Origin Story, Part 1: Buying the farm
How we pretended to be the thing we turned out to be
It was one of those relentless Brooklyn summers where the air-conditioning window units ran all the time, even at night. We were exhausted, and not just by the heat.
We were in the city for the summer only—I was on a temporary and very intense job assignment in between moving from my company’s small Sydney office to headquarters in San Francisco. Back in Sydney, my mother-in-law was nearing the end of a terminal cancer diagnosis, and we were doing some major compartmentalizing, at her urging. We were trying to keep going with life but feeling unmoored, emotionally exhausted, and preemptively grief-stricken, unsure of what we were doing and why.
On this particular morning, my husband climbed out of bed and shut the a/c unit off, so that we could bask in silence before the cold air leached out of the apartment and we had to submit to the unceasing noise once again. In the quiet, cool room, I scrolled through Facebook (it was 2014) until I saw an exclamatory post from an aunt, with a link to a real estate listing. I sat up in bed. The family farm was for sale.
Three summers in a row, my Mom packed me and my siblings into a car that was unlikely to make the trip to upstate New York (and yet somehow did) and we embarked on the eighteen-hour drive up from South Carolina. In two instances, it was for my brother to play baseball, and another for an uncle’s wedding. Each time, no matter how full the schedule was, my mom made a point of driving us forty-five minutes out of the way to visit the family farm.
The family farm, which sits on the traditional lands of the Oneida people, was purchased by my great-grandfather in the 1920s from the Rose family, who originally built it. The house and surrounding structures were likely built sometime between 1890 and 1910 and, over the following years, members of my family built small farms along the road as well. My great-grandfather, Peter and his wife, Amelia, who were Lithuanian immigrants, worked the land as dairy farmers, and owned it until the 1980s, when it was sold to a man from Long Island, who intended to use it as a country home.
The whole way to the farm, the adults in the car (always my mom plus either an aunt or my grandmother) would practically shout memories over top of one another. It would be a relief to turn onto the farm’s road, which bore my family’s surname, where at least we could get out of the car for the express purpose of being photographed by the road sign, and then again in the front yard of the house. I never wanted to look too closely at the house, which felt both vacant and threatening. In this part of New York, houses that appear abandoned often aren’t, and I was always braced for someone to open a door and yell at us, or worse.
The stories that unspooled from my mom, aunts, and grandmother were familiar ones. I’d heard them all my life (and are numerous (and salacious) enough that they deserve their own post someday soon). This house and this farm seemed to be a nexus of happy memories for them—the dark Lithuanian bread baking in the wood stove, the fresh pails of milk from the barn, the barn kittens begging for a taste, the way my great-grandmother referred to her grandchildren, lovingly, as “little shits.”
And so when I clicked the real estate listing posted by my aunt, I was driven by curiosity and a bit of inherited nostalgia, of course, but I was also reaching for something. I had moved a lot as a child and was preparing to move to my third city in six years as an adult. I’d never had a singular place like this—a place that defined me, that contained everything good.
What if, I asked my husband, we just drove up and looked at the farm? I was desperate to look inside. Once it sold, who knew if I’d ever have a chance to go in again? He reminded me that we had brunch plans with my friend Katie. I texted Katie and asked if she’d like to drive upstate for the weekend and pose as fake buyers for my ancestral farmstead. She, being one of my best girls, immediately agreed.
We had absolutely no business going to look at a farm in central New York. I was stepping into a promotion in San Francisco, we had no real connection to the area. Most of my extended family had long ago moved to South Carolina (as my mother had), and only a few third cousins and great-aunts remained, the kind who wouldn’t recognize me in the Dollar General if we ran into each other. Speaking of Dollar General—that was our closest store in any direction, and was fifteen minutes away. The closest grocery store—a small, mediocre Price Chopper—was thirty minutes away. There were no restaurants, no movie theaters, no shops or bars or bowling alleys or hardware or bakeries. No friends, no airports, no jobs.
And yet, as we made our way upstate—winding through the Catskills, and then driving through rolling farmland that rests in valleys between steep forested ridges, it started to feel very real. I grew up on horse farms in the south—suntanned arms and scratched shins and wind-tangled hair, dogs and cats and horses and chickens in constant need, and in mutual adoration. There were entire days during the summer when I only crossed the threshold of a building to sleep. I thought about how, more often than not, the only time I spent outdoors these days was the ten-minute walk from our rental to the subway. I imagined myself in the big office in San Francisco, the one with the cafeteria that served three meals a day, in the job that would keep me at my desk for a minimum of ten hours a day, on a good day. It was starting to feel like I was doing life very wrong. My husband could sense the playfulness fading out of me, and gently reminded me, more than once as we got closer, that we weren’t really on our way to buy a farm, right? Remember?
When I stepped out of the rental car beside the farmhouse, it was the first time I’d stood on the property without fear of reprimand. I had time to stop and look. To feel the size and shape of the maple trees along the driveway, to pause on the porch and look back at the field where my great-grandmother was said to have a kitchen garden large enough to feed their family of seven year-round.
The house was shuttered, and still. It had been empty and unused for thirty years, though looked after by a caretaker. (It turned out no one had ever been glaring at 12-year-old me from behind parted curtains.) As I walked from room to room, I tried to orient myself but it was nearly impossible. Was this my grandfather’s room? The one where he slept on a straw-stuffed mattress? Was this where they gathered around the new radio? Is this where my grandmother sat in her rocking chair, where she canned her vegetables, where she talked on the party line in Polish because there were no Lithuanians around?
After going through the house once I had to stop, and reset. I started over, from the mudroom, determined to look at the house as just a house—not as vessel for my family’s legacy. The current owners had fixed the place up in the 80s. There was wallpaper everywhere (pink and blue flowers), and yellowed trim. Linoleum and brittle roller shades, clusters of ladybugs in the corner of every ceiling and heaps of fly carcasses in the windowsills. But it was a really nice house. It had six-foot windows crammed into every possible space, beautiful honeyed floorboards, and heavy wooden doors with pewter knobs. It felt like a homestead, tucked against a mountain, looking over a large swath of the valley and the high ridge line beyond. Each window had a different view, and not a single one revealed another building. Just the heart-achingly variegated green of upstate New York in summer, a glimpse of the pond my grandfather had dug out as a young man, the fluttering of the lilac bushes, whose scent my mother dreamt about at night.
I don’t remember what we said to the agent, or how convincing we were as supposed buyers. I remember feeling that he was disappointed and maybe a bit exasperated when we left—we were so young, so vague about our circumstances, so unsettled.
I watched the house over my shoulder as we drove away. There was complete silence in the car until we reached the stop sign. I looked at my husband and said, “We have to buy it.”
Next week—Origin Story, Part 2: Renovations, with more before & afters than you could possibly want.
Feeling choked up at the end of reading this. Is secret dream of mine has been to buy back my childhood home in Vermont that my parents built.
Congratulations! My childhood memories were a1929 farmhouse that always held the aroma of bacon cooking, it was not nearly as grand as the house pictured here, but it was still way out of my price point...heavy sigh.