Chapter 2: The Farm
Chapter Two The Farm
The farm spread away in all directions from my heart. It encompassed some 100 acres of rich land on the banks of the Willamette River, where over the years we grew many crops, but mainly seed corn, the tall plants crowding the fields with their tassels and brilliant yellow cobs. I lived in its Emerald City and spent my days wandering the woods and meadows of Gillikan, Winkie, Quadling, and Munchkin country (during these years my father's older sister, Mary, sent me an Oz book on every traditional occasion and, as there were several dozen in the series, they provided a fantasy world to weave into my real one).
To reach the farm we had taken a journey from the eastern end of the country to the west. Travelling by car, we arrived first in New Mexico to stay for a year or so with my mother's Aunt Lou and her husband, Uncle Joe. I have no memories of this time, but my favorite black and white photograph of my mother, father, and me was taken then and hangs on the wall in this room where I write. There is a sidewalk along the edge of a wooden house. My parents are sitting next to it on an overturned box looking at some object, a piece of paper perhaps. They are wearing jeans and scuffed shoes and my father, already going bald in his 30's, is in a white sweatshirt.
My mother is squinting in the sunlight, looking on with interest. Her lovely hands are resting on her knees, the left one dangling in a graceful line toward her shoe. I am kneeling on the sidewalk in front of them looking toward the camera. White-blond curls leap out from the hood of a thick cardigan sweater with embroidery in heavy yarn down its front. I look safe. We are together in the fall brightness.
In the few other little photos from this period we look like vagabonds, sitting at picnic tables in the park. I was to have my own drifting years to come and these images of my parents represent for me a link from my own history to theirs.
During these Second World War years, I am unsure why my father was not sent to fight. In my mind there is a story that at some time he had wanted to enter West Point and had been disqualified for physical reasons, perhaps that he was too thin to float in water. It is a vague memory. What I do know is that after New Mexico we came to Portland, Oregon and here my father worked in the shipyards, learning the skill of drafting which would enable him to create complex buildings on the farm in later years. He was gifted at this, as he was at many things, and I think he wished in later life that he had turned to architecture rather than psychology in school.
My mother also contributed to the war effort. She was granted a War Emergency Certificate to teach nursery school in Vancouver, Washington, minutes across the Willamette River from where we lived, and she also organized Victory Gardens in our precinct of Portland.
During these years, when I was two, three, and four, we lived in a small house within a few blocks of the home of my grandfather on my father's side. This past summer I went with my daughter to find that house, not having seen it in 50 years. It was a sunny day, and we found it vacant and for sale so that we could approach it and even look through the windows. Inside, I could see the spot on the living room floor where I began to write my "a,b,c's." In the back was the bedroom where I lay in my crib with the chickenpox. To the right of the front door was a closet where "Uncle" Chet, who with his wife Lou were friends of my parents and shared the rent of the house with us, told me a wolf was hiding. He and I would sit on the couch listening to the huffing from behind the door. These are my earliest memories.
When we left I picked a flower from the yard and brought it home for pressing. Another delicate, tangible link to long ago as I follow the thread of my life story.
When I was four, my mother and father separated. My father went to California to work in an aircraft plant and my mother and I to the farm. They corresponded and eventually reconciled approximately six months later near my fifth birthday. I am told that I didn't mention my father for most of the time he was gone but when he returned I flew across the room and into his arms. I don't remember this, but I do remember a tiny silver airplane pin he sent to me. I can see it clearly pinned to his coat in the closet of the house in the farm of my childhood.
Thus began the years we were all together. Until I was 17, it was my extraordinary luck to know no other world but this one of crops growing, rivers flooding, animals being born and dying, fresh nature-scented air, and adults who worked hard to nurture it all. I had no way to know how I would miss it years later in the perspective of city life and world travel and grown-ups who have lost their way.
Far away in the kingdom of long before dawn, snow flowers open downward in the dark. In the long barn cows rest, the lashes dark against their eyes, and outside meadowgrass stutters with the cold and listens to the river turning white. Morning, and a child stands in the door.
Her name is youngest flower. From the windows there are two who watch across her to the elm where no one plays often, to the rose garden of the grandmother, and the fairest tree of all, even its name, larch, is music. They are called the king and the queen.
The king is sitting where you cannot see his height, but he is tall enough to speak to birds when they are flying and perhaps you hear his fields grow when you hold his hand. The queen is not so tall, because of bending down so often to the river or the earth and yet her arms will fit around almost anything. The whole of morning they have been there, thinking.
It is Christmas and this year they want to find for youngest flower the most lovely gift of all her life. Before it was a small green house beneath the larch, and once a bed of pansies, and another time a cradle fashioned by the king himself. And far into the afternoon they smile together with the answer coming to them separate and same.
The dark comes quiet and the moon climbs down the branches of the trees and walks across the graves of last year's clover to the edges of the windows where it sings that youngest flower has been given dreams to open…
Night is all around. It breathes into three faces framed by love and in the last moment before sleep, when every shadow rests against another, it begins to whisper, alleleuia.
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