The Farm

Kansas is a land of golden wheat fields with pricks of grass poking out in between the shocks of wheat, cows that lull their tongues out in the dry, dusty fields, corn stalks bathed in the golden beams of sunset. Kansas is a land of farms and farmers. My earliest memories of Kansas are of “the farm,” the home of my grandparents, who were not truly farmers and did not have the sprawling acreage typical of many Kansas farms.  On paper, the farm was 100 acres, but it may as well have been 1 million acres, as large as the land sprawled in my mind.

My grandparents’ house on the farm had once housed six children and two adults, with one small bathroom for all confined to share. My own time staying at the farm meant freedom, running in the waist-high bluegrass that grew next to the house, poking at the ancient refrigerator abandoned by the house decades ago in the past and wondering if children really could become trapped behind its massive metal door. The farm was a place of no rules – Cap’n Crunch cereal for breakfast, Windmill Cookies with vanilla icing for dessert, and condensed Campbell’s Tomato Soup for lunch.

My grandparents passed away when I was young, but the farm remained. When my grandmother died suddenly of a heart attack one snowy January morning on the very same day that we were scheduled to fly down to Kansas from Seattle, she had purchased raw steaks to prepare for us for our visit. Those steaks were stored under the front seat of her 1978 Oldsmobile, unbeknownst to the rest of the visitors to the farm, until the connection was made months later in a hot July day after it was concluded that something must be dreadfully wrong with the farm in general and the Oldsmobile in particular. These steaks were like everything else at the farm – unyielding, frozen in a moment in time, exhibits in the display of life that were stuck despite the march of years beyond the farm.

A large cellar down a rickety staircase contained Del Monte canned peaches, Smucker’s strawberry jelly, Campbell’s Tomato Soup. My grandparents had lived through the Great Depression as teenagers and young adults, and these provisions whose stamped expiration dates listed years that had passed decades ago were security against future wild economic swings. The nearby barn similarly housed every piece of faded fabric that my grandmother had ever used to sew for her six children, the edges of the cloth gnawed by rats and the decades of dust piling high in the folds.

I would love to take my own children back the farm someday, back to the place with unyielding freedom and few boundaries. But the farmhouse as I remember it is no more. After my grandparents both passed away in 1988 and 1989, the farm remained in the hands of my dear aunt and uncle – but the house was no longer inhabited. Word spread among the local teenagers in Mulvane, Kansas, and eventually, one blisteringly hot (or was it numbingly cold?) morning, we received a phone call that the entire house had been engulfed in flames and was no more. The farm lives on in our family heritage, the pond and the land in much better shape than had ever been in decades past, but with the farm of my childhood existing no more.

But sometimes, when the cicadas sing loudly on a hot summer night, or when I dump in the contents of a can of Campbell’s Tomato Soup to make for my own family, I am transported back to this place of golden wheat stocks, of lulling cows, the sickly sweet smell of rotting steaks. And I would give anything to go back again for one last visit.