From second through eighth grade, my daughter spent a few weeks each year on a farm owned by her elementary school. The idea was for city kids to spend time together in the country, starting when they were too young to have any entrenched prejudices. No matter what their cultural, racial, economic, gender or familial differences in the city, in the country, they would all be equally out of their element at first, and would work together to forge a community. And they did. What a magical time they had together. Some of my daughter's classmates appear in the photograph above, taken from the farmhouse kitchen window, and the one below, on the swing. I love every one of the children. They're all 15 or 16 and in different high schools now. Finding this photo makes me want to share a piece of writing my daughter did as an English assignment last year, about her class taking leave of the farm for the last time.
Our Last Night
Eighth grade was dwindling down, and school had become just a way to spend time with the seventeen people in my class, whom I had been with since I was four, and who were all about to scatter to different parts of the city, and one even beyond, to boarding school. Work was minimal and eventually shifted into none at all, and we spent most classes sitting in the heat waiting for one thing to happen: our last farm trip.
My middle school owns a farm. Our class first went there in second grade and stayed for three days. The next year we went twice, in the fall and the spring, and stayed for a week each time. And as we got older the number of our trips turned to three times a year, fall, winter, and spring. The farm was what defined our school. Everyone loved to be there, and we especially loved being there together.
When you first drive in, you see a vast space of just green grass, with taller, prickly bushes that come to your shoulder nearer to the road. The field dips down to a forest, and then a river if you go far enough, but no one really does. Right before it slopes down, there is a fire pit and a large rock with a cliff edge on the other side. Next to that is a gravelly basketball court. About fifteen paces from there is a compost pile, of all the fruits, vegetables, egg shells, anything food-related that can decompose. All the scraps are given to the pigs, including the bacon (which we always questioned). There are usually a few flat basketballs soaking in the smelly pile, but we still used them.
If you go further down the road you pass the chicken coop. When we were younger, we loved to go in there and name the chickens and call them our pets, even though they smelled horrible. Even further down the road you can see the farm house, the barn, the tire swing, the greenhouse, and the stream. The house is painted white and on the front, facing a large field, is a porch. In the fall, the caterpillars always seemed to end up there and we always had fun peering at them, poking them or screaming at each other that they were poisonous and we were going to die. Around the other side is the deck, a wooden platform built by some previous classes, where the greenhouse is. The greenhouse is not much, mostly a place to wash off the chicken eggs, and one of the best hiding spots when we played “sardines.”
The barn is the place that smells the worst. Even so, we all loved it. When you first walk in through the thin wooden doors you get to the cows. There are about nine stalls for cows, usually we have about seven. It was our job to clean those stalls during barn chores each morning, when we scooped all the poop into a wheelbarrow, sprinkled fresh sawdust on the floor, brushed the cows, swept in front of the stall and fed the cows. After that we had to milk one of the cows, usually a massive black one, a task I was semi-frightened of because on several occasions the cow had whipped me in the face with its rough-haired tail or almost stepped on me. We had a tradition that when we named a cow, it had to be dairy -related if it was a girl, or meat-related if it was a boy. We once named a cow Big Mac, and another Milky Way.
Past the cow area, you reach the pig pens that usually have huge, rambunctious pigs jumping at you, biting holes in your sweater. Then you get to the place where you dump all the waste from the stalls. After that area, you pass by the sheep, who are startled if you make the tiniest movement towards them. They leave poop all around the farm and their pen, which was amusing until we found out it was our job to scoop the six-inch deep layer caked on to the floor.
At the farm, the swing and the stream were two of our favorite places. The swing was where we always wanted to spend our time in the first few years. It was bolted to a thick wooden plank connected to a big tree in front of the house and sometimes held several of us at once.
The stream was where we played when it was warm. We would take off crusty barn boots, put on water shoes and jump in. We would splash each other and build a dam, making a small pool in the stream that could rise as high as our thighs. This vast farm was where we spent our childhood away from the city. We dreaded the final week, and the final day, which would bring our years of farm trips to an end.
On that last trip, when we finally reached the farm after the three-hour bus ride from my school, everyone only wanted to jump into the atmosphere and enjoy it as much as possible. Throughout the whole week, that was exactly what we did. We started to explore parts of the farm that we had never really gone to before, and said our final goodbyes to everything in our heads as we walked away, leaving the fields, streams and animals behind. Then came the last night.
Everyone had been preparing for this a few weeks ahead of time. It had been a tradition for every eighth grade to paint a mural, and we thought we had the coolest idea: an open notebook. One page had pictures of us, while the other side had the funny quotes from over the years, although more than half were left out as we realized after. It was also a tradition for the class to have a bonfire on the last night. Everyone wrote a letter to the whole class and read it at the bonfire, then burned something that represented your love for the school, the farm, your class or your departure from the farm into high school. I had been emotionally preparing myself for this moment for a really long time, and I still didn’t think I was ready.
As we gathered around on the last evening, the sky turned from a bright blue, to a navy blue and then a black night. I remember the stars shining bright, brighter than they would in New York City, ever. The air was so pure up there, and that night it was cool. The farm staff started the fire, a blazing orange catching on the logs and gradually growing larger consuming all the wood in the pile. For a few minutes we all kind of just sat around, soaking up the heat and watching the fire crackle. After that, one of the farm staff stood up and talked a little about our class. Then, one by one, everyone in our class got up, read their letter or said what they had to say, and threw their object into the fire.
I stood up and read my letter, my voice breaking. When I finished, most people were crying, even people I was not expecting to cry. I then took a blue cloth hat similar to the one I wore on my first few farm trips and tossed it into the fire. It landed around the edges, almost hesitant to be left behind. I knew it was time to let go though. I spent the rest of the bonfire on the damp grass, clutching my knees, crying and saying goodbye. At a certain point I stopped crying, and so did everyone. We stood around the fire, while another teacher told us how special we were. We knew it. We knew that there would not be many other classes like us to pass through the school, none to have a bond this tight and to have such an influence on our teachers.
That night we slept in the area above the cows, the hay jump. We tried to pull an all-nighter, but none of us really did. It was absolutely freezing in the barn. The few of us who were actually awake huddled together, lying across one another’s lap. That was how I drifted into sleep. Seventeen of us huddled in our sleeping bags lightly snoring, on a bright blue tarp, the uneven wood floor digging into our backs, allergies rising from the hay. That was our last night. That was our goodbye.
The author of this reflection, at age 5, sitting on a rock bridge over the stream, in a photo taken on her very first visit to the farm.
