Memorial Day Weekend: Codman Farm

On Sunday, we drove out to Codman Farm, and languished in our perennial fantasy of scrapping it all, and buying a farm. Thora got into the spirit as well. After we pulled up, she was itching to get out of the car. I unstrapped her from her car seat and set her down on the dirt ground of the dusty parking lot. And right away, she pointed and said, "Booo. Booo." There was an enormous tractor parked just feet away from our car, and I thought perhaps she was excited to be so close to it. However, there were also, about twenty feet away, two cows, calves really, laying down in the shade of the fence, lying snuggled together, facing each other with their heads resting on the other's back. I couldn't really believe that she was identifying the cows. After all, her version of "mooo" had for the last few weeks been "vvvvv," since that is the sound the cow makes in her old-fashioned noise-maker (the short cylinder that moos when turned upside down and then right-side up). But here at Codman Farm, just seconds out of the car, she was walking closer and pointing in the direction of the cows and say "booo." We got closer and I picked her up in my arms, to get a real sense of what she was pointing at. And there was no mistaking it; suddenly, right then and there, she went from saying "vvvv" to saying "booo". It was a small moment in the life of a parent when the clouds part, the sun shines down on your baby, and you watch as she fits another piece of the puzzle into place. Sean and I awed at her for a few minutes, shot some video of her new, more closely "moo-like" sound, commented to one another on how impressed we were ("I can't believe she spotted those cows so quickly and from so far away!"), and then started our tour of the farm.

We walked around, poking our noses in the various pens, cooing at the nuzzling, nursing piglets as they fell all over each other, their eyes closed, their noses rooting. We pointed out to Thora, and mimicked the noises of the sheep and lambs (all black ones), the goats and the kids who'd escaped from their pens, the turkeys and chickens, the ducks and the ducklings. There were baby animals aplenty there yesterday.

We wandered over past the community gardens and I coveted some gardener's tomato plants. Sean said, "Those are really spaced far apart," pointing to the 6-inch tall green, spiky, early tomato plants. And I said, "Maybe they expect them to be big and they'll need the room." And right then, I so pined to grow our own plants and herbs in a "real" garden. I've always had plants and herbs. Since Sean and I have been living together, since back on First Avenue in Tucson, I've grown tomato plants and various herbs to greater and lesser degrees of success. In New York, I had a container garden on our fire escape. I plan to have at least the same in our back yard here in Cambridge.

However, walking through the community garden yesterday, the sun hard and hot in the blue sky, punishing even, I felt the pull of nostalgia, to a rural life that I remember in patches of the short chapter of my childhood when we lived in Southern Illinois, the town where both my parents were born and went to high school, where they met and married the summer after my mom graduated high school, where both sides of my family originated and where my roots are clustered. I remember playing whiffle ball with the other neighborhood kids, and having to swat away the gnats from a raw patch on my leg, the result of sliding into one of the bases. I remember picking green beans from our garden; I remember a green garter snake trying to scale the inside of the screened-in porch, only to fall back down. I remember kittens being born. I remember a cat named Georgie and one named Snowshoes.

I was flooded with all these memories as we walked the dirt roads marked by the tractor wheels, and the desire to give in to the pull towards those gardens, those animals and their velvety muzzles, the tall flowers, that hard, punishing sun. We said, "Wouldn't Georgia (our dog) love chasing after those chickens." We said, "Can you imagine Thora out here?" We soaked up the sun and the blue sky. We swatted at the bugs. My gaze lingered on the green and sloping horizon of the fields. And then reluctantly, we got in our car, strapped our baby into her car seat, and drove down the road to get ice cream.