Sylvia's Farm by Sylvia Jorrin Page B

when we weren’t at the farm, we’d climb into the big black Buick and drive to Ocean Beach. My parents chose a distant spot, “away” from everyone, on an inlet close to a tiny island, accessible in low tide. We were taught not to swim but walk, our heads held high like little turtles, bathing caps and sand shoes in place, laughing when a wave splashed over us but terrified in our hearts of being swept away.
    When I got old enough to dare, I’d slip across the shallow inlet onto the tiny island, not more than a sand dune, I’m sure, and explore. The fear of the tide coming in between me and the safety of my parents spoiled it somehow for me, but I did it anyway. And never told my mother.
    On the other days we’d go to the “fahm” and visit my grandparents and cousins. My cousins were lucky to be allowed to stay overnight, while we lived too nearby ever to sleep over. Although now I don’t exactly know why we never did.
    Two of my cousins and the son of one of them went to visit my grandfather’s farm with me on the day of the rugosa roses. We remembered, with varying degrees of detail, our lives there and the lives that had gone on before. We exclaimed about what was still there and what wasn’t, how much smaller it seemed to Henry and Marilyn who had last been there longer ago than I. The pastures had been allowed to grow over. Not even a memory of a meadow for a cow, or the potato fields, or the old well remained. There were secret rocks that marked the place beyond which I would not venture into the woods. Those rocks linger in the pasture. And yet pasture does not even appear in dreams in those scruffy woods any longer.
    I went behind the house and found an apple tree that had beenthere when I was a child. The apples fell one at a time at my feet. I put two of them in my pocket with hopes of eventually getting their seeds to grow. My nature never changes.
    We saw the family graves, some of them. And graves of a world that has vanished for me forever. My cousins weren’t raised in New London, but my brother and I were. And there before me were names, name after name, of people who had filled my childhood with a sense of security. To a child a day is forever, and the large solid people inhabiting those days were forever as well. The kind of life that was so rich and full of meaning then is over, a victim of itself, in fact. In a wish to create a “better” life, our parents, everyone’s parents, traded in what was glorious about their past lives in exchange for the illusion of what was good in the present. And something became forever lost in the process. I came the closest of all of us to having that old life. I farm the land that none of the rest of us have chosen to have. My life is about sheep, not cows, although there are some cows in it, but it is a farm. I pick apples and elderberries and have a hint of a garden. I, of us all, live closest to the life on my grandfather’s farm.
    But there is a difference. Although I live not so very differently from the way my grandparents did then, my style is different, in form as well as content. But there is one more important thing that is different. There was family all around them. Friends. Relatives. Community. There were ties that could be broken only by death and even then continued. There were so many of us sitting around that table in those days. So many of us under those trees. I know, I know, the poverty and struggle were unfathomable, even for me, for whom my own farm is all too often on the thin edge of survival. And yet there was rich fullness of spirit in that place, that farm on Society Road near Perkins Corners in Niantic, Connecticut, that is wanting in the life we live today.
    And so I am glad to have picked a rose for my cousin Marilyn. And I am glad that Henry tasted a rose hip even if he didn’t like it. And that his son took home some gleaming stones from the beach, unpolished by the