The Farm

                                                     The Farm


I was told by my mother that Grandpa Lee moved Grandma Lill and the family all the time.  He always was making a deal.  I don't remember a thing about it, but the day came when he sold the house on Cottage Street.  I have some fragmented memories of a large upstairs apartment, so I am not certain that they went immediately, but the next big venue was the "farm". 

The farm was located south of Sparta on the way toward Norwalk on Highway 71.  About six miles south of town, there was a little community hall on the right.  The road that crossed the highway at that junction was Farmers' Valley Road.  Taking a right on it bent you back toward the city of Sparta.  Turning left took one to the "farm".

Farmers' Valley Road was gravel which was graded after the spring thaw and perhaps one more time during the summer.  The car would raise a rooster-tail of dust unless it had just rained. In that event, the limestone gravel dust became very slippery.  The road was like a roller coaster, rising up and dipping down as it traversed a number of small hills. Because it was graded, the road had a "washboard" surface and if a car traveled at more than twenty-five or thirty miles per hour, it would begin shaking, and it was possible for the driver to lose control and be shaken off the road and into the ditch.

Slightly more than two miles brought one up over a little hill where the road curved as it went over, along about a quarter-mile straightaway to a big white farmhouse on the left with a tin roof.

The house was quite rustic when Lill and Lee moved there.  Lee was all excited for the new adventure but  I am told that Lill cried, missing her beautiful house in town. 

I will describe the house in depth because it became a sanctuary for all of Lill's and Lee's daughters as they recovered from divorces, as well as for their son John after he returned from his stint in the army and was going to college.

As one turned left and into the dirt driveway, it went over a little ditch that went through a small corrugated culvert beneath and petered out as it went west along the road.  What little drain water emanated from the house came only from the sink and the ditch was quite sufficient to soak away this "gray" water. 

The driveway made a right up a little rise to a rather primitive garage, very rough in construction, with support posts made from thin logs which were still round.   The outside was covered with some tar-paper siding that had grey minerals adhered to it.  There were two stalls capable of containing a car but only one was used that way.  The car fit in very snugly and it was always better just to leave it outside if weather permitted.  There was a wooden stairway in back for access to the loft of the garage, which was used for storage.

A long grainery, the newest building on the property, stood opposite the bend in the driveway.  It had about four bins, separated by walls, for holding shelled corn or soybeans, then gave way to a long open section with a large opening for machinery to go in and out.  An old Alice Chalmers tractor was parked in there and a huge old fashioned hay loader stayed in its parking spot spot forevermore, since the time had long passed that hay was loaded up on a wagon loosely.

On the side hill north of the grainery sat a full sized barn.  The uphill side of the barn had the large sliding door so that a wagon could be backed in, but the hay lofts were all empty except for a layer of loose hay on the floor.  Trap doors with ladders and a chute led to the first floor, which was a decrepit dairy parlor.  There were old rusty stanchions and manure troughs.  At each stanchion was a rusty drinking cup with the lever still inside. 

A shallow pond lying east of the barn in the direction of the house was fed by springs in the hill beyond it which was scarred by a small shale pit.  On the other side of the pond and uphill was a small pump house, the size of a modern day bathroom.  There was a cast iron wood stove in there and a square, concrete pedestal with a round cover under which was a cistern which collected water from the same set of small springs which filled the pond.

Water ran down from this cistern to the house below through an inch-and-one-half iron pipe buried only a foot to a foot and a half beneath the topsoil.  There was scraggly grass lawn from the driveway nearly all the way to the pump house.  In retrospect, the dairy parlor in the barn was even or higher than the cistern in the pump house, so in previous years, the dairy parlor must have been fed by a spring above the level of the barn.  The drinking cups for the cattle just wouldn't work any other way, unless water was somehow pumped or hauled to a cistern or tank higher than the dairy parlor.

To the left of this long yard stood two parallel arbors of purple grapes, each about fifty feet long.  Luscious bunches of purple grapes grew by the bushel basket full on these vines.

The house was accessible either through a front door, which led onto a long, narrow cement porch with no rail, a back door which opened to a primitive indoor porch, or a door which opened into the kitchen from a deck on the north side.

There were two outhouses in the yard on the east side and a third small shed for holding garden tools.  The yard was filled with mature walnut and elm trees, a few quite close to the house.  About a hundred yards further east were the remains of an old basement, which was about one third full of bottles, cans, and other refuse.

The deck and the indoor porch both led into opposite sides of the kitchen, which had a bay window looking north toward the pump house, pond, and barn and the hills above them.  The view was beautiful.

From the kitchen, one walked through a doorway into a dining room with nice windows which looked to the south, across the road to a bunch of fields, a ditch, an orchard, and a large bald hill and the high ridges beyond all of these.

To the right, another large entryway opened into a living room with a huge picture window which looked west at the road approaching from the direction of town, bordered by large fields on either side.

The other side of the dining room led to a small bedroom, the only one downstairs, which belonged to Grandma Lill and Grandpa Lee.  They had two twin beds in there, a small desk, and a dresser.

A stairway went from a little landing in a corner of the dining room and up the west wall, next to their bedroom.  At the top and to the right was a nice upstairs bedroom above that of Lill and Lee's.

A hallway led to another even larger bedroom which was above the kitchen.  The hallway continued on through a door, turned left through a kink which would later become a tiny bathroom, and into a bedroom which was directly above the living room.

Another doorway led from this bedroom into a space the size of the large living room below.  A door led from this room into an enclosed stairway that went down and opened onto the deck.

This upstairs bedroom and living room became the private quarters of my mother and me.

Lill and Lee had difficulties with the water coming down from the pump house from the very start and I seem to remember Lee and even my uncle John digging the pipes up and trying to clear them or thaw them.  This problem was remedied very early when Lill and Lee had the space between the porch and their bedroom framed in, weatherized, and turned into a more modern bathroom, complete with vanity, toilet, and bathtub.  A well was drilled just outside their bedroom wall and the water heater and pressure tank were placed in the basement.

The outhouses and little garden shed were torn down and the pits filled in.

A toilet, tiny vanity, and stand up shower were crammed into the kink in the upstairs hallway.  A person coming down the hall from the two upstairs bedrooms had to open a door, walk through this bathroom, turn left immediately and walk through another door into my mother's and my bedroom.

A wall was stubbed in to cut the living room in half and a kitchen was installed, complete with a sink.  It was state of the art for 1952!

I think my mother must have found a secretarial job at Camp McCoy because it was with Lee and Lill that I spent my days.  Lill quickly filled the house with all her furniture and antiques and my mother put all of her possessions, which pretty much consisted of our clothes and a bookcase containing her prized volumes.  That was literally all she owned.  Even the bedding probably belonged to Grandma Lill.

I would run around the house getting into mischief all day and when my mother got home she would let me pore through her books while she unwound on the sofa in the little living room.  She had a hardbound copy of Dante's Inferno which was filled with elaborate and dark drawings showing what it was like in hell.  There were people being herded, by demons, single-file down a narrow stair cut into a rock wall to the fiery regions below.  There were skinny, depraved, near-skeletons of sorrowful, starving people reaching for apples that were just out of their reach.  There were drawings of people being tortured by demons with pikes, repeatedly having been poked and stabbed while standing in flames.  There were people standing in water with their ankles chained down and only their chins above the rising water.

I was fascinated by them and they probably traumatized me forever.

Lee would be given these little day-planners that were, in essence, a book about the size of a paperback but not as thick, that amounted to a calendar for the year.  There were lines on which to print appointments and such.  He would give them to me because he had a great big desk blotter that was actually a calendar and he used that.

I took a pencil and padded around the house, scribbling on all of the little lines.  It kept me busy and I'll bet Grandma Lill insured that he got me another when I had filled all the lines with curly scribbles.  I wouldn't stop until it was full.  Otherwise I was tipping over her lamps or knick knacks.  One day I was fooling around with a little table she had placed in front of the living room window.  She had a lamp that was filled with colored water, and it fell off and spilled all over the carpet, which was light green, and had just been put in.

She just sat down on the sofa and cried.

An indelible splotch remained in that carpet, right in front of the picture window that looked down the valley.  She had to put a throw rug over it because the stain would not come out.

This was the situation when my grandparents moved to the farm.  In addition to getting the house updated and livable, Grandma Lill immediately began gardening on a huge scale and Grandpa Lee began farming and pasturing beef cattle in cooperative partnership with a neighbor.