Girl Out of the Country

This is my first blog post. It will explain why I’m doing this.

In 2000, on a family trip to Disney World in Orlando, Florida, I had a sudden need to flee the artifice of the park. Handing the kids to my Gibraltar of a spouse (You want to go where? Why? Okay.), I threw on my running clothes, grabbed the rental car keys, and drove to what looked like a nice spot in Lake Wales, Florida to go for a run.

Bok Tower Gardens.

It was life-changing.

As someone who grew up on one of 203,000 farms in Illinois in 1950(1)--in 2021 that number was down to 70,900(2)--I crave space and nature. I’ve lived in many exciting and beautiful places, but they were cities or suburbs. The biggest was an acre.

The 100-acre family farm in the Mississippi River Valley had a creek, woods, rotated fields of corn, beans, and wheat. We fed Hereford cattle on grass, birthed calves, slopped hogs, raised (and axed, plucked and dressed) chickens. We mowed and baled hay and straw. Our dad flew his 1946 J3 Piper Cub off the clover field. When my mom’s parents retired, they came to live with us, helping with the animals and gardens.

“Go play outside'' was a standing order. Depending on the season, on any given day we could be found riding horses bareback, building dams in the creek, hanging sheets on clotheslines, losing ourselves in ripe corn, skating on the pond our dad built, pitching off sleds in snow behind the tractor, inhaling summer flowers, making hayloft houses, watching clouds on our backs in the grass, or touching the Rorschach backs of box turtles. To my sister and me, the farm was a giant toy box. But from the Piper Cub you would see it differently--an island in a metastasizing grid of small square houses on pixel-sized lawns, made possible by a macadam beltway of growth.

Back in Bok Tower Gardens–As I ran, then slowed to walk the garden paths, I saw this:

“Make you the world a bit better or more beautiful because you have lived in it.”–Edward W. Bok

Mr. Bok’s Dutch grandmother told it to him as a child. He dedicated the Gardens to her and his grandfather.

This was IT. My Baedeker’s. I ran to the gift shop to buy a postcard of it. WhereEVER I lived, I would strive to make MY world a bit better or more beautiful. But beauty to me was wherever nature reigns--and nature reigns better in the country.

Our family farm?

The state of Illinois built a highway through the gambreled barn. Families of pigeons, field mice and swallows had to move out. Blessedly, our parents did not live to see it.

After losing the farm–or the idea of the farm as it had been, before the scar of the road–having land, even if I could not live on it full-time, became a Scarlett O’Hara-sized obsession. Since then three pieces of Upper Midwest land were bought and sold. None had habitable houses. All were three hours or more from home base.

Each schooled me. Pulled twice out of a ditch, I watched the concrete box bridge I put in to save a trout stream wash away in a flash flood. I’ve been covered in leeches, argued about farming methods, and lived next door to Santa Claus (that’s for another post). I’ve come out of it like Philip Marlowe–woozy, bruised and stupidly persistent.

Now in my 70s, I’ve bought a 93-acre vestige of a 1200-acre Virginia family farm. It has a creek, woods, pastures, a river, and views of the Blue Ridge.

It has what I’m looking for: a long horizon and wide hopes, the main hope being that I live long enough to leave the world “a bit better or more beautiful.”

I don’t want to blow it. I need wise friends and a patient family. The kids, all grown up, are amused. My sister, who keeps horses on 35 acres, is going “Giddy-up!” and “Whoa!”, usually in the same sentence.

Gibraltar? He’s still there.

You want to do WHAT? WHY? Okay..

But I’m getting ahead of myself…

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1. U.S. Economic Research Service, Washington, DC: Farm Real Estate: Historical Series Data, 1950-92, p. iv.)

2. https://www.nass.usda.gov. USDA/NASS 2021 State Agricultural Overview for Illinois.

Next time: How I named the farm.