FARMS FOR SATURDAY...

And here's my favorite post...

We’ve got our share of old farms in Maine: they’re spread throughout the width and breadth of the state. Follow any old road in the area and you’ll eventually find one – or what’s left of one. They’re a slowly vanishing species around here – tumbledown barns, shells of old houses, sometimes nothing more than an old foundation and cellar hole, thick with sumac, saplings and memories of a lifestyle gone by.

 

This old beauty, spreading here from one end of the photograph to the other, is (or was) Ratherwyck Jersey farm. I lived and worked on this farm in the late 1960s and early 1970s (back in my hippie days), and took this photograph one fine summer morning while standing near the fenceline of what we called Maum’s Field – I was heading out to get the cows for morning milking.

         

The house was built in the early 1800s (the main house is the smallest piece on the far right) by the Lunt family, part of a Quaker community of farmers that settled in a corner of Freeport and Durham. As the farm expanded, more buildings were tacked onto the main house – this is a perfect example of New England connecting architecture: Big house, little house, backhouse, barn.

          Big house? The main part of the house, with dining room, living room, bath; bedrooms upstairs. The front door opened onto the road.

          The little house, perpendicular to the main house, was the kitchen and outkitchen – the outkitchen contained the laundry room (do you have any idea of how much laundry a working dairy farm generates daily?) and two enormous chest freezers in which I stored 30 cubic feet of vegetables for winter consumption.

          The backhouse was a jangle of purpose: in the 1800s, it housed the Lunts’ sleighs and carriages, had a workshop and a passageway to the outhouse (you can see the outhouse jutting out from the middle of the backhouse wall). We, too, had a workshop there and also stored machinery: the tractor (an Allis-Chalmers that was as old as I was), mower, bailer, and tools.

          And the barn – oh, that barn! Big, sweeping bays, grain bins, hay elevators straddling the uppermost rafters to help us load the tons of hay we needed to feed our forty Jersey milkers over the winters.

         

We milked twice a day, starting at 5:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. That early morning start meant, of course, that we had to wake up at 4:15 or so – and in order to make that wretchedly early start a bit sweeter, resorted to living our lives on Farm Time: we set all the clocks forty-five minutes ahead – so on Farm Time, we were up at 5:00 every morning.

          Much easier to bear!

         

I left the farm in 1975, went on to other things.

I still drive by occasionally; it is no longer a working farm. That great huge barn is gone – nothing there but smooth lawn – and the backhouse has been converted to a garage with upstairs storage. The meadows and fields have disappeared; some of the land has gone back to secondary growth forest, some to real estate development – there are houses and driveways where our cows used to graze.

         

It’s a bittersweet thing, this remembering.

But I know that somewhere, there will always be Farm Time.

Deb Gould is a retired ASL interpreter (educational specialist) and author; she lives, quite happily, in Maine, USA.