My Heart's Home

I lived in many different places as I was growing up--at least 4 states and 7 houses that I remember. I don't feel like this was a bad thing, but it did have the result of never being to look back at any one "childhood home." It also meant that my grandparent's farm was the only place that I have returned to my entire life.

Both of my parents were from South Carolina, but we lived in California until I was almost 12. My dad taught school for many of those years, and every summer we drove from California to South Carolina. I can't imagine how hard these trips were for my mom--especially the year we drove the 3000+ miles with 6 young children in a small pickup truck with a hard shell on the back. I don't remember how I felt as a child about the long journey east, except that I felt very important as I sat in the front seat with my dad at night to help keep him awake. We ate gumdrops and listen to Marty Robbins sing "Cool, Clear Water" and "El Paso", music that I still remember.

What I do remember is the Farm. When members of my extended family talk about the Farm you can literally hear the capital letter. It is that important to us.

My grandparents bought the first part of this land towards the end of World War II, after my grandfather was done working in some kind of munitions factory in Arlington, Virginia. They bought the land and had the small house built and finished raising their family there. As their children grew and married and had children of their own, bringing their families back to the Farm every summer (as they were able, of course) was an important priority.

This picture wasn't taken at the farm--I think it might have
been taken at my uncle's house in Richmond.
I am the second from the left, with the short brown hair.

My first memory of the Farm was the same every year. The excitement of realizing that we were now on the highway--the one the Farm was one. And then the fear of turning into the driveway. The driveway, you see, was not too wide. And there was a very deep ditch on either side. We always seemed to arrive at night, and I was so worried that my dad would somehow miss the drive and we would end up in the ditch.

And then there were the relatives. A few years ago my sweet sister in law gave us a book called "The Relatives Came." She told us how that book made her think of when we came to visit them or they came to visit us. But I knew the truth of it--that book was about my Watson family. Because we did drive for days to see each other, and there were just so many uncles and aunts and cousins and hugs and kisses. It was like kid paradise.

The Farm did not have any luxuries. As I've mentioned before, it was originally a small 4 room house that had been added onto many times throughout the years. One bathroom was off of my grandparents' bedroom, and the other bathroom was inbetween two bedrooms. The kitchen was small and the dining room was originally a back porch with a sloped roof. Until we were teens most of us slept there at the farm. Each married couple slept in a bedroom with their youngest children, but the rest of us slept in the living room, dining room, or wherever we could find a little bit of floor space. We slept all lined up in rows, packing in as many of the 43 grandchildren as were there at that time. One time one of my sisters even slept under the table! And we thought it was wonderful.

I managed not to be in this picture.
I was probably off sulking somewhere, since in 1979 I was an angsty teenager!

The very best part of The Farm was The Tree. On one of the side property lines of the Farm there was an irrigation ditch. Growing up from the near bank of the ditch was a huge sweet gum tree, with branches spreading in every direction. My grandpa had brought home a huge broken pulley belt from the mill that he worked in, and tied it onto a branch hanging out over the ditch. There was usually a decent amount of water in the ditch, and we spent hours and hours every day playing there. We would swing back and forth across the ditch, hoping that we wouldn't fall in the water, and I'm sure hoping almost as hard that we would. One morning our oldest cousins gave me and a couple of cousins my age "taxi" rides across to the other sides and then left us stranded there. My mom had given me specific instructions that morning not to get wet, and I was devestated to be forced to be disobedient. (One of my cousins still says that my mom knew we were going to get wet; unfortunately my mom isn't around to ask, so I still maintain that I was supposed to stay dry!)

I do have other memories from the farm; playing at a park on the banks of the local lake, playing house under the muscadine grape arbor with the sweet smell of ripening grapes, playing in the huge tractor tire (before the fig tree took over), taking walks on the hot deserted country roads. There was the year that my grandpa took all of us to swim at the club pool of the company that he had worked for all of his life. I think at that time the rule was that employees or retired employees could bring their family members to the pool. After that summer the rule was changed and we were never able to go swimming at the Sonoco pool again. I suspect it had something to do with the fact that there were at least 20 of us, several of those rowdy teenage boys. But the dominant memory of our time at the farm was the Tree. We were broken hearted when the Tree was hit by lightening when I was in my late teens. It was no longer safe for children to play in or around, and the younger generation of cousins grew up hearing about it but never experiencing it.


One of the delightful things about living in North Carolina for the last 13.5 years has been being only 3.5 hours away from the Farm. We have not been many times in recent years, but when the kids were younger we were able to go far more often. I want my kids to have a sense of where, as their southern relatives would say, their "people" come from. Each time we visit I am struck by how deeply rooted I am to this place. My heart knows that this place, this piece of land with it's modest house, means family and connection and love. I may have never lived on here, but it is still where I am from.

I know that now that both of my grandparents are dead my dad and his siblings will have to decide what to do with the Farm. Fortunately a local farmer rents and farms the land, so nothing has to be decided immediately. I am glad that I won't have to be a part of this tough decision making. And I will forever be grateful to have had the experience of the Farm in my life.