Thought & Memory

A Thing I Wrote for Class About My Favorite Place.

               I grew up on farms, both in New England and Virginia. My parents still live on a small farm about an hour away, the one we first moved to almost twenty years ago.  When I say small, I do mean small. We have five acres and on that five acres we have nine goats, four sheep, and five chickens. We have three dogs and a small colony of stray cats that my dad feeds on the back porch. They each have a name. But in addition to our small menagerie there is a barred owl who lives in the woods that we hear at night, along with a chorus of toads and whippoorwills. Once while weeding the garden, my sister almost picked up a small green snake instead of a handful of deadnettle. Hummingbirds, honey bees and clear-wing moths gather in the bergamot flowers that are planted all over to tempt pollinators into the garden. Sometimes at dusk, deer graze at the edge of the pasture. And when night falls, fireflies compete with the stars in their flickering brightness.

               I love that farm more than I can say. I always feel comforted and connected, restored to myself, when I spend time there. I love the way the air smells, the greenness of everything. I love each of the animals and their particular personalities: Blue, our most mischievous goat, or Charlotte the most stately. Bringing food from the farm back to Richmond feels like a luxury. Milk and eggs fresher by a mile than any I could buy in the store. Cucumbers, eggplants, tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, herbs – all from my mother’s garden, all that I witnessed while they created themselves out of nothing but soil, sunlight, rain and one seed.  The farm gives me a sense that the world is structured on a skein of associations big and small – tug one little thread and the ramifications ripple throughout. It reminds me that the rain falls just like a benediction. That miracles, paradoxically, happen every single day.