My Farm ... Now (cont.)
by Nancy Hayden

The plants around the farm have changed gradually and moved around. I discuss changes mentally with my long-dead grandmother, and occasionally sense approval.

Descendants of her hollyhocks still seed themselves in the front border, but, without the manure from the cows, I couldn't keep the soil rich enough for her colossal delphiniums.

My creamy daylilies, though, are prettier than her common orange ones or her gold ones with the brown smudge on each petal. And the peonies I brought from my childhood home are thriving. They were old even before we moved into that house in 1950. Festiva Maxima, they are called. I translate that as Huge Party, but my Latin is frail.

Mam -- my grandmother -- used to sit in the back garden and appliqué delicate chintz flowers on quilt squares. There was monkshood in that garden then and huge bushes of mountain laurel. The laurel kept the walls too shaded, though; moisture was trapped and the sills rotted out.

So now there's myrtle with little white fritillarias and a wonderfully scented, salmon pink azalea, planted further from the wall. There is also a very Zen rock with polypody ferns struggling to establish themselves on top. Usually when I sit there, it is to sip a glass of iced tea before weeding some more. My grandmother's gauzy dress has given way to my jeans. It is startling to realize that her pink rose and her Siberian iris bloomed this June, and that she has been dead for fifty years.

Somewhere along the way I noticed that the farm was still known as the old Mason place, the name of the owners preceding my grandparents. At that pace it wouldn't be mine for one hundred years. So we all proposed names and finally chose "Too Bad Farm" -- too bad about all the mistakes we'd already made and all the ones we were still doomed to make through ignorance or hubris. Too Bad also in the superstitious way of not wanting to attract the gods' attention and letting them notice how lucky we were.

Lately I've realized that the farm is finally mine. Two trees fell in recent storms: a willow and a maple. In a crotch in the willow, ten or twelve feet up, a croquet ball with a red stripe was embedded and had been almost completely surrounded by new wood.

One of my children had really sent another's ball to Kalamazoo in some hard-fought game that no one can remember. And in the center of a core of crumbly decayed wood in the maple rested our old tether ball, looking like an improbable dinosaur egg waiting for global warming to restore its habitat.

In my turn, I've grown crotchety about new people in the neighborhood, people who move too fast, people who've cleared so many trees that their house is visible from mine. Theirs is the only visible house, the only reminder that it is no longer the 18th century and that the farm has survived its first two hundred years. "Don't choke on the small bones," I remind myself, and "remember that New Hampshire grows great trees; just wait sixty years or so."

Since I've lived here, the contents of four households and accumulations from many auctions have been added. Almost nothing has been removed. I could never face the task of packing it all up, so I imagine I'll just stay here, first at the farm, then at the cemetery. Actually I'll have to rest just outside the cemetery; the family plot is full, and the rest of the cemetery is spoken for. But I measured, and I could be less than two rods from the rest of my family. And I've learned how to establish my own place without disrupting what's already there. It's mainly a question of time . . . and listening carefully to the neighbors.

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