I Can't Go Home Again

I was born in the hospital in Windom, Minnesota on May 16, 1947.  After a short stay my parents took me home to the farm on section twenty nine of Springfield Township, Cottonwood County, Minnesota.  The farm was 320 acres on the west side of the section and the house, barn and other outbuildings were located just ½ mile north of the intersection of Minnesota Highway 62 and county road 5.

It was an idyllic setting.  The house was antiquated, with no running water or centralized heating system.  We did have electricity, but there were times when kerosene lanterns would have to be used because a strong thunder storm or snow storm knocked out the power. There was an oil burning stove in the living room and a coal and cob burning stove in the kitchen which served the dual purpose of cooking our meals and keeping the kitchen warm on those cold winter nights.  It wasn’t until the mid 1950’s that we finally got running water to the house.  Prior to that our drinking water came from the well located down by the barn and the water used for laundry, baths, and dishwashing was hand pumped from a cistern on the north side of the house.  Of course, no running water meant trips to the outhouse whenever nature called.  In the middle of a Minnesota winter that was certainly not a particularly enjoyable experience.

Saturday nights were bath nights and everyone in the family had to take a bath, dirty or not.  After a week I’m pretty sure that we all qualified as dirty.  Baths were taken in a galvanized tub with water that was heated in pails on the old kitchen cook stove.  In the winter the tub would be placed in front of that kitchen stove because that was the warmest place in the house.   We kids had our baths early and, I suspect, that Mom & Dad’s baths came after we were all safely tucked into bed.

During the winter months the only rooms used on the main floor were the living room, kitchen and a porch on the north side of the kitchen where my mother had her washtubs and a ringer washing machine.  The doors to the rest of the rooms on the main level would remain closed until spring because what heat that the oil burning stove could provide was needed just to keep the living room and kitchen warm.  Upstairs there were four rooms and two large storage closets, but just two rooms were heated by registers in the floor that allowed heat to come in from the living room stove below.  My parents slept in one of those rooms and my brothers and I crowded into the other. 

In the 1950’s in rural Minnesota television sets were not found in many homes.  A neighboring family was the first around to own one of those amazing talking picture boxes and we were privileged to be invited over several times to watch with them.  It wasn’t until I was around six years old that we finally got our own TV.  At first there was only one station to watch, KELO from Sioux Falls.  Occasionally we would pull in a weak signal from a Sioux City station and eventually more stations became available and were added to our viewing choices.

Though this description of my early childhood might seem quite primitive to many people, especially those much younger than I, that farm and that old house hold many fond memories for me.  Memories that recall a life that felt simple and carefree. 

The farmstead was surrounded by box elder trees, walnut trees, and evergreens near the house and cottonwoods and poplars in a shelter belt to the north and northwest edge of the farm site.  Each spring and fall hundreds of blackbirds would come to roost in those trees on their migration journey.   I remember many cool crisp fall days walking near the shelter belt, my feet rustling through fallen leaves, listening to the cacophonic sounds of those huge flocks of birds.   Occasionally I would throw a rock up into one of the trees and instantly the cackling would stop and the birds would take flight, filling the sky like a big dark cloud as they moved on toward their ultimate destination.  It never was long, however, before another huge flock would come by, settle into the trees, and serenade us again with their noisy, inharmonious, warbling.

Perhaps my earliest memories go back to around the year 1950.  I would have been three years old that summer.  I remember that we still had a team of work horses on the farm back then. My grandfather was often the one driving the team and I remember him stopping in the yard near the house when they would come in from the field pulling a wagon load of hay or straw.   When he pulled back on the reins and hollered “whoa” the horses would stop and stand there snorting and stomping the ground, impatiently waiting to move on. Perhaps they were anxious to head for the barn and the stock tank filled with cool water to quench their thirst.  I was both fascinated and afraid.  Those horses were really big.

When my dad was in the field my mom would have to feed the chickens and collect the eggs.  I have a vivid memory of going with her to the granary to get a bucket full of shelled corn for the chickens. I was thrilled to be able to go along and help with that chore.  It was fun to scatter the shelled corn on the ground and watch the chickens come running from all directions to gobble up the little golden nuggets.  The problem was that in order to get from the house to the granary we had to open the gate to the fenced area where the horses were kept.  I remember holding tightly to my Mom’s hand as we walked through to the granary and back again, all the while keeping a wary eye on those big animals. 

Chickens were much less scary than horses to a three year old.  I remember one time my Mom let me go outside to play in the yard but it wasn’t long before I got bored with whatever I was doing and decided to go and visit the chicken coop. I must really have been fascinated by those funny looking birds because as I was looking through the chicken wire door of the coop my mother was franticly searching around the yard for me.  I still remember how upset she was when she found me standing there among the chickens and not in the front yard where I was supposed to be.  I guess that was the first time in my life that I was in trouble!

There are so many reasons why I loved that old place.  I took my first steps there.  I learned to ride a bike there.  I learned to drive a tractor there.   I developed my life-long love of sports there playing in the yard with my brothers and listening to radio broadcasts of the Minnesota Gophers football and basketball games. Mostly I remember a safe, secure, and happy existence on that old farm so many years ago.

We left that farm in the fall of 1959 when I was twelve years old.  A farm just one half mile north had more tillable land and provided a greater opportunity for my dad and so we made the short move north.  

Another farm family moved on to the old farmstead and during my high school years I would drive by almost every day.  Each time I’d look over and recall the great times I had had there.  Eventually the people that were on the old place retired and moved into town and someone else moved in, but by then I was long gone, married and with kids of my own.  I was busy with my life and career and didn’t give the old farm much thought.

With the passage of time the buildings on the old farm site began to show their age.  The last people to live there moved into town and still farmed the land, but they let the buildings deteriorate.  A few years ago my brothers and I had the opportunity to go back to that abandoned farm site and tour the old place.  To say it was bittersweet is an big understatement.  It was like visiting an old friend or relative in a nursing home, knowing that this would be the last visit.

As we walked around the yard and through the buildings the memories came rushing at me from all directions.  The house seemed smaller than I remembered but, aside from that, so much of it was still the same.  The location of the light switches, the high ceilings, the stairway railing, the view from the windows, were all like I remembered only it all seemed so old and so fragile now.   The interior of the barn was exactly as I remembered, but the exterior was weather beaten and crumbling.  The garage and the granary had suffered the same fate.  It was sad.

In 1940 a novel by Thomas Wolfe was published entitled “You Can’t Go Home Again”.   For me, now, that title rings true.  A few years ago the owners of the land decided that the buildings were beyond repair. They thought the best thing to do was to put them out of their misery and so they burned them all down.

I drove by one day last fall and everything but the trees were gone.  The sight of that gave me a feeling of emptiness, like a part of me was gone forever.  The finality hit me in the gut but, then as I drove on, I noticed a large flock of blackbirds taking to the sky from those familiar shelter belt trees, and I found some comfort in knowing that, at least for the blackbirds, it still was possible to go home again.