Memories of the Farming Dream

I guess I’ve known I wanted to be a farmer all my life.

Not in so many words, perhaps, but I have been trying to think back and find where this desire to farm came from, and I can see it all the way back to my earliest memories, to the games I played, the books I loved, and the earnest thoughts that ran through my little head. Of course, when I was little, “Farm” was synonymous with “Place with Horses,” but I do believe it went deeper than that.

Some of my favorite books when I was little were Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books, in particular Farmer Boy. My mom read these to me many, many times, and when I was old enough I read them, thought about them, and played them with a zeal bordering on obsession, which was how I did most things. There was something about the life that I saw in them, the neatness and organization required to survive, the wisdom and knowledge that their parents had, and even the grueling hard work that appealed to me at a surprisingly young age.

I remember playing with my friend Ty in my backyard, harvesting “wheat,” (read, “tall grass,”) bundling it up neatly and storing it for winter. We harvested “lettuce” (dandelions) and kept them in a box for years, periodically checking on their decomposition progress. I was forever mixing little concoctions and picking leaves and roots, pretending I was farming.

When I was about nine I spent several happy weeks playing with my playmobile outside under the willow tree. My little family were grass farmers, and they would work all day harvesting miniature bundles of grass, loading it into their horse-drawn wagon and hauling it to market. I repeated this scene, with few changes, over and over every day.

At eleven my family moved out to the country for a year, and while I was sometimes lonely because we were far from my friends, I remember that year as one of my happiest. I loved being out where no one could see me, roaming the woods and playing countless imaginary games by myself. Even though there was no actually farming going on on this farm, the setting lent itself to all sorts of games in which I usually featured as the poor farm girl, running off into the woods after a long day of work. Of course I never playacted the long day of work part.

I remember watching a documentary one night about kids in a Middle Eastern country who at a young age worked with their families on a camel trading trip. I remember crying that night, trying to explain to my parents why. “I want to do real things,” I cried.

Sometime during that year in the country, I decided that what I wanted to do with my life was build a log cabin on the back pasture of the land, have a wood stove, a root cellar, a big garden, and just live there. I had every detail of that little house planned out, down to the construction of the bed I was going to build.

It was all for naught, however, since we moved back into town shortly after. Although I liked our house and loved living in town where I could bike or bus everywhere, I missed the country for years. A couple years later I wrote in my journal that “I felt so much more alive in the country,” in ways that I could not articulate. I was quite an introspective little thing.

In my teen years, I lost this dream. After I gained some actual experience in hard physical labor, I came to believe that it was a pastoral daydream that I was attracted to, the myth of the Green World that did not exist. Almanzo from Farmer Boy could not possibly have been happy working sunup to sundown at the age of nine. Horses were really not all that intriguing after all, and were as likely to step on your foot as look at you. My obsessions grew in other directions and I focused on other things, violin, theatre, books, movies, chainmaille jewelry, and many others. (Indeed, from this blog it might appear that all I ever thought about was farming. Actually I had many interests and dreams, and I am just isolating these particular ones here.) Through all of this, however, the desire to do “real things” never really subsided, and was certainly never satisfied.

Then last summer, working at my parents’ place, I spent my first several days of work building compost piles of mildewy straw, fresh green grass, and even fresher manure. I dug right in. When I finished I looked at the piles, nearly as tall as I was, and I couldn’t wait to find out what they would look like in a year when we broke them open to spread the sweet-smelling compost on the garden.

This is the moment that I put it into words.

“I want to be a farmer.”

And now here I am, a farmer in training, living on a farm at last. I start the day fighting my alarm clock, cursing its existence; I come to the end of each day worn out, starving, dirty, and blistered, despairing over ever again having clean fingernails; I delight in the weekends and exalt in the occasional surprise afternoon off; Some things bring frustration, others bring teeth-grinding irritation, and some things are just flat-out annoying.

But I am really, truly, happy. I have found my pastoral daydream, and it is not a daydream but a dream, and we all know dreams can be accomplished. I have entered the Green World and discovered the grass really is greener over here.

Why I am happy is difficult to explain, and I believe it is the sort of feeling that you cannot understand until you have felt and lived it. I think I will engage that question in a later post.

So parents, if your kids have a daydream, listen to them. They might be on to something.