Marty farm, view from northeast, ca. 1957. Kodachrome. Photo by Gaylon Marty.
What better portrait for Earth Day than earth? Here is my favorite color photograph of my family's farm taken around the time I was born into the world. This is the farm that I loved. This was the view of it from the edge of the woods, looking toward home. The only thing missing is my house, which stood outside the left frame of this photo. The house that you see is the 1898 farmhouse built by my great grandparents for their five children. Four years later, they built the big red barn, heart of my heart.
What I see here is, first, reconstituted trees. Every building in this photo except the cement silo is made of wood that didn't travel very far to get there. Second, an open field, which looks to me like it's just been planted in corn. You could say: deforestation, and erosion. That's all too true, but to me it's also beautiful.
My mother remembers her first summer at the farm. She had married my dad in May. That summer, Dad and Grampa Marty got up on scaffolding themselves and roofed the big barn, nailing green asphalt shingles over the old wooden ones. In this picture, the barn has the old wood shingles, so I know it was taken before that summer. My aunt found this picture for me last year in Uncle Gaylon's slide collection. Uncle came home from the army in the spring of 1957, just in time to be Daddy's best man. He had been to China and Japan, so I think I can imagine why he would have walked with his camera to the woods to take this photograph in the morning light.
There's a version of the song "For the Beauty of the Earth" that was set to the 13th century tune Adore Te Devote for the Missa Gaia by Paul Winter, performed at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York in 1985:
For the beauty of the earth, sing, oh sing today/Of the skies and of our birth, sing, oh sing, always./Nature, human and divine, all around us lies/Lord of all, to thee we raise grateful hymns of praise.
This is my song today.
Names of the buildings in the photo, left to right: The big house (Auntie and Uncle's, where Gramma lived upstairs), Sam's garage, granary (gray), tractor shed, chicken coop, milk house and behind it the three-car garage, log barn, silo, big barn (called the old barn after the new barn was built in 1963), and the machine shed.
I'm in the middle of reading your book. I'm reading it slow to relive the sights and sounds of my childhood. Grew up in Hinckley in the same years. People think it odd that I only had six weeks of kindergaten. I now see that I wasn't the only one. Thanks for the memories!
Posted by: Lisa | April 22, 2010 at 11:05 AM