The Farm
When I was a little kid, we moved around a lot. We lived in the Midwest, multiple places on the West Coast, we even lived in the desert for six months. Finally, when I was about to start middle school, my parents settled us into their forever home back in the Midwest. It was massive. A four thousand square foot old, falling down farmhouse nestled into twelve wooded acres and surrounded by rolling corn fields. Walking inside for the first time felt like we had entered another era. The house was built in 1901 by a local land shark who had nine children. It boasted five bedrooms upstairs, a library, a parlor, kitchen, dining room, living room, basement, a massive attic with the original wood flooring, and one small bathroom. It also hadn’t been updated since the 1970s. The kitchen was avocado green, the claw foot porcelain bathtub was hidden behind a rectangular plywood box painted harvest gold. Most of the plaster walls had four or more layers of wallpaper firmly glued down. Most of the multi-planed windows needed to be repaired or replaced. The woods had been used as the family’s person dumpster and were filled with decades of trash. There were multiple buildings outside as well. The main barn was huge, had once housed livestock and was complete with bales and bales of ancient hay. The rickety structure was painted red like most out buildings in the area and stood alongside a stone silo with a tin roof. There was also a Grainery, two separate workshops, a chicken coop, and a garage haphazardly attached to the house that had been built sometime in the last fifty years.
It was January when my parents moved me and my five siblings into this renovation wonderland. We spent the first couple of months stripping wallpaper, helping dad repipe the bathroom, and painting every surface in sight. Except for the wood trim in the main living areas downstairs. Those and the build in cabinets and the grand front staircase, were left with their original staining from the early 1900’s. The kitchen was all white expect for the sky-blue wallpaper mom put up. It had little white and yellow flowers on it. To this day, I still think family kitchens should be blue and white. That first spring we spent warm days cleaning up the woods of garbage and broken glass. We found old, glass Coca-Cola bottles from the 1960’s and rusty tins with the word Aspirin painted on the front. We were forever finding treasures in the attic, new trees to climb in the vast woods and unearthing flower beds under jungles of weeds that spread across the once groomed lawn.
It was the eight of us against decades of neglect and unuse.
-Helen