More on the farm

My grandparents in KS died 20 years ago. It's a long time ago, yet it's something I've never completely gotten over. They had this incredible farm in the small town of Derby, KS, just outside of Wichita. I LOVED going there as a kid- we got to have our free run of the place (and there were hundreds of things to explore that I'd never get to see growing up in the 'burbs!), helped out with chores, ran around the hundred-year old house, rode the tractors and 3-wheeler to the pasture with Grandpa, went rabbit-hunting with my dad and Grandpa, etc It was like heaven to us kids. One of my favorite times of being there was during wheat harvest, when the combines would fill the wheat trucks up with grain and before my dad or uncles took the trucks in to the co-op to drop off the wheat, they'd let us crawl around in the piles of grain. Sounds weird, considering people consume that grain that we'd just crawled through. It was such a funny tactile experience- the feeling of grain surrounding your legs and torso and letting it run through your fingers. And there were always curious bugs crawling through the grain- things I'd never seen in the 'burbs. When my grandparents died suddenly within months of each other, my mom and her siblings made the tough decision to auction off the farm and land. It was extremely hard on the family, and a piece of our heritage that no one really wanted to let go of, considering that a large part of the family still wanted to go visit the old farm 2 weeks ago. I know that I'm not alone in these sentiments of the farm.

One of the pieces of land that my mom and her sisters kept for years (and finally had to sell off- long story) was 80 acres of homestead land. I guess this land was given to my great-great-grandfather by the gov't after he fought in the Civil War- the deed for the land still exists somewhere in our family. So this piece of land had been in the family and farmed since the 1870s. When I think about the hours of labor that went into making that land workable, making a living off of it, that our family was essentially built on the farming way of life, it makes me proud. It also makes me wish that I had been old enough to buy the farm at the time of the auction or that I could get it back now and turn it back into something that all of my mom's family could enjoy again.