Maria and I got up just after dawn this morning and we took Red and went up to Bedlam Farm to do some weed-whacking and mowing and moving around the barns and pasture gates. Maria, who is overdoing outside work in the heat, mowed around her Studio Barn, I did the wacking, which I have come to like.  We are having the farm mowed, and a good neighbor is brushogging the meadows for us for little or no money, a great kindness. There is something wrong, something unnatural about a beautiful farm without people and animals scurrying around and even though there are all kinds of good people watching the farm and caring for it, its barns and pastures seem empty,  poignant, waiting, so much happened there.

But memories do not  die, they grow out of the earth like flowers. If you look closely, it might be Rose sitting in the pasture, or Izzy or even Orson in one of his ill-fated efforts to herd sheep. There were sheep there, donkeys, even cows. We walked up that hill every day to sit in the Adirondack chairs at the top of the hill and read and thinking and struggle to understand the nature and meaning of life. This morning, I walked into the trap of nostalgia, the lure of looking back, watching Red scour the pasture for the sheep he once herded there by the barn where lambs were born and surgeries were performed and animals died and were cared for. I reminded myself that memory is not nostalgia, it is not mournful or self-pitying, I do not wish to go backwards, do not mourn for what was. But I do wish to remember it and honor it, it is in my blood and soul and life.

What a beautiful dream of a farm Bedlam Farm is with its rolling hills and paths in the woods and barns and meadows and stately old farmhouse. I am in awe of it every time I go there, memories and dreams wash over me like a cool stream in the summer, they cleanse me and course through me. I closed my eyes for a moment and I saw Rose there, going up to fend off some coyotes, or following the bleat of a lamb, or going to push the sheep down to the feeder in a blizzard. Once a border collie has seen sheep, he or she will always look for them there, for all time.

I tried to explain to Red that they were gone, they were none here. I hated to see the steps leading up to the pasture covered over in tall grass, I got the weed-whacker out of the car and me, a man in my 60’s who had never once touched a week-whacker in the first six decades of his life, moved into the now, the present and started whacking away and the steps were revealed and the path was revealed and the gates were open and clear and the steps of the Pig Barn once again greeted hundreds, thousands of people coming to Bedlam Farm to see Maria’s splendid art work, to see Rose work, to meet Simon and share in the glory of the place. How lucky I was to be there, I blew it some kisses and we cleaned it up a bit. Life has its own plans for me, I am its servant and disciple, I shall go where it tells me and build new memories and live new dreams.

Farms are really about heart, when all is said and done. Once you fall in love with them, you are smitten for life.