This Old House

We live on the family farm. When I say family farm, I mean my husband grew up here, my father-in-law grew up here (he was actually born in the room that is the master bedroom now), my husband's grandparents lived here.....I'm not actually sure how many generations this goes back, but it seems to me that this is a rarity in this day and age.

In 2010 this will be a "Century Farm" which means that it will have been farmed for 100 years by the Burk family. There's an official presentation at the State Fair where the Burks will be presented with a plaque signifying the accomplishment. For years my husband has been scouting out the perfect place to display this outdoor plaque. I've played along in his search, but never really gave it much more thought than that....until now. The closer we get to this milestone, the more I see it as just that - a milestone. An accomplishment that is getting harder and harder to reach these days. All of us in rural America need to face the fact that a family farm is going to be harder and harder to find in the future. What once was a business of living off the land and putting your trust in God for your crop has turned corporate....big business. It's beginning to push many of those farms from meager beginnings to the wayside and that is a sad thing to see. I agree, progress is important in any industry, whether it be education, agriculture, medicine or retail. You have to change with the times and roll with the punches to guarantee yourself any kind of success. But with those changes in times, comes hurt for the little guy. Passing down the family business will get harder and harder for people, not only because there won't be enough acres to farm in order to make it in this world, but I also think that family values are getting lost in the shuffle of "being somebody".

All of this thought about family farms brings me back to our house. When I first moved in, I was less than excited. It is your typical old home....lots of square footage, but broken up into many small spaces that leave interior decorating to be a challenge, the corners are not square and the floors tend to slope. There's a lot of work to be done upstairs....walls need to be torn down and insulation and drywall need to be put up. We've dealt with leaks in dang near every room from one time or another and have had a couple of "floods" in the basement when the weather was just right. When I first moved in, I complained....a lot - so much that it's kind of embarassing to think about now. My husband has been a peach through the whole thing....I believe once I was even told that I'm welcome to move into the machine shed if I was looking to live in something "newer".

One day (probably after one of my "if only this house would just burn down" discussions) it hit me. If we were to build a new home, it would be a tragedy to lose all of the things in this house that could never be replaced....the memories. Of course, there are the memories of the last seven years of our marriage, but with a Century Farm the memories go back way farther than I'll even know. My husband's parents have both passed on and I'm sure there are many memories of them here in this house that he will never want to lose. I would think that he walks into our kitchen sometimes and can visualize his mom standing at the stove cooking or at the sink washing dishes. I'm sure he walks into our living room and sees his dad napping in the recliner after a long day in the field. There has to be a memory or two of family dinners, birthday parties, Christmases....and not just for him, but for his brothers and sister and their families too. How can I dare to take those images and memories away from any of them? I couldn't and I won't. We will stay in our crooked house for as long as we need to and will continue to build many more memories to add to the collection. Maybe someday one of our boys will decide that they want to enter into this game called farming and will settle in to this place with their own family. I won't blame their new wife for wanting something newer, a little more level, a little more updated....I'll probably agree with her on each of those accounts. But I do hope that she will come to a realization that the important part of this house is the history that it holds, the memories that live amongst these walls.