Discovering the "Pleasure" of Farming

Although I have never regarded myself as The Hermit of Ivy Street, it wasn't until early last winter that I realized how insular I had become.

My self-awakening began with a drive beyond the beltway. I was surprised at the traffic that clogged the roads out there. I had envisioned this world as nearly unpopulated, empty except for the open farm land and the occasional wood lot. It turned out to be more than unfamiliar; it was another world of which I knew less than a little. (I hope no one takes offense with my calling beyond-the-beltway "out there"; you see, I remember when all there was to Chantilly was a fruit stand and a gas station.)

From where I sit on my front porch, I have almost everything I crave within an easy stroll or a five minute drive. In the new world I visited beyond the beltway, there was little near by. Where a wagon and a horse once satisfied a self sufficient farmstead, now it appeared several automobiles were necessary for a family to get where it must go everyday. You can probably grasp both my delight and terror at what I had encountered.

This other world out there reminded me in many ways of my childhood. In those days, before Arlington was urbanized, men had rough hands and spoke softly and politely to children and anybody's mom could tell you how to behave without fear of contradiction. It was a place where cows munched grass on the hilly ground not far from Seven Corners and swampy fields near the old Washington & Old Dominion railroad tracks held the pulsing life of tiny frogs we called spring peepers.

My current insularity prevented me from knowing whether the verities of my childhood were present in the lives of those who lived in the houses by which I drove. It was the openness, the large sky, and the incompleteness everywhere that recalled those unfinished, striving places I remembered from half a century ago.

Loudoun County recommended itself to me. It seemed like a good place. Joyce and I had actually looked at a greenhouse along Rt. 50 about 20 years ago and thought about purchasing it and the brick house behind it before we decided to stay put and disrupt Francesco's dream of having a soccer field in the back yard. The greenhouse is still there along a wider Rt. 50, and it is still empty and unused.

Soon after my sojourn in the country, Francesco and I began hanging around with a real estate agent named Bill Hunt from the Weichert office in Sterling. We didn't think we could get into much trouble with real estate agents and we permitted Bill and his sidekick, Carson, to drive us all over Loudoun County. They took us to remote areas to look at land and the buildings upon it. After several weeks of this, we pulled up in front of a tumbled down place that looked like what it was: For Sale As Is, a phrase that should send a cold breeze down into the most private place of a man's soul.

Francesco and I fell in love with the barn on this place of high grass, rabbits, deer, groundhogs, and an assortment of biting insects. It was an exquisite brick edifice of three stories, a bit tattered now over 60 years after its construction. Maybe we should have taken Tammy's advice. "Why do you want an old, rundown place like that?" she asked pointedly after the home inspector had left and we had found a little Mexican restaurant in which to seek sustenance. Her question was practical and realistic. Of course, she was right to question our sanity. On the other hand, we had seen something hidden beneath the tall grass, mud and dilapidated buildings. We had seen the germ of a dream, perhaps the same impulse that pushed easterners West in the time of the gold rush.

Some dreams are easy to shake; ours was not. We were suckered by rusticity and I do not think that the DeBaggios had one moment's hesitation. We wanted to buy this place of modesty and wide sky, and after a time of agony, misunderstanding, and indision, it was ours, along with what seemed like a ton of dried pigeon droppings left on the top floor of the barn. Despite it all, we saw there a real herb farm, hundreds of varieties of plants we were not unable to produce because of space constrictions, and lots of parking. It seemed as limitless as the sky.

From the beginning, we called the new place "The Farm", but as a description it was a bit off the mark. It has only 5 acres, a far cry from the acreage required in the old days to pasture cows or produce corn, beans, and alfalfa. It was not the space, its grass, or its past that urged us to think of it as a farm. It was the large, three-story brick and stone barn that dominates the space that called forth the word "farm" to describe it.

We like to pretend the farm is out in the country, but it is only a 30-minute drive from Arlington. (We did not want our second location too far from home base.) It is in Loudoun County where there may still be more horses than people, but the ratio is moving toward the latter. It is the kind of country place where during daylight you can always hear someone banging on something with a hammer or blowing up rocks (there is a quarry nearby). The land looks wild and free as long as you face the woods or peek at the high grass meadow across the street where a weary farm building sits in a forlorn snit. You can also look out on the front lawn and find four or five deer cutting the grass for you (they also eat strawberries and prune the tops of tomato vines.) It is the kind of place where city slickers take seriously a failing septic field and are able to survive on the rumor that a real sewer line is on its way.

I didn't have much time to sit on the porch in Arlington last summer as we struggled to find what was in the place we had purchased. Francesco and Tammy took up residence in one of the two houses on the farm, after spending two months remodeling the interior of the little stone house. They turned it into a place of smiles and warmth.

During the summer, we worked hard to begin the transformation dictated by our dream. Among the first things we did was to remove an old, sagging shed improbably sited on the front lawn. On the same day, earthmoving machines also removed the little forest that had grown up through a concrete pad where a chicken house had been. Greenhouses were ordered, a lawn tractor was purchased, and, most important, wonderful acquaintances were made among our new neighbors. By September's end, an herb farm in embryo could be seen, but there were few herbs in the ground to herald it. Major garden creation would have to wait until the summer of 1998.

In Acres And Pains, a book describing his adventures as a farm owner, S. J. Perelman wrote that " to lock horns with Nature, the only equipment you really need is the constitution of Paul Bunyan and the basic training of a commando." In time, I hope to discover whether the humorist was a sage or just a wisecracker.

Insularity has its advocates and opponents in nature and in life. Last summer I discovered one of its sweet advantages, the adventure of finding yourself in a new and exciting world that you never dreamed existed and at the same time I was reminded of a physical past that still resonates in buildings and earth.

--Tom DeBaggio