On Brassard's Farm by Daniel Hecht

Author:Daniel Hecht
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Published: 2018-02-25T16:35:40+00:00

Chapter 31

Sept. 7

Brassard figures the only way out is to auction off half the cows and then sell off some of his fields, fifty acres subdivided into four lots. Earnest, even though he’s legally co-owner, defers to Brassard on these matters because ultimately it’s Jim’s family’s heritage. And anyway, he can’t offer a better course. Will can only shrug.

The parcel he’s chosen to sell is right on the road—flat, pretty, well-drained acres at the lower end of his fields, so if he can find some buyers who want to live this far out, it’ll bring in a decent price. Having made the decision, this big, quiet, gentle man now goes about his days in a kind of mourning. It doesn’t help that this change comes so hard on the heels of losing his wife. He’s a man going through the motions, a man surrendering his past. In a rare moment of confession, sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee growing cold at his elbow, he told me it’s hard to accept that the skills he’d acquired through a lifetime, all that devotion and hard work, mattered not one jot. At the same time, he says, he’s had it, he’s had enough of this. “It probably is time to cut back or call it quits, with these damn knees and knuckles the way they are.”

So, another Vermont dairy farm down the drain. Four houses popping up on another rural road. Brassard will see them from his living room window. I might see them from some spots on my land, at least when the leaves fall.

But what’s the matter with that? Four families will have nice homes. They’ll plant little trees along their driveways and do that cute thing with circles of redwood bark around their shrubs. There’ll be more traffic on our road, maybe even school buses, I’ll probably hear their lawn mowers from my little patch of wilderness. But that’s modern times, right?

I’m ashamed to write this. As a “flatlander” myself, I have no right to criticize, no right to mourn the passing of the old ruggedness and honesty and ragged edges of the working landscape. I’ve spent so little time in it, have devoted too little of myself to it. I haven’t earned the right to mourn.

But I do mourn. I have been nurtured by this, strengthened by it. I’ve taken solace in the fact that there are still tranquil corners of America where people make do even if roads are muddy or cell phones don’t work. I’ve just started to get my feet under me and I know living this way is the reason. I can’t help but see the pending loss as another verification that my need to flee my prior life and “get away from it all” is doomed and pointless. There is no “away.”

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