Papa's Farm

As a boy of five or six years old, I lived near Papa Walker's "farm"-

-I used the outhouse, helped "slop" the pigs, pumped water from the well. I watched Papa sharpen a hoe and tend a large garden while he sang old gospel songs. I ate the green beans, black-eyed peas, and the tomatoes that grew in that garden, while I sat weary from the heat at a tiny kitchen table next to an enormous window fan. I drank in Papa's values with the cold water he offered from the tin dipper. I want to return there now, but a highway has paved over the place where the sharecropper's house once sat. The terrain is so changed that the exact location is nearly impossible to spot. Corn fields (for fuel?) clothe the landscape with uniformity from ditch to ditch. There are no fence rows, few gardens, no diversity of livestock kept for food. I didn't realize that my childhood eyes were watching the disappearance of that green haven forever.

And if I cannot return, I want to see it again in my mind, clearly, as it was. I want to experience it momentarily, by practicing the skills that made it possible, even in a place as unlike it as night from day.

The farm industry says:

"Keep in mind that on grandpa's farm, the cows and pigs walked in creeks and streams and rain water washed manure off of open lots." (Don Villwock, President, Indiana Farm Bureau, The Hoosier Farmer, Summer 2006)

But I say, "Not on Papa Walker's farm!"

The farm industry says:

"Unfortunately that farm doesn't exist anymore and hasn't for some time." (ibid.)

But I say, "If the way grandpa farmed was harmful, why is its disappearance unfortunate? And if grandpa's way of farming was beneficial, its forced disappearance (by economics) sounds like a capitulation to the worst sort of tyrrany."

Tumbledown Farm is a virtual haven, a place to learn and explore 19th and early 20th century farms. ...a place to sow and grow "contrary" dreams.