Holding Our Ground
I have been thinking about this topic probably for most of my adult life, and wrote about it during my letter-writing days, and now I have even more information collected after almost sixty years of living in the same spot, practically. I am currently inspired in my thinking because I am reading my niece Julia's master's thesis, which seems to be speaking to me in particular. She studied and thought and wrote about a much bigger topic -- the idea of home and what it means to people who feel homed and to people who are shifting from one home to another and the sense of threat and danger to people who experience new people coming to change their own sense of home. She takes it even further than that, but I haven't made it to the really juicy parts of her thesis yet. When I do, I am certain I will have more to say.
I can't speak to the experience of the immigrant or the refugee. I am the person who is grounded in a home, who has spent nearly all my life on the same piece of ground. Not in the same house, but I can get to that house without any effort -- either by walking directly through the woods, down a steep hill and across a creek and climbing back up or by getting on my golf cart and heading back onto the farm roads, the easy way. My mother still lives in that house. It is extremely comforting to have that amount of grounding. Nothing lasts forever but this has been going on for a very long time.
This is a rare life these days. There is this children's book written by the same person who wrote Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel -- it is about a little house that stays put while the city grows around it. I think the story is written from the perspective of the house. If it is, I find that pretty interesting. It is not the house that gets to make those choices, of course, it is the people who live in the house.
So, really quickly, how did we get to this situation? In the mid 1960s my parents bought a five acre piece of property that was adjacent to property owned by good friends of my Newcomb grandparents. It was deep in the woods, with no direct access to a road -- only a right of way. On the other side of the friends' orchard lived my grandparents. So it was not a random piece of ground that my parents bought. It wasn't even a particularly useful or good piece of ground. But the location was key for starting something new. Little by little my parents purchased more parcels that eventually got the first piece connected to the road -- now we had road frontage on a real highway. Not a back road but a historic connecting road between Alexandria and Leesburg, a turnpike in the olden days. It took several more purchases to collect up 25 acres of rolling, wooded, completely not flat ground, and that is what became the home base for this farm and this family. The acreage was still contiguous with the Moutoux Orchard, and that was still connected to the grandparents' property.
All of this is important because it wasn't a pioneer experiment, setting out to start a homestead in the middle of nowhere. It was starting a homestead right next to friends and family. In many ways, it made no sense at all but in the most important ways it was the difference between building a strong future with a huge running start and truly starting out in an alien land.
It's not particularly relevant to this topic, but my father's father never approved one bit of these life choices. My father and his father fought regularly about every little thing, and this scheme of farming was not in my grandfather's hopes for his son. He could not have imagined how that scheme would take root and grow so many other schemes and homelands and enterprises. And yet, he welcomed his grandchildren into his home at any time, day or night, for all of the years that we were within walking distance of each other. So much of my childhood was spent in the comforts of our grandparents' comforting and stable and cozy house.
Skipping over the middle 50 years to now. Now I am lying on the couch in a house that sits on what was once the Moutoux Shed Patch (so named because of its proximity to said shed). When this house was built (along with the other 18 houses in this community), we could see the Circle Shed at the Moutoux's, with their orchard ladders leaning against it and the scraggly plum trees between us and the shed. Now, through the same window, we see a row of solid, square, tall, brick-covered houses. The orchard is gone and is now filled with 60 oversized houses.
How do we feel about this? Not the best. But we have managed to continue to live the life we choose -- and we even have a paved easement that crosses through that development, allowing us to drive our tractors and golf carts right through there to our grandparent's property. This took a lot of relationship building with the people who made the decisions while building those multi-million dollar houses. Because we are so committed to continuing to have a home here, we worked with them to make it possible for us to keep farming in the way we want to, despite the changes. We do not waste energy on resenting the new people -- most of them have no idea they have a farm on one side and a cohousing community on the other. They have big garages and not much time to observe their surroundings. But we always wave from our tractors as we drive on the wide paved roads.
I am still not getting to the point. There are too many points. This topic is way too big. Let me try again. We have had the immense privilege of holding our ground, of building our communities, of growing our families and our friendships by staying on this one imperfect piece of property for a very long time. We have not built a big fence and talked only to ourselves. Instead we have left the deer fence gates open (literally, during the day) so that people can come in. Strangers are allowed to walk through the farm whenever they want, as long as they stay off the fields. Hundreds of customers come to the stand every week, or to the CSA room. We have made this unlikely, weirdly shaped, not particularly accessible piece of ground into a home base, a place of welcome, a place that is changed by every person who lives here or works here or finds a way to be here regularly. It is the work a lifetime for my family and friends to have created this. And it continues to change.
The same story is unfolding in Loudoun at our other farm. That's for another day.
I can't speak to the experience of the immigrant or the refugee. I am the person who is grounded in a home, who has spent nearly all my life on the same piece of ground. Not in the same house, but I can get to that house without any effort -- either by walking directly through the woods, down a steep hill and across a creek and climbing back up or by getting on my golf cart and heading back onto the farm roads, the easy way. My mother still lives in that house. It is extremely comforting to have that amount of grounding. Nothing lasts forever but this has been going on for a very long time.
This is a rare life these days. There is this children's book written by the same person who wrote Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel -- it is about a little house that stays put while the city grows around it. I think the story is written from the perspective of the house. If it is, I find that pretty interesting. It is not the house that gets to make those choices, of course, it is the people who live in the house.
So, really quickly, how did we get to this situation? In the mid 1960s my parents bought a five acre piece of property that was adjacent to property owned by good friends of my Newcomb grandparents. It was deep in the woods, with no direct access to a road -- only a right of way. On the other side of the friends' orchard lived my grandparents. So it was not a random piece of ground that my parents bought. It wasn't even a particularly useful or good piece of ground. But the location was key for starting something new. Little by little my parents purchased more parcels that eventually got the first piece connected to the road -- now we had road frontage on a real highway. Not a back road but a historic connecting road between Alexandria and Leesburg, a turnpike in the olden days. It took several more purchases to collect up 25 acres of rolling, wooded, completely not flat ground, and that is what became the home base for this farm and this family. The acreage was still contiguous with the Moutoux Orchard, and that was still connected to the grandparents' property.
All of this is important because it wasn't a pioneer experiment, setting out to start a homestead in the middle of nowhere. It was starting a homestead right next to friends and family. In many ways, it made no sense at all but in the most important ways it was the difference between building a strong future with a huge running start and truly starting out in an alien land.
It's not particularly relevant to this topic, but my father's father never approved one bit of these life choices. My father and his father fought regularly about every little thing, and this scheme of farming was not in my grandfather's hopes for his son. He could not have imagined how that scheme would take root and grow so many other schemes and homelands and enterprises. And yet, he welcomed his grandchildren into his home at any time, day or night, for all of the years that we were within walking distance of each other. So much of my childhood was spent in the comforts of our grandparents' comforting and stable and cozy house.
Skipping over the middle 50 years to now. Now I am lying on the couch in a house that sits on what was once the Moutoux Shed Patch (so named because of its proximity to said shed). When this house was built (along with the other 18 houses in this community), we could see the Circle Shed at the Moutoux's, with their orchard ladders leaning against it and the scraggly plum trees between us and the shed. Now, through the same window, we see a row of solid, square, tall, brick-covered houses. The orchard is gone and is now filled with 60 oversized houses.
How do we feel about this? Not the best. But we have managed to continue to live the life we choose -- and we even have a paved easement that crosses through that development, allowing us to drive our tractors and golf carts right through there to our grandparent's property. This took a lot of relationship building with the people who made the decisions while building those multi-million dollar houses. Because we are so committed to continuing to have a home here, we worked with them to make it possible for us to keep farming in the way we want to, despite the changes. We do not waste energy on resenting the new people -- most of them have no idea they have a farm on one side and a cohousing community on the other. They have big garages and not much time to observe their surroundings. But we always wave from our tractors as we drive on the wide paved roads.
I am still not getting to the point. There are too many points. This topic is way too big. Let me try again. We have had the immense privilege of holding our ground, of building our communities, of growing our families and our friendships by staying on this one imperfect piece of property for a very long time. We have not built a big fence and talked only to ourselves. Instead we have left the deer fence gates open (literally, during the day) so that people can come in. Strangers are allowed to walk through the farm whenever they want, as long as they stay off the fields. Hundreds of customers come to the stand every week, or to the CSA room. We have made this unlikely, weirdly shaped, not particularly accessible piece of ground into a home base, a place of welcome, a place that is changed by every person who lives here or works here or finds a way to be here regularly. It is the work a lifetime for my family and friends to have created this. And it continues to change.
The same story is unfolding in Loudoun at our other farm. That's for another day.
And you (all of you) have made this land into a beautiful, cherished spot for many people. That is not a small accomplishment.
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