Dan Needles is the author of “Wingfield Farm” stage plays. His column is a monthly feature in Country Guide
In the dark months of winter, a man’s thoughts turn from agriculture to dwell on subjects that wouldn’t ordinarily distract him during a busy growing season. Things like what to do with the kids.
My two older ones, Kissable and Lofty, came home over the holidays and griped about their lives and fought with their younger siblings and ate like starved refugees and contributed the square root of a very tiny sum to the household. When it was all over, Lofty announced he was moving back in and Kissable decided she would spend four-day weekends with us because her university courses are all lumped into three days a week.
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By the second week of January, even the dogs insisted they needed to spend more time out of the house. My wife suggested I go get some air, so I drove down to visit my old, white-haired mother, who, at 85, still lives in her own house south of Highway 13.
“You moan about your children every time you come down here,” she said grimly as she poured me two fingers of scotch.
“I’m sorry, but I worry about them,” I said. “Lofty is back from his world tour and still has no idea what to do with himself. He spends all day in the basement playing blues guitar and harmonica. When Kissable isn’t asleep in a pile of cats, she’s yakking on the phone with an unemployed horn player or writing bad free verse poetry. The Mouse is struggling in high school and spends eight hours a day slaying Orcs on his video screen. And the Fruit Loop, who just turned 12, is tired of her role as The Golden Child and has started fighting with her mother. What am I supposed to do with them?”
“Just ignore them,” she said, settling back on the sofa with her catalogue of spring bulbs. “That’s what I did with all of you and you turned out all right. Go out and get interested in something yourself and never mind your kids. Once they turn 12, there isn’t much more you can do for them anyway.”
My mother was married to an actor who came home once every three or four months for a few days at a time. She was a writer, too and she announced to her mother early on that children were never going to interfere with her life. When I turned 12, she bought me a .22 rifle, a fly rod and a horse and told me to go explore the neighbourhood. These were the last days of the traditional mixed farm in our rural community and I remember her saying, “Pay attention. This is a world that is slipping away. By the time you are my age it will be long gone.”
When I wasn’t in school, I spent most of the next eight years in the company of a very odd group of farmers from our dusty concession road, doing field work and chores for them. The search for added value on the farm was already well underway and each of the neighbours was either looking for some new way to turn a dollar or listing the farm for sale to a weekend resident. Many of the men drank heavily and the rest were alcoholics. There was a cheerful drover who took me from one end of the province to the other in his rickety stake truck, wheeling and dealing in livestock sales barns. There were two brothers who trained racehorses all summer and spent the winter on the racing circuit in upper New York State. A third became a well driller and went off for weeks at a time with his drill rig. All of them needed a willing hand at minimum wage and I was always up for a road trip.
Mother never even looked up from her flower-bed when I went off on these excursions. Up until the age of 18 when I left home for good, I always trotted over to wish her goodbye and tell her when I would be back. Without looking up, she would wave absently, in a kind of benediction. Sometimes she asked if I needed money but more often she just said, “Stay in touch.”
Later that afternoon I drove home through the whirling snow, pondering Mother’s advice. In Petunia Valley, I stopped at the local bookstore and bought a big fat book on free-range chickens.
