The Family Farm

Chapter One: A Town Frozen in Time

Just north of Olney—the suburb of Washington, D.C. where I grew up—is Brookeville. Down Old Market Street, you will see a square white stone house that is renowned for being the “White House for the Day” because President Madison and his staff found refuge there as the British Army burned the Capitol and the White House in 1814.
Continuing down the street, you will see many historic buildings. There is a faded red brick house, white-washed, with one side covered in ivy.
Unlike other towns in the county, Brookeville is like a world apart. The oldest incorporated municipality in Montgomery County, it was founded in 1794. Back then, Brookeville was a bustling market town with mills, a tanning yard, a blacksmith, and a seamstress, among other things. What’s left today is a relic from the past—but it has remained largely unchanged—a town frozen in time.
If you pass through the historic section of this town, you will come upon “Brookeville Road.” This ordinary road is more interesting than it appears. Partway down the road, a wooden sign reads, “Locust Grove.” At the top of a grassy hill, is an enormous horse barn—nine columns wide. You wouldn’t guess it, but this hill of grass is the edge of the largest piece of privately owned property in Montgomery County.
Although it was only miles from my home, I knew nothing about the existence of this farm or its owners until I moved there when I was 28. But before I go into detail about the O’Brien family and the farm, I’d first like to paint a picture for you of the rustic beauty of this area.
The places I am describing farther down Brookeville Road are not owned by the O’Brien’s. There are enigmatic names along this road, such as a street called “GrayHeaven Manor Road.” Two stone pillars on either side of a driveway mark the entrance to “Quarry Farm,” and the name is printed on the stone.
Near the end of Brookeville Road, some black cows lie in a field of buttercups, oblivious to the pretty picture they make.
My connection to the farm came through a friend of my father’s, Jocob, who is married to one of the O’Brien daughters.

Chapter 2: Mr. O’Brien

Mr. O’Brien was the owner of the farm and, at one point, had owned many acres in Montgomery County. He was born in Washington, D.C. in 1900 and grew up in the city. An ambitious young man, by his early 20s, he was ready to leave the scars of poverty behind. In Montgomery County, he discovered wide stretches of undeveloped land. For him, land meant riches—riches that could be touched and never taken away.
He was living the Manifest Destiny dream. Never mind that it was the 1940s. And so he started out by buying some acres by Zion Road. But the large stretches of unclaimed farmland were too alluring for the rising entrepreneur that Mr. O’Brien was becoming. And so he bought more, and more land—until he owned more than any other private owner in the county.
He married a woman 16 years his junior and they renovated a pre-Civil War mansion that already stood on the property for their family home. In the 1800s, it was an old boarding house for girls. Intricate stone masonry work graced one side of the house and a serene pond filled with leap frogs and lily pads was off to one side.
Mrs. O’Brien loved to garden and she spent her days tending to her vegetable gardens.
Mr. O’Brien was a hard worker and he rented out some of his acres to farmers to raise beef cattle. He and his wife had two girls, Gertrude and Mary. He was a strict father, but he had a gentle heart that melted often, even when his children had committed the worst deeds.
The O’Brien girls were truly “daddy’s girls.” In summer, they played by the pond, catching goldfish, and then—at dusk—they’d race home to hear his bedtime stories. Mr. O’Brien was a history buff, and he’d tell his girls glorious tales about the Roman Empire, Constantine, and the Gladiators.
On Halloween, the girls loved to play a joke on one of the tenants named Buddy. They’d string up a handmade ghost from the light in the abandoned shed. When he came home from work, it was swaying in the light breeze—illuminated by the light from the moon—and he nearly had a heart attack.
And in winter, the girls dragged their sleds to the top of the highest farm field, and slid down. Once, some cows had gotten loose from the barn and, as they sped down the hill, the cows bolted after them—their black and white hides nearly disappearing in the snow. The girls—half-laughing, half-screaming—were still small enough to squeeze through the middle of the electric fence.
One special apartment in the complex used to be the girls’ playhouse. I had only met the tenant who lived there now—Allie—once. On the stone floor of her apartment, the little O’Brien girls’ drawings live in infamy.
Mr. O’Brien was such a forceful personality that many of the men he employed on his farm and who worked for him for many years, still remembered and talked about him long after his death. He had been dead ten years (he died at the age of 103) when I moved onto the farm. And yet, some of the old-timers still referred to him as if he were alive. I remembered what my father had said to me: “He was the closest thing you’d get to an Earl around these parts.”

At age 97, Mrs. O’Brien lived alone in the mansion. The two daughters also live on the property—Gertrude with her husband and three kids lives on Locust Grove with the big horse barn and Mary lives at the end of the long driveway next to the cattle barn.

Chapter 3: The Cows’ Song

The day I moved to the farm was cold and misty. I drove north on Georgia Ave. in order to get to the driveway that was the entrance to my apartment. Along the way, I passed by a still pond that had the clear, dark outline of trees reflected in it.
The first thing I remember when I reached my building, was seeing the wide, clean field filled with brown and white dried cornstalks unfolding before it—and thinking how great it was to be able to live next to such a pristine piece of land. I breathed in deeply the air and cherished this view of the fields that demanded nothing—a refuge from distraction.
The farm field, which teemed with bright yellow cornstalks during the rest of the year, was dull that day—and a thin afternoon mist hung over it.
My mom had come with me and, as we got out of the car, a group of deer charged boldly through the mist across the open field. They went by swiftly—almost surreally—in one blur of motion. Of course I had seen deer before—hopping gently through the trees or grazing peacefully on the strip of grass near my parents’ house. But as I saw this, a picture came to mind of a herd of antelope thundering across the hot expanse of an African plain, leaving a cloud of dust in their wake.
After my mom had left me, I decided to go on a walk. I walked on the driveway in the opposite direction to the main road. Not far down the driveway, a gravel road veered off to the left, passing through a thin strip of woods. I decided to see where it led. A quiet peace filled me as I passed through the trees. On one side, a stream lay where the ground sloped downward.
Coming out on the other side, I was greeted by a breathtaking sight: It was like the land flowing with milk and honey. One hill of perfectly-cut green grass rose up before me. After it, I could make out the outline of the swell of another one—and another beyond it. Their crests lined up perfectly all the way to the sun. I continued up a long path that went up the first hill. At the top, I could see a magnificent house in the distance. Later, I found out that this was the other side of the property with the great horse barn.
Soon, I noticed that the sun was sinking down, and so I decided to go back.
Coming back out through the trees, a man on some kind of small motorized vehicle whizzed past and, seeing me, pulled over and stopped.

“Are you lost?” he asked (Later, I learned that his name was Jeff and that he was one of the farm workers.)

“No, I just moved in,” I replied.

“Oh, I was thinking that I’ve never seen you around the farm before.” Then he glanced at the gravel road where I had just come from and, leaning in close, pointed in its direction.

“Let me give you some advice. Don’t walk that way," he said. "They’re particular about who walks on their property.”

Then he rode away. I stood there, feeling like the thrill I had felt moments before at discovering that wondrous place hidden beyond the view from the main driveway, had been too suddenly taken from me.
That was my first introduction to the ways of the family who owned the farm. It was like the beginning of a story, in which the characters of the people who lived here would slowly develop and come to life as I learned more about them over the following months.
Later I learned that Jeff’s house had the best view of the farm. It had a spotless field in the front and the back of the home. The only downside was his large guard dog—Diesel—who would bark unceasingly when I passed by. Jeff’s girlfriend, dragging on a cigarette, would yell at him to be quiet—but of course he never was.
Lying in bed that first night, the sound of a low whining came through the open window. It has to be the cows, I thought, for I had seen them grazing in the pasture near my apartment earlier that day. Then I realized that the environment here was going to be very different from suburbia where I grew up.
Instead of the obnoxious sounds of passing traffic and lawnmowers on a Saturday morning when you had hoped to sleep in, the melody here was different. And so my first night on the farm, I closed my eyes and enjoyed a new kind of music—falling asleep to the steady rhythm of the cows’ song.

Chapter 4: Joan

One evening after work, I was preparing to go on a walk. My neighbor, Joan, pulled up in her car. I asked her if she’d gone on a walk yet, and she said she’d join me. We walked down the field in front of the apartment. Deer were grazing in the distance.

“See how their white tails go up in high alert when they are preparing to run,” she said. “I discovered that they make a whistling sound.”

Joan is a photographer and she takes photos of the wildlife around the farm.
She was a wealth of knowledge, as she had lived here many years ago. She’d moved away for a time, but she came back. The attraction of this place couldn’t be resisted—it drew people back like the love for an old friend.
Joan told me stories about her encounters with wildlife on the farm. One night, she was out on the side of the field taking trying to get pictures of the deer. Suddenly, out of the darkness, a deer appeared inches from her face. That’s when she said she discovered the mysterious whistle sound that they make.
Joan longed to sleep out on her deck under the stars once the weather warmed up. “I’d love to sleep right here in the middle of the field,” she said. “Except that it would be too dangerous with the coyotes.”
During our walk that night, dusk was falling. Up above, the puffy clouds seemed to be three-dimensional—the evening light poured down one side of a cloud and then followed the puffy outlines up through the middle, and finally landed in a pool of luminescent light on the upper left of the cloud.
We could hear a chirping sound as we walked back to the apartment.

“Hear that?” Joan asked. “Almost everyone thinks those are crickets. But they are actually the frogs singing on Mrs. O’Brien’s pond. Isn’t it romantic?” And she sighed.

When we got to the apartment, Joan began poking around the abandoned shed and underneath her deck, calling, “Bessie…here kitty, kitty.”

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I’m looking for Bessie,” she said. “She’s a Bengal with an orange tail—and so she’s hard to miss. But, poor thing, she only has one eye.”

“Aww…” I said. “So you can hold her and stroke her I suppose.”

Joan laughed. “Oh, no. She’s wild. I don’t touch her. There’s no way to know how she’d react. She’s used to fending for herself. Except…” and her voice dropped to a whisper. “I just know someone is feeding her. She’s way to plump for a cat her size and age, and she’s survived many a winter.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s Mary. That woman…if only she had half the compassion for human beings as she does for cats.” Joan pointed in the direction of Mary’s house which was just visible beside the horse barn. “She holes herself up in that house. And when she does cross your path, barely more than I few words she’ll say, looking past you as if you were invisible.”


Chapter 5: The Farm’s Guardians

On Saturday, my mom came over to go on a walk with me around the farm. As we were getting ready to go, Joan came down the steps from her deck.
“Are you going on a walk?” she asked. “If you wait a few minutes, I’ll come with you.” She walked with us around the farm, pointing out things that I would have never known.
We arrived at the driveway to Mrs. O’Brien’s house where great, shady sequoia trees lined both sides. The house was a grand sight. Joan pointed out the pond on the right where the leap frogs were. And, to the left, she pointed to a small log cabin.

“That’s where Mrs. O’Brien’s maid lives,” Joan said, in a tone which suggested that she thought it quite intriguing.

Joan said she goes over to the house once a week to talk to Mrs. O’Brien. Sometimes, the maid comes in, she said. She is a Swedish woman about 40 named Kristin. The maid reads to Mrs. O’Brien whose eyesight is failing.
Joan said that, once, she was walking too close to Mrs. O’Brien’s house and also on other parts of the property that were forbidden. Gertrude was driving by on the way to her mother’s house and stopped Joan. She told Joan that she couldn’t walk there.
But Joan has a close friendship with Mrs. O’Brien and she later got permission from the old lady to walk anywhere on the property that she desired.
Joan said she understood why the O’Brien women were so protective of the property. Developers were constantly pressuring them to sell this land that their family had preserved for decades.
But I could not share Joan’s favorable view of the sisters. Fresh in my mind, was Jeff’s admonition that I couldn’t walk on the most beautiful part of the property that lay beyond the woods. Why did they guard this land with such fierce protectiveness? I wondered.
I sensed that it was somehow linked to their identity, as it had been passed onto them by their father, and therefore, they had a responsibility to ensure its future. It was as if they viewed the land as a precious family heirloom to be kept safe from the world.

Chapter 6: Mary

One day, as I was walking down the driveway with my mother and Joan, Mary was passing by in her car and stopped when she saw us. It was the first time I had seen her up close. She had a cropped gray haircut and her mouth had not a hint of a smile. She appeared to look right through us, but her eyes were a soft, gentle blue. We said hello, and she said something as well which I cannot remember.
As she drove away, I saw her two large dogs bouncing high through the back window of her station wagon as she hit the potholes in the driveway.

After she left, I thought about her eyes, and I suddenly was pretty sure that there was something more beyond that cool exterior. Some sad story or some deeply felt hurt. In any case, I sensed that she had the makings of a good friend—steadfast and caring—once she decided to let you in.
Joan, as usual, had somehow picked up a wealth of knowledge about Mary, although she’d never had a real conversation with her. Apparently, Mary was a real intellectual and spoke five languages fluently. She’d spent time traveling through Europe and, at one point, single-handedly built a teepee where she lived for six months in the hills of Ireland.
But there was also another story about Mary that I surmised probably explained her sad exterior. It was a story that the family had kept secret for fear of embarrassment. It was what made her the black sheep of the family. Mary lived alone in her farm house down the road from her mother's house. She never married.
Mary was definitely the smarter of the two Nash girls. While Gertrude went to the University of Maryland, Mary went to Yale. Gertrude took the well-travelled route for a woman of her time, marrying right after college and then having two sons.
Mary, on the other hand, excelled at Yale and went on to become a professor. But that’s when things went downhill. Because of her lack of social adeptness, she couldn’t see human emotions, and instead held beliefs about love that she gleaned from black-and-white descriptions in philosophy or psychology.
But there was a young man in one of her classes—Mike—who she fell in love with. It was an attraction that she couldn’t suppress. You wouldn’t think she’d be attracted to a guy like this. He was strong and rugged. But he had a soul that you could really see into—transparent. It was how she longed for hers to be.
He sensed her attraction, but would never be interested in her, as Mary was not very attractive and her social mannerisms and awkwardness did not make her appealing to the rising basketball star that Mike was. They were from two very different worlds—hers one of privilege and opportunity, his of struggle. Basketball was his ticket to a better life.
However, Mike was in a bind and he saw this attraction as something that he could use to his advantage. His basketball scholarship hung in the balance because his GPA was just missing the mark for him to retain it. He needed to stay on the team—he felt his dream of playing in the NBA was in jeopardy.
So he did what any selfish and unethical young man in his position might have done. He pretended to return Mary’s affections and they went out on some dates. Towards the end of the semester, he was able to influence Mary to bump up his grade in the class—enough so that he met the requirements of the scholarship.
Of course, Mary held a significant part of the blame for this bad deed. But Mike was the only guy who’d ever shown an interest in her. She wasn’t like Gertrude, who had men falling at her feet. And Mary also knew that her parents expected her to marry.
Mary’s transgression was soon discovered and she was immediately fired. She lost everything: her job, her reputation, and Mike ceased to see her.

She retreated to her farm house. She was undone and unknown except to her immediate family. Ever since, her days have unfolded in ordinariness. Her family was disappointed in her, but they still loved her. But Mary couldn’t forgive herself and lived in denial. Her parents and sister began to be afraid to talk to her, because she put on airs as if she was still a successful professor. The workers around the farm whispered that perhaps she was losing her sanity.
The only creatures unafraid of her were the cows. There is something unthreatening about a cow, and perhaps that is why she spent her days around them. In the early morning, you could hear her calling for them to come back into the barn for their feedings, and they promptly responded to her call, ambling towards the large barn.


Chapter 7: Spring on the Farm

When spring sprung on the farm, the world turned to green and the cows came out to pasture. Purple shoots sprung up on the field where the corn would be planted in late spring.
One day, I sat on the stone wall overlooking the cow pasture. The cows were a mix of all different sizes, and the baby ones were intermixed between the adults. They looked like miniature figurines. They all wore tags around their necks.
When you walked away, the cows just stood there waiting, as if they didn’t understand why you were going and wondered when you were coming back.
I remembered what Joan had said about how, at some point, the babies are separated from their mothers and the mothers are sent to be slaughtered for beef. She said it is a heartbreaking sound that the mothers make when their babies are separated from them.
As I watched the baby colts, I noticed that every few seconds, they tossed their heads to get rid of the multitude of fleas buzzing around their eyes.

“Poor creatures,” I thought. “There must be some way to rid the pain of such a simple irritation.”

And it reminded me of Mary, because in a way she was like these baby colts—fighting the shame and no one could help her. One of the mother cows was trying to get closer to the fence and, in her haste, she knocked into her baby, and the poor thing almost toppled over.

Chapter 8: A Return to the Familiar

One day, I decided to go back to my parents’ house to visit. I walked down the blue bike bath behind their house. It was about to rain and the clouds were dark and heavy.
At the end of the path, I noticed a child’s pink sock fringed with lace was hanging over the narrow rail of the top rung of the fence. How did it get so carefully placed there? I wondered. It was like a sign of hope under the dark, luminous clouds. Such a sock would never be found on the farm, I thought. Life moved so slowly there—the only thing fresh and new were the baby colts born each spring.
That sock left so carelessly there made me nostalgic for my parents’ home.

Chapter 9: The Doors That Couldn’t Talk

Joan also told me all about the other tenants in the apartments. Bart, the maintenance man, was a real character. He was older and had a hurt knee and so he couldn’t handle a lot of the farm equipment that he once had been able to. He spent many days working in his large garden, which was to the side of the apartment overlooking the field.
One day, as I passed by the garden, I saw what I considered a wonder of nature: two butterflies faced each other and their legs and antennae matched up perfectly in an embrace. This is what I love about the farm, I thought. The fresh open landscape—the freedom from noise and distraction—allows for such moments of quiet beauty.
Bart almost always had his poodle, Pewee, out on this deck. When I would go on walks down the driveway, Peewee would continue barking at me until I got all the way to the end. Bart told me that Peewee has poor hearing.

I said, “Well, there certainly isn’t anything wrong with his eyesight.”

In front of the apartment, is a large shed piled high with chopped wood because Roger uses it to heat the apartments.
Bart had a close relationship with Mr. O’Brien. He knew things that Mr. O’Brien had done regarding the apartments. One particularly disturbing thing were the pieces of house structures that Mr. O’Brien had collected. The heavy wood doors to our apartments apparently came from St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital in Washington, D.C., which has since closed.

“If doors could talk,” I mused.

What human suffering did they shut in?—keep hidden from the ignorant world. It made me uncomfortable to know that the doors to my apartment once had been like a prison to those less fortunate.

Chapter 10: Alexandre

One evening, I was taking a stroll down the driveway when I noticed a car pulling up slowly behind me.

“Don’t worry,” a man called out. “I am driving slowly.”

I had stepped off onto the side of the road. Startled to see a strange man staring at me in the near darkness, I asked, “Who are you?”

An older man, perhaps in his 60s, with a wrinkled face and eyes that sparkled when he smiled, looked back at me.

“I am Alexandre,” he said. “I live in the duplex next to your apartment. Bart tells me that you are moving into the bigger apartment. I used to live there.”

“I would offer you a ride,” he added in his heavy French accent. “But I can see that you are walking for health.”

I remembered what Joan told me before: people on the farm rotate around to different apartments, but they tend to stay for a long time.
It was as if they were people rooted in the familiar. They were like riders on a merry-go-round—trying different animals, but staying on the same ride—the same scenery that gave them comfort over and over again.

Chapter 11: Winter on the Farm

One morning, I awoke to a scene of a winter wonderland. The field was covered in a clean bed of snow. It was a virgin snow—a snow that would have been a crime to tarnish. Driving down the lane towards the main road, the branches hung low. The tips of their narrow, knurly branches reached towards each other across the lane, weighed down slightly by the thin layer of snow that balanced perfectly over each branch.
I inhaled sharply at the beauty, and waited for the spell to be broken.
I half expected the wicked winter witch to glide through on her sleigh, the bells jingling. I thought this because the scene looked straight out of the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis.

Chapter 12: The Maid’s Torment

Another time, I walked to the mailbox at night. Standing there in the cold, crisp air—enveloped by the deep darkness of the night—my eyes were drawn toward Mrs. O’Brien’s house and to the tiny cabin of her Swedish maid that was beside it. I saw a thin curl of smoke rising up from it—to the black sky and the stars above twinkling softly in the great arc of the heavens.
This doesn’t happen in modern times, I thought. Yet, here I stood—alone and surrounded by hushed silence—watching a scene that seemed transported from earlier times.
I felt a certain tingling—an excitement, like when you are on the verge of making a great discovery.
Suddenly, I wanted to peek inside that cabin. I found myself walking down Mrs. O’Brien’s driveway, shivering at the shadows of the large sequoia trees the moonlight cast across the path.
Reaching the cabin, I saw a candle flickering in the windowpane.

Inside, Kristin sat on a stool. She wore a thin cotton nightgown and her long golden hair was tied in a loose braid. On her lap, was a large spool of yarn. She sat upright and rigid and her back was towards me.
All of a sudden, she got up and walked to the door, swinging it wide open so that the cold night air rushed in. Then she stepped right out into the snow in bare feet, her white nightgown billowing in the night wind.
Then her voice first came in a slow whisper, but gradually grew louder until it reached a fevered pitch.

“Emmaline… Emmaline!” she called into the forbidding night.

I felt my stomach go into knots. Something was terribly wrong.
Then, just as abruptly, she went back inside and resumed her position.
I walked back to my apartment in the darkness, wondering what heavy weight hung upon this woman—and haunted by that desperate look in her eyes.
For the next few nights, I swore I heard that same calling for Emmaline on the night breeze as I went down for bed. I had to know what ailed the woman.
A few days later, I got the opportunity. Meeting Buddy in the laundry room, I told him everything I had seen.

“Oh, that poor tortured woman,” he said. “She’s been through so much pain. Her baby died about ten years ago—born through an affair with a farm hand. I daresay she’s never gotten over it.”
I thought about the fragility of life then. How my own life was so rich with opportunity, so untainted by sorrow. Yet one simple, unexpected event could change all that. And I could lose my sanity too.

Chapter 13: Refuge from the Storm

One night, a few weeks later, there was a bad winter storm. From my apartment window, I watched the snow swirl around fiercely. It was a blinding snow—one that wouldn’t be safe to drive in.
The next morning, the snow had stopped. I walked out to get my mail from the mailbox. I overheard the farmhands talking. They were talking about Kristin. Apparently, she had disappeared last night. I gathered that search parties were being sent out.
About a week later, I was walking down the driveway in the direction of Mary’s barn. I was used to hearing Mary’s voice calling for the cows. But this time, the voice summoning the cows was different: it was softer and gentler.
Curious, I approached the barn. And, suddenly, there she was—Kristin! It was the first time I had seen her face-to-face.

“Who are you?” she immediately asked.

I was still so shocked at seeing her there that I couldn’t manage a reply. “I, I…”.

But then at that moment, Mary pulled up in her station wagon. I shifted uncomfortably. Was she going to reprimand me for being on her property without permission? But to my surprise, Mary got out of her car and smiled when she saw me.

“Kristin here is helping me bring the cows in,” she said matter-of-factly.

I had to know how Kristin got there. “The storm,” I blurted out. “Did you find her?” I said to Mary.

“Oh, yes. Soaked through and shivering to the bone. I was driving by…Come on, Kristin, let’s go get our tea now.”

Then without saying goodbye, Mary abruptly turned and walked into the house with Kristin.
I didn’t tell anyone that I had seen Kristin. Something about Mary’s abrupt leaving made me think that there was more I didn’t know; I decided to let Mary be the one to reveal Kristin.
A few weeks later, I received an invitation to tea from Mary in the mail. I had sensed that something in Mary was changing. When she passed me by on the driveway, she seemed less reserved, less guarded. Still, I didn’t quite know what to make of the invitation.
Mary had the table laid out in a very organized fashion. Everything was just-so. As we sat down, she said, “I sensed you wanted to know more about Kristin, and so I thought you should know what happened.”
“When I found her near my barn, she was calling for Emmaline. I knew there was no way to get her out of the cold, and so I asked her if I could help her look. She was nearly hysterical by this point and nearly freezing, and so I was able to coax her into my car. Within minutes, in the warm heat, she was fast asleep.
“The next day I woke her at dawn and told her she needed to help me bring the cows in for their feeding. Somehow she related to those cows.

Since she’s been here, she hasn’t called for Emmaline.”

“So you saved her life,” I said in wonderment. “And no one knows. Don’t you think you should tell them?”

Mary replied, “Kristin’s happy here I think. If people find her with me, that’s fine. But I won’t be the one to tell them.”

It was the old Mary shining through. She didn’t want to draw attention to herself, yet she didn’t care how that affected others. If they thought Kristin was dead, that didn’t impact her, and so why should she care?
It was similar to how she didn’t like it when the spotlight was cast on her after she was fired from her teaching position, but she also didn’t care about the shame it brought on her family.
Yet I still saw what a good deed Mary was doing. She was helping to alleviate Kristin’s grief and, in doing so, she was also overcoming her years-old humiliation.
It was as if both women had found refuge here on the farm—an escape from the past. And I, although I was only a bystander witnessing this interaction, hadn’t I too found a refuge on this farm—hadn’t I escaped to the family farm?
And, oh, what had I been trying to escape?—the trappings of the city, perhaps, or the confusion of young adulthood?

Chapter 14: A New Direction

Near my 30th birthday, I decided to move back to the city. I’d got a job as a paralegal at a firm in San Francisco. I lugged my things out to my car in the pre-dawn light because I had an early flight to catch to California. I took one last look around the farm before I left. The cicadas had come out this summer, and they were louder than ever.
I listened for the sound of the leap frogs on Mrs. O’Brien’s pond, but the cicadas were drowning them out this time.

“Goodbye,” I whispered—though to whom or what, specifically, I didn’t know.

There was such much fuel for the imagination here, so many special memories—the people, the animals, the scenery.
But I was really thinking that just maybe—like Joan—I’d be back one day.
As I drove away, I decided to take a detour down another road close by the farm. This road, Gregg Road, has a babbling brook filled with large rocks at its entrance.
Farther down, some ugly cows lazed around in knee-deep mud by a broken down barn. A ways down the road, there was even the front part of an abandoned shed swaying in the breeze. The top window was cut out and—through it—you could see the wide field that went on and on in the distance.
But what struck me most along this road, was the cluster of old tombstones encircled by a thin rusted fence that was off to one side of the road.
On the opposite side of the road, sat modern and expansive houses. The gravestones within the fence fell in all directions, a couple of spiny trees rising up around them. One stone lay half-fallen against a tree, another had a miniature confederate flag sticking out.
The circle of lopsided tombstones seemed to serve as a reminder that almost everything from an earlier age can be demolished, but the things honoring the dead won’t be touched. Maybe only after the stones have fallen all the way to the ground and been covered over by grass, and the rusted fence has been blown down by a finally-powerful-enough gust, will people forget these relics from the past—and build homes on them or plow fields.