Saying Good Bye Inside Someone Else’s Story
I recently attended a native plant walk at Hyde Farm Park in Marietta, GA. It was a great walk. Hyde Farm was a multi-generation farm now preserved for historic and recreational use by a joint Cobb County Parks and National Park Service project. The walk was nice. It included natural history and human history. I didn’t know the human history would be a part of our walk, but both plant walk and history tour fit right in my geographer’s sweet spot by including Human Geography and Physical Geography.
Here is a chronology of what it took to make this farm into a park in the burbs. Now all 135 acres are on the National Register of Historic Places.
The young man who gave our plant tour was full of energy and enthusiasm for the place, the plants and the grant project he was working in the park. It was also an unexpectedly strange and sad experience for me. The sadness was due to a combination of personal experience and the variety of attendees in our group.
My roots are in the country, so I understood the farm pretty well, but some of my fellow attendees had a really different background. Can I say this? Some of my fellow explorers, well, some of them were city slickers. That’s not so shocking in an urban landscape, I suppose. And, it’s true. Native plant lovers can be urbanites. In fact we’re all counting on people in more crowded locations to start planting native in their pots, on their balconies and throughout their yards to help restore ecological balance, kill fewer animals and create layovers for wildlife between increasingly small patches of disturbed habitat.
It was the way some people reacted to the primitive lifestyle of the original family on this farm that separated me from them. You could see that they were having difficulty understanding the choice to live that way. The whole setup, even in the final working days of the farm when electricity and indoor plumbing were added to the home, was pretty foreign to them. Taking a walk for water and bringing it back in a bucket, cooling your food in the creek, some of these people may have never considered things like this being a part of the 20th century. That people were living or farming here, using these same buildings until 2008 deepened the effect.
Every time I go back to the home town of my youth, I pass abandoned weathered, gray, bare wood buildings that were once homes to someone without electricity. It’s not just in my family history, it’s in my bones. Don’t get me wrong. I grew up with central air, and hot showers, but I was in a community that was never more than spittin’ distance from someone who remembers hot summers in a way I never had to endure. Living that way wasn’t my childhood, but it was my community. I loved the old people and their old stories. I feel closer to people who are closer to the earth than I do to people who are more comfortable calling a plumber than crawling under the sink.
That summer I spent in Costa Rica when I hitched a ride on the back of a milk truck, when it was so humid my freshly washed jeans wouldn’t air dry and I had to put them on to get them to dry- that was one of the best times of my life, and I was sad to learn that they replaced “Old Betsy” the ancient green Range Rover with an air-conditioned van for future students to ride in. Seat belts? Soft shocks? Air conditioning in a cloud forest? It would not at all be the same experience for the students who came after.
The deeper separation I was feeling was personal for other reasons though. Our family farm, the one I feel 5 generations of connection with, is about to become no longer mine. Our situation was different from the farm park where I was walking around. The house on ours had been replaced with a better, more modern one at least twice, and ours is not in a highly populated area, but I was still walking around on a farm that got saved and was being appreciated (even if some people couldn’t fathom the lifestyle) and mine was about to be divided, enough differences that I hadn’t anticipated what it would feel like, and probably wouldn’t have if I had known we were going to get a family history too.
I never expected that I could be the one, be of the generation who let go of family land, not even part of it. I hate it, but sometimes, walking away is the thing to do for yourself and your family. My sister and I aren’t compatible. She will keep the best parts of our farm and I will sell my share. Someone else will own the parts she doesn’t keep. Proceeds from my share won’t get me a different farm for a different future where I live. I live in the burbs. Moving out and away from an HOA would be a dream, to have a vegetable garden, to be allowed to have a small a greenhouse, these are high on my list of wants, but where I live, there’s not much over an acre that doesn’t already have a 2 or 10 million dollar mansion filling up the view.
After our house fire years ago, I learned to love thrifted things that belonged to someone else’s grandmother. If I couldn’t have the thing that belonged to mine, I figured that somebody loved the person this other one belonged to, that might have been made on the same day in the same place as my grandmother’s, and if not, at the very least it reminded me of the person I loved.
I hope there is some version of that with our family farm. I hope the new owner will feel connection, walk beside the stream, appreciate the flora and fauna, love it like it had been in their family for generations. Maybe for them it will replace something they lost along the way. And who knows, maybe, one day, I’ll have land to love again too, as though it had belonged to me and mine for as long as I can remember.
At least where the farm I’m giving up is, there won’t be as much pressure to cut and splice and cover it in McMansions. There are solar panel installations planned in the area, but hopefully some day soon they’ll start using those to shade concrete closer to the energy users instead of ruining habitat and increasing demand on transmission lines. I can hope so anyway.
The tree in the photo is an enormous Osage Orange near the main residence on Hyde Farm Park. I didn’t get Russ to pose for scale, but take a closer look and notice the Southern Magnolia behind it to get an idea.
Book of the week is Mini-Forest Revolution by Hannah Lewis. If you just want to learn about the Miyawki method of habitat restoration, the audiobook is fine, but if you actually want to build a forest by the Miyawki method, I recommend the physical paper version. It’s a better format for the instructions.
Have a glorious day and we’ll see you on the trail.
