Old Farm

It has become my family's Easter tradition to walk back to where my great-grandparents' farm used to be. It is located on East Fork State Park property in a somewhat unknown spot. We only occasionally see other people back there.

As a child, my mom would go to the farm every Sunday and she and her siblings and cousins would often spend the warm months exploring every inch of this land. There are a few traces of the old pig farm left. A few fenceposts, a manmade pond deep in the woods, and my favorite--these daffodils. It's so amazing to see that the daffodils still faithfully come up each spring.

There's a lot of beauty, but also a lot of sadness here too. You can still see remnants of a stone wall from the farm that used to be across the road and there are old driveways and more bulbs that mark where the fronts of houses used to be. Mom said there were a few holdouts when the state was buying out the land, and one farmer killed himself in his barn. Another woman's house mysteriously caught on fire. She was in the basement and didn't make it out. My great-grandfather, another holdout, awoke one morning to find that all of his pigs had been poisoned.

 I don't like to think about the loss that occurred here. I prefer to see this as something full-circle. The land was used and loved. Then it was reclaimed and overrun by the trees and kudzu. Now I visit it and respect the land as my great-grandfather always did.

We have hidden a geocache so that others may find there way here.
http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?guid=cec2eb96-8484-44d3-bdad-852211d8f08a