Farm Life

            I live in London and have been in cities, big and small, since I was seventeen.  But my roots are in rural Louisiana and I grew up on a farm in the Mississippi Delta, snuggled between a small town and a small city and surrounded by flat fields of cotton, corn and soybeans. 

            Our farm has been in my Dad’s family for about 200 years and one of the highlights of his youth was when he and his sisters drove down to Louisiana from wherever they were living and had a vacation on the farm with his grandparents.  He worked on the farm as a young person and, eventually, followed a winding path through life into agriculture.

            My Mom comes from Cleveland and went to Barnard in New York City.  Through a series of events and after eight years in New York, she ended up teaching at Mississippi State, where she was set up on a blind date with my Dad.  According to him, the friend that set them up described her as ‘a weirdo from New York.’  Weirdo or not, they got married and she ended up spending the rest of her life to this day in Tallulah, Louisiana on a farm.  I admire her for that. I’m not sure I could have done the same.

             What our farm and the towns and cities near it lack in classical culture, is made up for in local culture.  Yes, we have museums!  There is the tiny Coca-Cola Museum in Downtown Vicksburg, the SS Cairo Museum (an impressive skeleton of a ship from the civil war), the hilly and beautiful military park with its occasional civil war reenactments and the stimulating Courthouse Museum. Actually, I can’t really comment on the Courthouse Museum, because I’m pretty sure I haven’t been there since I was in about the fourth grade.  The Miss Mississippi Pageant takes place yearly in Vicksburg and is quite the social event.  When we were kids, my mom would usually get tickets from one friend or the other and would take my sister and me, dressed in our pageant finest, to watch the glamorous beauty queens compete for the crown.  In the days that followed, and decked out in hand me down cocktail dresses from our grandmother, we would enthusiastically emulate all that we had learned from the pageant contestants.  It is probably a good thing that our future as beauty queens was limited to our imaginations.

            I’m not aware of any museums in our very small town, although on a recent jaunt into town with my Dad, it occurred to me that the entire town seems like a museum these days.  He spent half the time pointing out places that used to be. ‘That used to be the Ford dealership,’ or ‘That used to be the drug store,’ and ‘That used to be that gift shop that you kids liked to go to.’ Tallulah has a bayou that runs straight through it and in the bayou there are stalky looking electric Christmas trees, which stay up year round.  My grandmother used to say that Tallulah was romantic. 

Sadly, the landmark that Tallulah has been most famous for is its school for ‘bad boys.’  Whenever we were in town as children and would pass a light blue van, mom would say, ‘those are the bad boys.’  In recent years, the bad boys made the front page of the New York Times after it was exposed that they were being abused in horrifying ways by the guards at the Juvenile Delinquent facility and, since then, the facility has been shut down. Tallulah still has a high security prison. 

            But we didn’t live in Tallulah or Vicksburg. To this day, I don’t know what the name of our community is. It is near Tallulah and Vicksburg,  close to Mound and Thomastown, but not part of any of them.  We were on Route 2 my entire life, but since they got set up with Emergency Services and can now call 911, my parents have a new address that has nothing to do with the Route 2 of my childhood.  There is still debate about whether an ambulance would be able to find them, new address or not.

            Our life on the farm was fun, even though we longed to live in a neighborhood like ‘normal’ kids.  Back in the 80’s, cotton was still put into large trailers and each fall during the harvest my sister, brother and I would jump in the cotton.  It didn’t matter that it was usually still hot and the cotton stuck to our sweaty skin.  I look at the neat bails that cotton are put in now and feel sorry for the country kids of today who don’t get to experience the thrill of jumping in cotton.  And for the city kids who have never jumped from hay bale to hay bale or experience a hayride in a trailer pulled by a tractor on a chilly autumn evening.

            Our lives on the farm were filled with adventures that no suburb or city kid could imagine.  My young daughter and I spend our days going from one structured activity to the next in London, but I have already witnessed her, at younger than 18 months, thriving in the space and freedom that she has when we are on the farm. I hope that as she grows older, she’ll get to have the same sort of unstructured and rambling experiences that I had with my brother and sister. We fearlessly paddled down the snake filled bayou in front of our house in a kayak, climbed trees, ran through fields, scrambled on and into tractors, explored the musty, fertilizer dusted rooms of my Dad’s shop (in retrospect, probably not a good idea).  We watched farmers chewing tobacco and then imitated them using a mouth full of raisins.  We fished crawfish out of our swimming pool and spent our summers splashing around in the lukewarm water and playing games that sometimes landed one of us in the ‘quiet chair.’ We sacrilegiously rode four wheelers and our trusty go cart over the Indian Mound on the farm and ran through old cattle corrals.  We had a pet calf, lots of dogs and cats and some horses we hardly rode.  Our dad gave away two nasty little ponies to some local boys telling them that if they could catch them, they could have them.  We ate delicious vegetables from our parents’ vegetable garden and picked sweet corn out of the fields.  We sat around in rocking chairs snapping peas that we had picked from the garden and slapped at mosquitoes while we watched fireworks on Fourth of July. We camped out in our pecan grove or in the cow fields, watching the stars and listening to bull frogs in the bayou, harassed by our cats rubbing against our tents and usually ending up back inside because the mosquitoes were so bad or we got scared. I learned to drive on a standard shift diesel pick up truck and nearly drove my Dad and myself into the bayou during one of my early lessons.  Later, I bashed up the same truck while joy riding around the farm with friends.

            Even as adults, we love to go home to the farm.  There are more animals than ever—mostly cats and dogs now instead of cows and horses—and delicious food cooked by Mom, the same trees we used to climb as kids, a new vegetable garden in a different spot and the same swimming pool shaded by a tree that has grown over thirty years to keep it cooler than when we were young.   A few years ago, my husband and I lay in the pecan grove where we used to camp, watched th stars and listened to a barn owl hooting in the distance. At some point we realized that it was completely disrespectful to ride motorized vehicles over the Indian mound, but we still enjoy trekking across the fields to the cow pasture and riding in the pickup truck to the levy, where we can walk down to the banks of the always impressive Mississippi River. 

             I love the farm, and I have only happy memories about my childhood there. My parents made sure that we grew up open minded, well read and with access to culture and I’ve never felt like I was really a ‘farm girl’ because of all the opportunities that we had growing up.  But, when I went off to college, I never looked back.  I am grateful that my children will be able to build their own experiences in the place where I grew up, but I am also happy that they will likely grow up in cities.  They will have access to culture that we had to make a great effort to experience in our childhood.  They will, I hope, have the option of going to the kind of excellent public schools that are rare in Louisiana and of going to school with people from all cultural and ethnic backgrounds. It’s likely that they will move frequently throughout their lives, but I also hope that living around the world and the United States will help to shape them into interesting, passionate and worldly people. And when we all need a break from our busy city lives, we will head home to the farm, lie down in the pecan grove, look at the stars and listen to the bullfrogs, slap the mosquitoes and think how lucky we all are.