A VIEW FROM THE PORCH

“Nothing impresses the mind with a deeper feeling of loneliness than to tread the silent and deserted scene of former throng and pageant.”

Washington Irving


While visiting my father and grandmother one Sunday afternoon in the late 1990s , I told my father that I wanted to leave the city and build a home near the Kasey House (more on this in a moment). I would make the daily one-hour commute to my job in Roanoke with WVTF Public Radio, raise a few head of cattle, have a big garden every year, and cut firewood for the stove I would have in my spacious basement. Patiently, my father would listen to me dream aloud while we sat at the kitchen table, and then he made what was for me a curious observation about my future:
“Just remember that when I’m gone, this place won’t mean the same to you.@
I couldn’t understand this sentiment because he spoke often and affectionately about the past. Besides, I loved this 98-acre farm in Bedford County, Virginia, and he knew it. I first thought he was trying to convince me yet again that little money was to be made on a small farm, but he had already made and lived that point well over the years: “Its too far to drive every day, and you’ll just wear out your car, and you can’t work in the city and raise cattle in the country, “ were refrains that he could have set to music.
I never learned how to be a farmer. I picked up knowledge by living on a farm, of course, but I never plowed a single row or baled one bale of hay in my lifetime. I never raised a single cow, pig or chicken. What I know about agriculture, I had observed. I had, though, fulfilled his biggest dream for him (and for me), by earning a college degree. I had a good job, too. So, he had no reason to be scared that I wanted to come back home, uneducated, and with no prospects,

to tend a small farm and live in poverty.
“When we left the Dabney Place (the farm where he and his siblings grew up), we never did go back,” he said.
“Daddy, you didn’t have to go back! You can look out the kitchen window and see the Dabney Place from here!” I replied, nearly laughing aloud.
“Just wait and see.”
I will never feel differently about this place, I said to myself. My father and I never mentioned the subject again. I would, though, often recall the conversation. My overambitious farm plans depended on my father being around to “watch over things,” or to make sure I knew what I was doing. He would, I thought, enjoy letting me take over the responsibility of the cattle and the land. While I was at work, he could “put out the fires” that would occasionally crop up. With his experience and his counsel, I would continue a tradition. With him still around, the farm would still feel like home.
However, I did not take into account that my father was no longer able nor had a desire to put out fires. Farming a roughly one hundred-acre farm is always part-time work but a full-time responsibility. Sometimes, cows get through fences and out onto the highway. I would not be able to leave my full-time job in Roanoke to go chase cows in Bedford County. Finally, my plans did not take into account that my wife, Kathy, reared in the Raleigh Court area of Roanoke City, had no desire to live on a farm.
Finally, my fathers’ death ended all of my plans.
On a chilly weekday October afternoon, two months after my father died, I traveled from Roanoke back to his home to meet with a contractor who would replace the decades-old furnace that had worried my father for years (more on that later, too). Soon, my grandmother would take ownership of my boyhood home. Though her own home had fallen into major disrepair since my grandfather died in 1983, her new one needed plenty of work, too.

After my meeting, I went into the living room and sat down. Although there was about an hour of daylight left, I had closed the curtains to give me an extra measure of privacy; there had been many welcome condolence calls and visits lately, but on this day, I craved solitude. But the silence that I encountered this day was foreign, peculiar and unwelcome. Although a huge void had been left in my family when my mother died in 1996, this place had still felt like home.
Just a few weeks ago, my father and I had sat in the kitchen and talked while my grandmother prepared dinner. Now, just a few weeks later, the house was completely empty. My grandmother, who had lived with my parents during the last two years of my mother’s life and almost a year after her death, was now back in her own home and she came over with me only on Sundays to visit with my father. On this afternoon, with her gone, too, though, this place that had once been home was empty for the first time. An odd, unsettling stillness had crept in here; it was the silence that death leaves behind.
A thin layer of dust that had settled on the furniture during the past few months was an odd sight. The familiar smell of the home and its resident had faded away. Almost overnight, it had become just an empty old house that needed a new furnace. I didn’t sit and ponder this silence and this strange place for too long after the contractor left. No sooner than I sat down, I had to get up and leave. Sometimes, silence is not golden.
I walked outside and crossed the field separating my father’s home from the Kasey House. This dilapidated dwelling, which was built in the late 1870's by John Kasey, a former Bedford County government official, has been in the Martin family since 1939, the year my father’s uncle Garland purchased the 98-acre tract of land. After my father became the owner in 1948, he named the farm the Kasey Seats, because in the late 1800's, worship services were held on the very spot he built his home in 1955. The services were held outside, and makeshift pews were
fashioned from old boards laid across blocks and tree stumps.

Several barns and tool sheds were added to the Kasey House plot in the 1950's but they, like the old clapboard home itself, are slowly falling down. Since I was a young boy, I have enjoyed walking over to this farmhouse to stand inside the doorway of the little side porch that leads into the kitchen. From here, I would admire the view of the surrounding countryside that had always been, for me a lovely, peaceful panorama of beautiful pasture and forest. As a teenager, I would dream of the world that lay beyond those trees and dream of the day when I go out to see it.
The Kasey House played a prominent role in several generations of Martins, including mine. My paternal grandparents lived here in the late 1940's before building a house about a mile away, on the same road. Afterwards, my father, his older brother, Willard and his first wife, Ann, lived here briefly. In the early 1960's, after my parents had married, my maternal grandparents moved to the home site and tore down the house’s crumbling front porch and placed a mobile home on the spot.
On this October afternoon, I came to my hideaway to think about my recent loss. Many times over the years I stood here and let my mind wander in all directions while I admired the beautiful landscape and enjoyed the country silence. Now, though, this place was no longer as silent as it was when I was a boy playing in what had once been a front yard, when far less cars traveled White House Road.
Just as my father’s home had been a few months ago, the Kasey Place had once been alive, too. I could almost see my uncle in his cattle truck, pulling up the driveway to unload a new purchase of livestock; my grandfather at work in his tool shed; my mother and grandmother hanging clothes on the line in front of the cherry tree, and my father mowing hay on his tractor. I remember coming home one afternoon from school to find my first bicycle, which was a gift from my Granddaddy Martin, resting on its kick stand in the front yard.

But I saw only death and decay on this October afternoon. Even the Kasey House and my view had lost its appeal. It was now just a ramshackle reminder of a different way of life, in a very different time. I knew nothing was going to bring me solace on this day because I was grieving over my loss, but I also knew my life, and my life here on this farm, had permanently changed.
I went into the house, passed through the kitchen into the parlor, and almost tripped over an old cardboard box. A few old kitchen chairs, an old vacuum cleaner, ironing board, broken cups and saucers, old books, records and toys had cluttered the floor for years. My first bicycle, with three decades of rust on it, was part of the pile, sharing a grave with old magazines, records, and other discarded items from my family’s past.
Of all the junk in the room, the bicycle caught my attention. I remember how excited I was and how much I loved it its bright red color and white stripes. I must have seen that old red bike here a hundred times over the years, but today I saw just a rusted, useless piece of metal, beyond repair and appropriate in its tomb, an old, abandoned farmhouse listing toward the pasture separating it from my fathers’ house. Both its purpose and its time were gone, just like the rest of the junk that littered the parlor floor.
So this is what my father meant when he said the home place would not mean the same to me when he was gone. The past is filled with lots of old things that you just cannot or do not want to keep. We cannot or should not want to relive our past, but instead we should desire to live for today.
I looked around the parlor of this old farmhouse and was struck by the contrast from the living room I had just left. My fathers’s house use needed some work before my grandmother could move in, but, compared to what I was looking at now, the thin layer of dust on the lamps and the television didn’t seem so bad after all. Yes, the furnace needed replacing, the floors needed some work and the bathroom needed a complete makeover, too, but at least it was not as bad as this! Furthermore, my grandmother’s new home had all its windows and was not listing to one side!

As I walked out back through the field to my car, I recalled some of the many times my father said that he had enough trouble paying for his own home over the years to even think about restoring the old Kasey House. With no insulation and only a few small fireplaces in its two bedrooms and a small, coal-fueled Warm Morning stove in the parlor, it wasn’t a cozy, warm and toasty place to be, he recalled. As a teenager, you slept with as many blankets under you as you did over you because the draft beneath the straw mattresses was unmerciful. Blankets were like gold to farmers. His Uncle Lynn, Granddaddy Martin’s brother, once half-jokingly remarked that in his day a smart man looking for a wife would want to know how many quilts she had and if she knew how to make them at all (which my Aunt Beulah did)!
No, my father would say, the Kasey House would keep the rain and the leaves off of you, but little more. Furthermore, life was not a story book tale for my father when he had lived at the Dabney Place, or even here. For him, unlike me, there were no picture book images or views in his mind. He had worked hard here. He and my mother, in his words, had “made their stand” here. But for me, this place had been just a pretty place to look at.
Several months later, at a personal property auction, I sold that old red bike in the Kasey House. In hindsight, I almost regret it because my grandchildren could have had one more memento from their grandfather’s boyhood. But there’s barely enough room in my shed for their own bikes and toys, much less an old rusted one.
My view from the porch was beginning to change.
As I walked back to the house, I looked out into the backyard and saw Jackie Tuck, a friend and neighbor who first took care of the farm after my father died, and one of his sons, Tracy, in the pasture behind my father’s house. Father and son had borrowed my father’s tractor. Jackie was using the front-end loader to lift his son high up into the apple tree to get the fruit near the top before it all fell to the ground and rotted. I looked longingly at what they were doing. Then, I drove back to my own home, and life, in the suburbs.