About farms
McCarthy, Abigail
Of several minds: Abigail McCarthy ABOUT FARMS A LIFE OF SMELLS & FRAGRANCES ROM MY HOTEL BALCONY in Rome I Flook out to the left and right on distant blocks of newly-built and graceless flats...
...Ultimately such children have learned the lesson of the family farm-that to which the small landholders cling everywhere...
...It is true that many a canning factory worker, many an assembler of electronic equipment gets into a car at the end of his or her work shift to make a lengthy trip to the old farm house...
...The sounds: there were the good man-made ones—the high whine of the separating machine which told us that the men were back from early morning milking and the milk was being separated from the heavy cream...
...In retrospect farm life seems more than any other a life of smells and fragrances...
...The sound of a rooster crowing far off will bring them in a rush...
...Of several minds: Abigail McCarthy ABOUT FARMS A LIFE OF SMELLS & FRAGRANCES ROM MY HOTEL BALCONY in Rome I Flook out to the left and right on distant blocks of newly-built and graceless flats but straight ahead I have a vista of the Italian countryside...
...The owners have jobs now, and are part-time or one-crop farmers...
...And on the horizon the dark cypresses march in double rows toward still another villa...
...In Europe such a farmer talks about clinging to the human dimension of things, of knowing and being known on home ground, of the continuity of generations in one place...
...A flock of sheep grazes on the hill beyond...
...the sound of the butter churn turning, and the thump and slap of the butter paddle shaping the butter before it was pressed into molds...
...Somewhere I hope they search for the errant turkey hen and her young, shoo them down from low tree roosts and herd them home just as the first stars show...
...Will the same thing happen in the United States where so many lament the disappearance of the family farm...
...In America he is more apt to speak of the appeal of freedom, space, light, air—the absence of crowds...
...Perhaps he has a garden there, a few head of livestock, fruit trees, chickens...
...But, in either case, he or she is not talking of the multi-faceted, almost self-sufficient farms of the kind I used to visit every summer of my childhood...
...In Italy, France, and Germany stubborn owners hold to the land...
...ABIGAIL McCARTHY Commonweal: 360...
...In these weeks of early summer I find the memories of the farm life I knew flooding back...
...But the connectedness to the earth and the interconnectedness of creatures to which farm life bears witness are things the human spirit is loath to lose...
...They were made possible by a great deal of back-breaking human drudgery and isolation...
...Meadow rings a monastery and its dependent school...
...Some fragrances 'one takes for granted— clover and apple blossoms, new-cut hay and field grass—but there are smells, not fragrances, which linger—not unpleasantly at all—in the storehouses of memory like the sicklysweet smell of pollinating corn and the pungent smell of manure spread as fertilizer...
...So many are holding out against the encroachment of the large mechanized farms (really food factories) that some agronomists see them as an economic threat in a continent seeking to feed itself...
...Those farms are gone...
...They seem to be all creaturely memories—of sounds and smells and comforts...
...Perhaps the fields lie fallow or are leased to a neighbor who farms on a big scale...
...Common market economic planners are beginning to complain of an unforeseen phenomenon...
...Nearby, just beyond the hotel, there are one or two small independent farms...
...That may not wholly be a bad thing...
...But distance and the cost of fuel and transportation make the prospect an unlikely one for us...
...The Angelus rings out three times a day and a white-robed monk paces a tree-lined lane to say his office...
...There were the animal sounds of cows, of pigs, of horses, the peeping and pecking of the newly hatched and hatching chicks in the incubator, the frantic high-pitched piping of the last chick scurrying to reach the mother hen as she gathered her brood under her wings at dark, the clear notes of a meadow lark's call first thing in the morning...
...The dispersal of light industry in postwar Europe has made it possible for many small and part-time farmers to cling to their small acreages...
...Food is the business of farms and the production of food on the family farm is inextricably linked with the care of growing things and the warmth of working together so that others may join them around a table...
...Somewhere this summer I hope children gather eggs, know the "thunk" of plump gooseberries gathered into a pail, climb apple trees carefully to get the fruit just out of reach...
...the creak of the pump and the windmill followed by the sound of water splashing...
...Somewhere they go into the lamplight where their folk of varied ages gather to read, sometimes to sing, to talk of former days and, as they do so, gather comfort and security against the night...
...On the attached tenant farms the rectangular fields of vegetables are flourishing because of the late spring rains, and fruit trees are blooming...
...In another year, perhaps, the growth and industrialization on the left and right will have closed, pincer-like, on this patch of countryside and wiped it out...
...But perhaps not...
...I can see a villa nearby with terraces and a formal garden...
...Perhaps—around our great cities—and around the small ones which woo industry as zealously...
Vol. 107 • June 1980 • No. 12
