Our Farm House
by Lilless McPherson Shilling
June 18, 2009

A Haiku:
Our farm house still stands.
My family owns the land.
It is our legacy.

I call it our farm house because my three brothers and I own it and the property in the rural area around it. It’s empty now but still holds many memories. Unpainted and dilapidated, it only stands erect because plants are holding it up and is barely visible from the road because of the grass, bushes, and trees that hide it. But once it was a comfortable home in the country. It had shingle siding and a tin roof. Flowers, plants, and trees abounded in the yard: a gardenia by the chimney, the cedar tree by the mail box, purple bearded irises, the grape arbor, crepe myrtle trees, rose of Sharon bushes, a weeping willow tree, a locust tree, loblolly pines, blackberries, raspberries, and thistles. The cedar tree is still there but the mail box isn’t. Everything else is overgrown. We still smell the cedar tree. We still hear the bob whites and other birds. Cars still pass by on the old country road. Life goes on but the house is almost moribund.
The house stands on a five-acre lot and the land around it is one hundred acres, about half of which is wooded and half farm land. Today a local farmer rents the farm land to plant cotton and soy beans.

Located on Nixonton Road near Elizabeth City on the eastern coast of North Carolina, our farm house was originally the home of my great grandparents, the Davises. In 1947, when I was about five, my grandmother and grandfather (the Pendletons) moved into her father’s old deserted home. My grandparents renovated it and added a garage, a new kitchen, a new bathroom, and a new bedroom to the three bedroom, one bathroom house. The water at the farm house, which tasted like iron and had a slight rust color to it, came from a well.
When my grandparents lived there they were among the few people in the area with indoor plumbing and electricity. Most of the people (black and white) in homes nearby had outhouses and used kerosene lamps for light. The children I played with when I visited my grandparents lived in those homes. While I did not feel better than they, I did feel privileged compared to them.

Keeping the farm in our family was not easy. When my grandparents died in 1960, my mother and her two siblings inherited the property. For a while, renters lived in the home and it gradually went downhill. Then, my mother, who was divorced and whose four children were grown and gone, moved into the home to take care of it. This proved difficult and lonely for her but she was determined to keep the property in the family. However, when one of my brothers and his wife had their first child, they asked our mother to come live near them and help them with the baby. Again, renters moved in; and again, the farm house declined. Soon my mother’s brother and sister wanted to sell the farm, calling the farm house a rural slum. My mother continued to resist their efforts to convince her to sell the property because it represented a legacy from her parents and she felt land was a good investment. In 198??, When my uncle died, his family was insistent about selling out. Around that time, we sold some of the timber from the woods for lumber and my brothers and I used our portion of the profits to buy out my uncle’s part of the property. The McPhersons then owned two-thirds of the property and this made my mother so happy. When my mother’s sister died in 19??, her children did not insist on selling the property because all of us knew how important it was to my mother. But after my mother died in 2006, her children started to urge us to sell or buy them out. Finally, in 2008, we bought them out. Now the McPhersons own the entire property.

About a mile away is the old cemetery in the woods where my grandparents are buried. My mother often took us to visit their gravesite. After my mother died, we took her ashes there and sprinkled them between her parents’ graves. We planted a hosta plant there then. When I visited the graveyard a few weeks ago, the hosta was still there. While our farm house is failing, our plants continue. Our legacy continues.

Our farm house still stands.
My family owns the land.
It is our legacy.