Judy couldn’t remember where the key was—or wouldn’t. She claimed that the leaking roof had made the house unsafe. Our second cousin now owns the family farm, which has belonged to our family since the early to mid-1800s. Our great-grandfather, Thomas Pope, built the house in the 1890s after a good corn crop. His wife, Matilda, and their 12-year-old daughter, Della, died shortly after from the Spanish flu. In the early 1900s, Thomas died of a kidney stone following surgery on the kitchen table, and soon after, their second daughter, my grandmother, moved in. After my grandmother’s death in 1973, my parents moved in. When they passed away in 2004 and 2005, Judy took over, and her adult children lived there on and off until it was clear that no one was going to stay permanently. She sold the house to our cousin Neil. Renters damaged the house significantly. The costs to repair it and bring it up to modern standards became overwhelming. After Neil’s death three years ago, his oldest son inherited the house and warned us that it would soon be bulldozed. This visit was my last.
The Eastlake-style farmhouse is large, as farmhouses were in those days. Gingerbread decorates the front porch. You enter a spacious kitchen that was once filled with a long wooden table, a cookstove, a daybed, and a rocking chair. A pantry off the kitchen leads into what must have been intended as a dining room, with six doors opening into the table-sized room from the stairway, a downstairs bedroom, the front porch, the parlor, and the kitchen. I have only known it as a living room. During my grandparents’ time, the available wall space showcased giant, gold-leaf framed photographs of my great-grandparents: Thomas and Matilda; Rachel, my father’s Welsh maternal grandmother; and her Irish-born husband, Richard. I found them as intimidating as the four upstairs bedrooms, through which the wind whistled and whined, rattling windows that were just inches from the floor. As my late husband Donald once noted, no one had ever moved out of the house. All their possessions remained: baby dresses and wedding nightgowns; contents from desks and sewing baskets; wedding suits and dresses; and locks of hair from those who had passed. The house smelled of generations.
The house sits on two acres of land. My grandmother had two vegetable gardens and another for potatoes. Wide flower beds separated the gardens from the expansive yard. In late spring, Judy and I could pick weed-like bluebells and violets. Sticky-stemmed petunias thrived in her bean and pea rows, and asparagus’ serpent-like heads peeked through mounds of vinca at the edges of the garden. A volunteer white peach tree grew at the border and was prized for its delicate, sweet fruit.
As children, Judy and I raced our bikes along the L-shaped driveway that wound through the orchard, garage, chicken coops, and then to the barn, corn cribs, and sheds. We were told that the summer kitchen off the back porch of the house was built from the wood of Thomas’s old house, which once stood at the north end of the driveway near the old weigh station. The small building smelled of rodents and was filled with boxes and tools; it was only haunted by our imaginations of its purpose: summer cooking.
This compound was paradise for Judy and me, verdant with our family’s history. Now we found ourselves locked out. Judy didn’t want me to enter anyway. She wanted us to remember it as it was, not as the corpse of a house it had become. But I needed to see it, remember it one last time. Thank it for the 130 years of shelter it had provided our family. I needed a kind of viewing, as we did in the Midwest when someone died, one last look at the beloved now barely resembling him or herself.
We walked from window to window, peering into the kitchen and my parents’ old bedroom, which they had moved into after they could no longer climb the stairs to their upstairs bedroom. Gallons of whiskey bottles and trash cluttered the rooms. The gingerbread along the front porch had rotted, and the upstairs windows on the north side of the house were broken and boarded up from the inside.
When did the deterioration begin? Was it when the cattle and sheep were sold off, and eggs and chickens became easier to buy at the grocery store in town? Was it when the old barn burned down and wasn’t replaced? When did the cars start to rust in fields once grazed by sheep, horses, and cattle? Was it when my father aged, piecing together affordable repair solutions? Or was it earlier, after World War II and into the ‘70s, when the world of the small farmer was swallowed whole by corporate interests, and chemicals made weeding and fertilizing easier?
I remind Judy that 200 years ago, none of these buildings were here, and soon, none will be here again, more like the time when tribes of the Illinois Federation occupied it. I say this to try to comfort us. This farm has met the fate of many before it. Since 1950, the number of small farms has decreased by 66% due to increased mechanization, growing productivity, and people like ourselves leaving the farm. The average small farm acreage has doubled, and fewer people are needed to do the work. Animals are now factory-farmed, and the clumps of houses and barns dotting the Midwestern landscape are unnecessary.
We are old, too. In fifteen or twenty years, Judy and I will not be here either. This eternal place turns out to be just as mortal as we are. I am reminded of the drastic changes on Earth, which I never imagined would occur in my lifetime. Shorelines are no longer habitable; fires ravage forests and communities, desiccating areas of Los Angeles and Santa Rosa, California—places that used to feel safe. Unpredictable temperature shifts disrupt seasons. Is mourning this family farm a prelude to something much more significant?
The house looks lonely in the late afternoon sun. Lines from a favorite childhood poem[1] swim through my mind. “Whenever I walk to Suffern, along the Erie track/ I go by a poor old farmhouse with its shingles broken and black/…This house on the road to Suffern needs a dozen panes of glass/… It needs new paint and shingles, and the vines should be trimmed and tied/But what it needs the most of all is some people living inside/.…”
I turn to look at Judy. I’m glad we’re together, perhaps the last of our family to visit. The lines of the poem keep running through my mind. “A house that has done what a house should do, a house that has sheltered life/… is the saddest sight, when it’s left alone, that ever your eyes could meet…”
It is late, and we have promises to keep. We return to the car. I take one last picture.