew up and moved on, and my husband and I reached the end of our road together. For the last five years, I managed the farm alone. Feeding animals twice a day, cleaning the barn and keeping up with the weeding and pruning and the maintenance of a large old house became harder to sustain and justify. Still, every plant in the sprawling garden had been placed by my hand. The wildflowers that bloomed in the forest persisted because I kept the ivy at bay. What real distinction was there between me and my place? How could I ever leave?
As if I would live forever. As if the farm would last forever. The truth was, I would leave that farm one way or another. Dead or decrepit or sooner, through catastrophe or thoughtful design.
I chose thoughtful design, and I think of this radical change in my life as practice for the changes I will meet in a radically changing world. We all face a future we might not have imagined, one that is different from the future we had planned for. We can hang on, pretending until circumstances end the game, or we can take stock and seek new opportunities and a new way of doing things.
Do I miss the farm? The way I miss childhood, fondly but with no real desire to return. I’m cultivating a new love and a new household, in a strange new neighborhood filled with people and dogs wearing raincoats. For now, the farm still grows in the shape I gave it. May it prosper! The farm will always live in me as I ripen the seeds planted by my engagement with it. I saw an owl in the middle of the afternoon down on 22nd and Johnson. A pack of crows pointed it out, those perennial tattle-tales. The owl, imperturbable despite the scolding, was not to be turned away. But as I age, I grow less fierce and less determined. My harvest is different than I once imagined, not the comfort of hearth and home but the ripe experience that bears new seeds. I hope to be ready, with an open heart and open mind, for whatever’s next.
— Jane Carlsen
