If I Could Do it All Over Again

Even though it’s a rainy day, I want to take a drive out to Ohio farm country, specifically to drive by our old house. I expect it to look the same — a little, two-bedroom farmhouse surrounded by mature trees. I had to have that house when I saw the 200-year old shagbark hickories and enormous oaks, the woods, the barn, the long cement driveway lined with peony bushes, the bird houses atop posts planted along the creek that divided our property from a soy field, farmed by a man who goes by the name of Wiley. Just Wiley. Like Cher, but drives a combine the height of a two-story building and the width of  the road, and wears only one outfit: a Carhart, t-shirt, overalls and boots. All the farmland that made up most of the radius of our view belonged to Wiley.

I don’t want to go inside. I just want to see the house again and remember how much I loved living there, especially this time of year, when the farmers are putting away their combines, moving truckloads of corn or soy beans to silos. Some of it they sell to the Champagne Landmark grain elevators in Marysville, nearly a half-hour away, where later it is loaded into railcars through a chute. Most of the harvest is stored in the farmers’ silos.

When word gets out that the price of grain is up, there is a line of trucks at the granary. That’s when the train whistles through Marysville more often. It is a comforting sound. The Midwest is providing, for the rest of the country and for export. When I used get stuck in Marysville behind a railroad-crossing gate to let long trains snake along the tracks that cut through town roads, I would count the railcars holding grain, and try to imagine where they were heading. To General Mills? To Kellogg’s? To ports? I liked to imagine children in China eating tofu from beans that grew out my window.

We’d wave when we saw Wiley drive his truckloads by our house. Give him the thumbs up to salute the long days out in the field, running the combine hours beyond sunset to get the crop in quickly before damp weather came. Our view changed drastically from one day to the next this time of year. Just as we’d gotten comfortable in the cozy seclusion of tall cornfields that sprouted up around us and grew tall, little by little, we were exposed again at harvest when the crop fields were reduced to perfect, even rows of stubble. Miniature snowdrift fences in winter. I like to look down the rows when I drive by, look down each row as far as I can. The order is comforting. Once in a while I spot a squatty groundhog, nibbling on some grain left behind. Mostly large flocks of blackbirds sweep in and out.

Once the crops are harvested, the house and outbuildings seem too modest for their five acres and wide-open views. We kept three acres mowed, one was wooded, thick with blackberry and raspberry bushes. The acre between the house and the woods I left for wildflowers and tall grass when the jostling of the mower was too much on my spine. My favorite corner of the property is in the back, the northeast corner, just before the woods, where the oldest oak tree within miles lives an enchanted life. I call it an eight-arm tree because it takes four people to wrap their arms around it to be able to touch fingertips. The branches defy gravity. They dip down and up and although they never broke in a storm, I didn’t dare climb on them. I rode the riding mower with great reverence underneath that tree. Reverent limbo. I’d have to lay back as far as I could or lean lower than the steering wheel to scrape by underneath the great grandmother’s long arms, and still she’d manage to grab strands of my hair for keeps.

That wise old oak was young when the Wyandot Indians walked the land. I’d think about them when I looked for arrowheads and picked berries in the woods. I’d look out at dawn, before the fog lifted, and imagine a group of Wyandots walking through the rows of corn stubble in Wiley’s fields.

The kitchen was set up for canning, and baking pies, and making large meals with vegetables from the garden. It had long counters and more cabinets than we had pots and pans and dishes to put in them, and plenty of room around a large table that sat in the middle, begging for company around the holidays. If only company were not so far away.

The last time we drove out to see the old house was after a tornado stormed through Union county. It shredded houses but left barns standing, or ripped barns to splinters but left unscathed silos full of corn and soy that would yield just enough profit to pay off a portion of the loan on the combine, gas and food, seed and propane for the year. The old house, and more importantly, the old trees were still standing as they were when we left. But in the fields were large piles of debris, entire tin roofs crumpled like paper, fencing. Wiley must have gathered everything from his fields with one of his tractors.

When we walked into the house for the first time, I flew from window to window. We bought the house for its beautiful views no matter which window you looked out. These views would be the perfect salve to help me process the topsy-turvy changes I’d endured in the last few years. My grandmother once said, “If you don’t believe in God, go someplace beautiful. When you find God’s peace in that beauty, you’ll know God.”

I needed some peace. I’d died a dozen deaths with all the changes I’d been through. Moving to Ohio from New York was not just a culture shock, but an identity earthquake. Recently married, I was a new mom, an at-home mom, without a career, no longer getting paid for being “a publications specialist”, no longer working with people who would reinforce my identity everyday. Best friends outside of work, who could help me remember who I was, when I’m not a job title, broke off our friendships cruelly and untimely. I was starting over with every aspect of who I was, building my identity from pieces, finding myself in the rhythm of the sowing, growing, yielding, and resting backdrop of farm country.

I couldn’t have chosen a better spot to find myself than the heartland. I found myself while picking berries and rolling out pie crusts, dusting the film of fresh flour from the pages of my mother’s Joy of Cooking before closing it up, returning it to the bookshelf, and waiting for the timer to ding while the house filled with warm sugary goodness.

I found myself while Baby James and I stood side-by-side, reaching our hands carefully around prickly blackberry bushes to pick juicy, plump berries. One for our mouths. One for our containers. James said one of his first sentences, “Yook, Mommy! I have a bunch!” He lifted his container to show me a half-dozen half-ripe berries, unaware of an ant crawling up his arm toward the dimple in his elbow. I brushed it off before it got lost up his sleeve and we’d pick and eat, pick and eat, until we collected enough.

I found myself when Baby James and I walked into the woods to sit on a log and share my berries while listening to the birds. We tried to guess if they were a boy or a girl bird, and how many brothers and sisters they had, how far away they were from their nests, and were they looking for another bird to fly with or just a lowly worm to eat for lunch?

I found myself under the clothesline that was mounted between two shagbark hickories by the previous owner. I’d hang baby clothes among colorful t-shirts that Skye and I had worn since before we met. Next to the onesies and the tiny socks hung the tie-dye t-shirt Skye was wearing when I met him and the Santana t-shirt I’ve had since high school.

I found myself on the riding mower where I did my best thinking. I timed the chore so that I would be outside when the huge, orange sun sank behind the soy fields and colored the sky and everything under it in a warm glow. I liked the idea of riding off into the sunset and not turning back.

I found myself listening to opera while tediously scraping the paint off the pump house and repainting it to match the house. I found myself in the garden I tilled and planted and manicured with Baby James; he with his trowel, me with mine. We compared worms that wiggled in our palms and made us giggle.

I needed someplace to be. Someplace spacious, to let my thoughts sprawl and untangle and settle. When the realtor showed us the house, I couldn’t speak the whole way back to our apartment in the suburbs. I was afraid if I said “We’ll take it!” too soon, it could affect the negotiations. While I was trying to play it cool, I hadn’t noticed something important. It was a very, very long drive back to civilization. That long drive would eventually be the reason we’d sellout sell.

When we bought this house in Columbus, we knew we were trading views across long distances of land for convenience, amenities, high-ranking public schools and a social life. Our souls craved the fresh air in the morning, the silence in the day, the sunsets in the evening and the awesome blanket of stars at night, but the time in our lives as a family, with one child ready for preschool and another on the way, determined the change. We miss the sunsets and the brilliant stars at night.

I was in my second trimester of my second pregnancy when we moved to Columbus. There was a biological urgency to find a home before the baby was born compounded by an extra push we felt to purchase this house once our farmhouse was in contract. We bought this home after looking at it for 30 minutes. Compared to the other two houses we saw, this one seemed the sturdiest, and had the best features and conveniences. It would do. Our realtor said, “You’re one of those couples for whom everything just comes together smoothly, aren’t you.” We hadn’t thought of it that way before.

Like every major decision in our life, choosing this house, while it went smoothly, felt rash. Fortunately it turned out all right. As with all of our rash decisions, we have separately and together wondered if it was the right choice. Did we make a mistake? How did we come to that decision? What were the circumstances again? How’d we get where we are now?

Now and then when we’re taking inventory of our life and the path we’ve taken as a couple, we wind up talking about the crossroads moments. The deciding factors that led us to live together right after we met, that led us to get married right after I got pregnant, that led us to take the job in Ohio when we could have gone anywhere in the country, that led us to the apartment in the suburbs, to the country house, and then the city house. We realize we’d do it all the same way if we had to decide again with years to think it over first. And we’d do it all the same order.

Except we might not have performed our first home inspection ourselves. A professional inspector would have advised against it when he slithered into the crawl space and saw what was going on underneath. That farmhouse was held up with a carjack. Skye discovered that when he did the inspection but he forgot to mention it to me. It’s possible I was so smitten with the place I didn’t hear it. We like to drive back to see the old house, not just to wax nostalgia, but because we want to know if it’s still standing or if the jack gave out.

For now, it still stands.

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