Home, Sweet Home

“Where Thou are - that - is Home.”
Emily Dickenson

My father’s prediction came true after all: the land my father had called the Kasey Seats Farm no longer feels like home. The noise from the traffic on White House Road is now a steady din, long after the tourist season is over. Several new homes dot the once empty landscape. There are no fields planted in corn and no tobacco barns constructed of rough hewn logs sealed with mud and ready to receive a crop for curing. To my knowledge, not a single mule can be found anywhere in the community.
The Kasey Seats Farm died when my father died. He earned the property by the sweat of his brow while I, as a boy, played there. Because he had worked this land, he loved it in ways than I never could. Once, he remarked to my mother that this is where the two of them had “made their stand.” Here, he had maintained a tradition. He was the last of a long line of farmers in the Martin family. He had worked the Kasey Seats Farm for fifty years. He came from a community of farm people who lived and died near the place of their birth.

For the past twenty seven years, I have made my home elsewhere. I have reached middle age, been bitten hard by the travel bug and developed a good case of wanderlust. I have even considered a move away from Virginia, though Kathy is not keen on that idea. But it only proves true one of the best pieces of advice my father gave to me: what we call “home” changes over time. Home is where your heart, and your family, is at.
Nathaniel Hawthorne says that “the past lies upon the present like a giant’s dead body.” I have finally thrown that body off. I have learned that time changes everything. For my father, the replacement of mules for tractors marked an end of an earlier period in his life; the plow he used to turn new ground and to cultivate his father’s property with those mules became a lawn fixture in his adulthood. In my adulthood, what was once a cow pasture adjacent to my Grandma Martin’s former home is being sold for business and residential development. On the rare occasions I walk out through the field to my hideaway at the Kasey House, I remember that I have traveled far beyond the horizon visible from it’s back porch, but that distance from me is much closer than it used to be. The surrounding buildings continue to deteriorate and soon will need to be razed. The tin roof on the barn where we used to keep hogs flaps back and forth on a windy day, but its wistful sound mingles with the constant click of the electric fence power supply that is mounted on the wall behind me and reminds me of a time long gone. I still love to hear that slow, constant clicking sound! It is now my only reminder of days gone by. It also reminds me that I have made my stand elsewhere.
I did not learn how to farm here. I neither milked cattle, mowed, baled hay or bush-hogged here. I only drove a tractor four or five times during my boyhood on a farm. My only contribution to the land is that I have kept it in good condition by leasing it, by having someone else do the work. I have been fortunate, though, to have grown up here. My consolation is that no one can really own the land, anyway; we can only lease it for a while.

From August 1999 to December 2006, my maternal grandmother was the sole resident on the Kasey Seats Farm. During that period, I talked to her by phone several times each day and visited her every weekend. When I pulled into her driveway, I would occasionally sit in my truck for a few moments and think of the days I once spent there. At times, the memories were almost so vivid that I could hear my father calling the cattle to the barn; could see my maternal grandfather tinkering in one of the tool sheds; see my Uncle Jack pulling up to the barn in his cattle truck down at the dairy barn to unload a few calves he bought for my father at the stock market in Roanoke; see my grandmother hanging up clothes behind the Kasey House.
As of this writing, my grandmother lives in a Roanoke nursing facility. I have sold my boyhood home. I did, though, keep the farm and I lease it to a nearby farmer. I rarely visit. William Shakespeare writes, “These our actors, as I’ve foretold you, have vanished into air, into thin air.” The players from my boyhood days are almost all gone now. The stage sets have been dismantled by time. They are gone with the wind, as my father would have said. The memories, though, remain. The lessons that my father taught me are still vivid in my mind and I teach them to my grandchildren every chance I get. I am walking in my father’s footsteps, and I am enjoying the pleasant stroll.