American farms are scruffy. Growing up in Texas, sagging
barbed wire fences, rusting farm equipment, dilapidated peeling farmhouses, and
weedy farm roads were normal to me. Then I traveled to and lived in Germany,
where farms and villages really do look like postcards or fairy tales, with
geraniums and whitewashed walls and tile roofs. Nowhere the abandoned farmhouse
sinking into a ruin of briars and splinters. Nowhere the sagging rusty roofs collapsing
over last years’ hay bales and bits of crumbling iron. Nowhere the field full
off mechanized farm equipment in various stages of disrepair. It was all
impossibly tidy.
Now in middle life, I have acquired my own slice of American
rural heaven. Thirty-six acres of woods and meadows with a double-wide mobile
home and a motley assortment of outbuildings. Not big enough to be a working
farm by modern standards, but it probably was a hardscrabble 40-acre spread 100
years ago. The only remnant of what may have been here before is a stone
foundation wall half buried in front of my mobile home, traces of a basement
maybe. And everywhere the detritus left by 20 years of occupancy by the previous
owners, who clearly had that rural mindset “never throw anything away – it
could be useful someday.” Even though the dump is just down the road and free
to use.
I’ve been here a bit over a year now and I’ve barely begun
to clean it up. Now that the heat of summer is beginning to ease, I’ll snag the
truck keys and prioritize trips to the dump. Some of it may go on marketplace “free
to a good home.” You never know what people will want.
A pile of at least 40 old tires.
A tractor tire and rim that’s about as tall as I am.
Rusty barrels with neither tops nor bottoms.
3 old intermediate bulk containers (IBCs).
A riding lawnmower that doesn’t work.
Scraps of siding, guttering, and roofing materials.
An obround steel tank for fuel storage.
A couple of broken push fertilizer/seed spreaders.
2 cheap electric cooking ranges.
The metal ends of an old school desk.
Scraps of barnwood and lumber which may or may not be reusable.
Old partially rotted fence posts.
Various lengths and sizes of PVC.
A metal truck bed tool box.
A bent metal canopy holder with no canopy, nailed and zip
tied to my deck.
A rusty broken metal thingy in the middle of the pasture
with a tarp tied to the top which the previous occupant used for feeding hay.
Scraps of wire fencing.
About 50 pieces of rusty rebar.
Several dog shelters made out of pallets nailed together and covered with asphalt shingles.
That’s not even counting the half-buried drifts of trash still to be discovered and hauled out of the woods, once the leafy undergrowth has been stripped bare by winter. Last winter we dragged or carried another half dozen tires, bags of cans and bottles, and lengths of rusted barbed wire from under the fallen leaves. As we build trails and explore our 20 acres of forest, I’m sure more middens will be discovered.
And then there’s all the other work to be done, the building
and repairing of buildings and fences, the clearing of fallen trees and overgrown pathways, the plowing and planting and tending of the vegetable garden, the planting of fruit trees
and flowers, and the care of bees and beasts.
None of which actually pays the bills.
