THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 7, 1996 TAG: 9607070063
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Elizabeth Simpson
LENGTH: 65 lines
I watched their heads bob in the back window of the truck as it bounced down the gravel road.
My slender 5-year-old daughter and her strapping 6-foot-plus-tall grandfather were headed for the farm.
I knew without being there that the pickup was strewn with work gloves, tools, faded maps. That it smelled of pipe tobacco and dirt knocked off my father's work boots.
The only reason my daughter wanted to go was Goldendrina, a baby calf abandoned by her mother, that my father bottle fed.
She'd helped feed Goldendrina before, during our vacation in Missouri, but always in the company of cousins and parents and aunt and uncle. This would be her first solo trip with Papa.
It was a mile or so to the farm from where we were staying. Past the bandstand, the long-shuttered general store, the abandoned two-room schoolhouse that made up the town of Roanoke. The farmhouse where my father spent his childhood was in shambles, but our family's history was still alive and well and ready to be retold.
I had been in my daughter's tennis shoes decades ago, when my father used to drag me to the farm on Saturdays. After he had checked on the cattle and tended to other chores, he'd show me the creek where he used to fish, the tree where he collected walnuts, the worn gravestones where relatives from Civil War days were buried.
He'd tell stories about the two uncles who used to move light bulbs from one room to the other to save money during the Depression. About the sturdy aunts who fried up enough chicken to make the table boards groan. And the great-grandparents who ran the general store when this was a bustling community.
I would roll my eyes while listening, wishing I were home watching Saturday cartoons, imagining the day when I would live somewhere more exciting. I felt hemmed in by this place where everyone knew everyone else. Where graveyards for the dead outnumbered grocery stores for the living.
But now the farm had a certain appeal. There was Goldendrina, who chased after my father when she saw him. Six newborn kittens that meowed and nestled in our hands. A dog named Mike.
Now that I have children of my own, I realize my father's stories and trips to the farm had some purpose. They were a way of telling a child she has a place in the world, a place in history that was started long before she was even born.
They are roots that you draw on for a lifetime, without even realizing they are there.
But for Taylor, the farm outing was scary. By the time she got back, her bottom lip quivered.
``How'd it go?'' I asked.
``Good,'' she said. But she wouldn't look me in the eye.
Later, I found out from my father that the sky was spitting rain by the time they got there, and that thunder rumbled in the distance. While my father was mixing up milk in the shed, Mike got loose and leapt up on Taylor, scaring her.
She cried a little.
Like my own childhood visits to the farm, Taylor's trip was a task to be endured. But one day she will know it was important.
We ask about Goldendrina when we call home. She is out with the other cows now, my father says, weaned off the bottle for a couple of weeks.
But whenever she sees Pop's truck come bouncing down the gravel road, she still comes running. by CNB