Fresh Hell Bizarre Family Story - The Farm Years

“I shall purchase a small, completely rundown farm in the middle of nowhere Utah and move there with my four teenagers. Although they’ll be completely isolated from the larger world during a crucial period in their social development, they will be content in their isolation, learning useful skills and gaining depth and character from living off the land. Splendid!”

That was my mother’s mission statement, which she indeed fulfilled, as we lived on a farm for two years. I believe this exodus was a logical culmination of my mother's deep nostalgia for a simpler life in a simpler time, one which could not have been a remnant of her own memories, as I suspect the simple time she envisioned occurred decades before she was born.

Overwhelmed by the ways in which society was changing, and likely deeply unsure of her ability to keep up, I think she was always searching for a place of greater safety for herself and believed that removing her family from the inevitable dangers of society would, in the end, save us all.

Her utopian ideal was perhaps motivating in the abstract, as in her mission statement, but the practicalities were vague.

The farm was not a picture of rural bliss. The house was small and sturdy but the rest of the place was a wreck - fields overgrown with dense prickly brush, and weeds. The ramshackle sheds were piled with random farm debris accumulated over decades. It was a Green Acres nightmare come true.

We cleaned up as well as we could, pathetically armed only with suburban lawn tools. To complete the kitschy faux farmkid look we were issued sterotypical farm clothing for our cleanup - crisp new overalls and jaunty desert boots whose newness cruelly pinched our ankles. The look was completely dweeby, circa 1975, and clothing which no true rural teen would ever wear. I regret to say there is photographic evidence, which after 30 years still makes me cringe.

The farm had indeed once been a working sheep farm, but the years had taken their toll on the buildings and overgrown fields and even after clearing it was obvious there was very little to salvage. The shed in the best condition became the hen house, and our farm livestock increased to the tune of 7 whole chickens.

It was my brother's job to feed the chickens twice a day their mixture of grain mash and hot water, adding vegetable peelings and kitchen scraps to the evening mess.

It was a dirty job, and while he obediently wore his desert boots out to the chicken house he defiantly never put them on properly but jammed his feet part way down, so the heel of the boot was permanently crumpled. We used to laugh watching him careening through the yard at night like a drunk lurching home from a binge, stepping carefully in the ruined boots (he often wore them on the wrong feet, which didn't help but also didn't hurt), the feed pail swaying with every step. I sometimes helped him with this job, and can attest that the loathsome reality of feathered dimwits with the sense of marshmallows, who were raised for eggs they never laid, trumped the imagined romance of Foghorn Leghorn every time.

My mother had the 1/2 acre empty field in back of the house professionally tilled to become our garden. The space was ridiculously huge - we planted endless rows of corn. There were other vegetables also, but I seem only to remember a horizon consisting of nothing but corn. This could also be a result of being rousted out of bed at 6:00 am on a summer morning to weed the garden.

Adolescence is synonymous for sullen grudging compliance, and we were typical teenagers unwilling or unable to understand and appreciate the connections between hours of garden work and delight in the resulting harvest.

To round out the Green Acres metaphor, my role model was Eva Gabor. I longed for a penthouse apartment on Park Avenue, silk lingerie and maribou-trimmed mules, and would have traded my overalls for diamond hoop earrings in a hearbeat. I was immediately bored and thoroughly disenchanted with rural living. My emotional metronome was tuned entirely to daydreams about owning wardrobes I saw in Vogue magazine and living an exciting New York City life, details of which I saw in movies or read about in books. (It's a testament to enduring dreams, then, that I've lived in New York for 20 years.)

I fervently longed to be a famous author living a glamorous life anywhere, just so long as it was light years away from the farm.

So I set up a study in my closet.

My mother renovated the house's attic into a dormitory room for us girls - it was a beautifully done space, although my favorite part was my very own closet. It was big enough to stack my teeny shoe wardrobe neatly in one corner and leave enough room for me, a pillow to lean against, and my typewriter propped in front of me on a sofa cushion. There was light and most importantly there was privacy, perfect for an Undiscovered Young Author, dabbling in science fiction and romances, writing egregiously bad poetry. My sisters still laugh when they remember coming up the stairs to a completely dark bedroom , a sliver of light coming from underneath my closet door, the lonesome clack of my typewriter the only sound piercing the silence.

My siblings and I often joke about our ability to block painful memories - our family motto is "Just Because You Don't Remember It Doesn't Mean It Didn't Happen." Difficult to render into Latin and position around a coat of arms, I suppose, but a motto that goes far to explain how two years of farm living can be distilled into these few poignant memories of Fresh Hell.