The Farm

Watching my mother throw me overboard should not have surprised me.

Many people have early childhood memories and can recall the first or second grade, but i can’t. i don’t remember being hugged or kissed as i made my way out the door to school. it’s like i wasn’t born until years after that. That can’t be the case, so i am stuck with a gap between my birth and the days when my memory comes to life. i’ve learned that when humans suffer trauma they go into flight or fight mode to seal off the pain. in the process, some painful memories get erased or sealed off to protect us, which probably explains why i don’t remember my early years.

The early memories i do recall never involve my mother, father, or sister. Whatever happened in our house the first few years of my life has been wiped away. as i recall my earliest memory, i am wrapped with the enduring love of my grandmother daisy Viola Wyatt and my grandfather William forrest Wyatt, my mother’s parents. i spent summers and holidays with them on their farm in lomax, illinois. Their dairy farm was a safe place for me, a place where i was loved and cared for. Those are the childhood memories that make me warm and happy.

My grandparents had fourteen grandchildren, nine of which were boys, yet i was the only girl who chose to spend her summers on the farm. i feel sorry for my girl cousins because they missed out on the positive, loving moments that helped me grow. Being on the farm allowed me to watch and learn from my grandparents, and they raised me to be authentic, honest, and god-fearing.

The farm was more than just a vacation spot for me. i had lived near my grandparents for most of my early life, and my roots there ran deep. i was born in la Harpe, illinois on May 29, 1954. My mother, forrest darlene Wyatt, spent much of her early life on that land. She was one of five children born to forrest and daisy in lomax, illinois and was raised on their nearly 300-acre dairy farm with her brothers. it was one of the largest dairy farms in the state, but it seemed cozy and intimate to me.

My father, Billy Merle Harding, was also a farm kid, and that created a bond between him and my mother because they understood how tough farm life could be. They had both strained under the long days and intense labor it took to keep a farm running during sweltering summers and freezing winters. dad was one of three children born to Tommy and Cora Harding in Blandinsville, illinois. He was the middle child, born between an older brother and a younger sister. Their parents had a large cattle and hog farm and owned the only gas station in town, a one-pump Shamrock station that sat across the street from their house on the main street. dad’s father ran the gas station, and his mother managed their cattle and hog farm and the business associated with it.

Both of my parents came from wonderful, strong, hard-working american families, forged by the great depression and World War ii. almost no families in that part of the world survived those events unscathed, and mine was no exception. My mother watched three of her brothers being shipped off to fight in World War ii. Their youngest brother escaped service only because he died at home from pneumonia at the age of two. luckily, her other brothers came home from the war and were able to start families and build lives for themselves.

While her siblings were fighting america’s enemies, it was up to my mother and her father to run the farm. farming was the family’s way of life, and my mother made sure crops were planted and animals were fed. it was tough work, and she was on the clock from sunup till sundown, 365 days a year. She did the work of three grown men when she could have been going to parties and dancing to the latest songs. lomax and Baldwinsville are twenty-two miles apart. That may seem far to city dwellers, but to farm kids in the 1940s and 50s it was all part of the same neighborhood. in those tiny country towns, high school students from all over gathered for proms, dances, graduations, and the like. My parents met at one of those high school dances. They were a beautiful couple, at least on the outside. dad was handsome, with black curly hair and steel blue eyes. My mother was attractive The final basic human need is the need to procreate as well. She had dark brown curly hair and a wonderful figure for a high school girl, a form sculpted by the hard farm work she did most of her early life.

i never knew how long my mother and father dated. i do know that they were both ready to escape the lives they had been born into. dad wanted to get out of the house and start his own family, and my mother wanted to flee the grind of working on the farm by becoming a nurse. Sometime after meeting at a dance in the middle of the illinois countryside, they married and stayed married for twenty-five years. after they were married, my parents lived close to my mother’s parents’ farm in lomax. it seemed my parents would do anything to avoid working on the farm. To support himself and his new wife, my father began driving a milk tanker truck all over the state. i wasn’t old enough to understand why he was gone. i only knew that i didn’t see dad much after he started his new job. My mother was a stay-at-home mom to me and my sister until we were old enough to start school, and then she went to work at the Shaeffer pen factory in fort Madison, iowa, which was just across the bridge over the Mississippi river.

i would like to say that it was a happy marriage, that my parents’ house was full of love, joy, and grace. But if that were the case, this book would never have been written. i have come to learn that most of the years my parents spent together were difficult. as a child, you don’t have any context to know if your parents are happy or not or if marriages are supposed to look like the one your parents have. You may not like the way you feel when your parents argue, but you don’t know why, and you don’t know if similar arguments are happening in the homes of your friends.

it took me decades to understand what was going on between my parents. Whatever love, if that is the right emotion, they felt one night at a high school dance in rural illinois had long-since vanished. Whatever spark there had been between them had dwindled, and there wasn’t enough heat left between them to make a marriage work. The attraction between them must have vanished as quickly as it came. When i was in my forties, my father told me that when he walked down the aisle to marry my mother, he knew he was making the biggest mistake of his life. Those were difficult words for me to hear, but that explained the negative energy that enveloped me as i was growing up. i had been raised by two people who didn’t care for each other. They didn’t nurture themselves or their relationship, and there was no way they could care for the children they brought into the world.

despite the tension between my parents, i spent a lot of joyous time with grandpa and grandma Wyatt on their farm and in their home in town that was fifteen minutes from the farm. i loved every moment i shared with them.

it helped that i was a tomboy. Working on the farm was right up my alley. There is always something that needs to be done on a large farm, and i loved being my grandfather’s shadow and helping him get things done, like milking the cows and planting the fields.

i was thrilled to ride the big farm horse, Jim, who was so gentle that he never bucked any one off. Jim carried me around the fields in and near my grandparents’ farm for more hours than i could count.

My grandfather kept his prized bull in a pen, and as i sat on the fence with my boy cousins, they dared me to run across the pen and jump on the fence without the bull catching me. i was afraid, but not so scared that i was going to let my cousins win the bet. i took a deep breath, slid off the fence, and ran like crazy. When i reached the other side without being touched by the bull, i jumped on top of the fence, savored my glory, and smiled at my cousins who hadn’t been brave enough to test fate like i had been.

every summer we had to harvest silage, a green grass that was cut up and stored on the farm. Someone drove a truck behind a tractor as the tractor cut the silage and dumped it into the back of the truck. When the truck bed was full, we drove it behind the barn and dumped the silage into a huge hole that had been dug there. We didn’t stop until that hole was full, and the silage that hadn’t stuck to our sweaty, sticky skin was fed to cows throughout the year.

My sister never liked the farm as much as i did, and it seemed that she was never there. i do not know why i spent summers with my grandparents and my sister did not, but i do know she never liked the dirt. even during the few times she was there, she never did the same things i did. While i was busy with farm chores, she preferred being inside and putting her hair in braids or playing with makeup. We were as different as night and day.

Being a tomboy didn’t stop me from learning how to do things most girls were expected to. i spent many happy hours in the kitchen learning to cook and bake with grandma. She made the best cinnamon rolls i have ever eaten, and her loving hands taught me how to knead the dough back and forth until it was ready to be covered with cinnamon and sugar and placed in the oven. When the rolls were done, they were sweet and sticky and baked with all the love grandma gave me.

all the food we ate was grown on the farm and was fresh and natu-

ral. i harvested some of it myself, including picking strawberries with my grandmother, berries that were plump and sweetened by a...