Homer'sWorld

An advertisement on Facebook for farm aerial photos allowed me, within a few minutes, to find two photos of the farm where I lived from 1974 to 1979. They are asking $179 for a digital photo- crazy. 

But anyways, the photos brought back a lot of memories, most of them not so great.  

In 1973 my father's half-brother decided to divorce his wife. There was some sort of court hearing or custody trial and my parents were called as witnesses. They told the judge that my aunt was a perfectly fine mother. My uncle and grandmother were claiming she wasn't. They got custody. I always wondered if they bribed the friend of the court.

My father was a long-haul truck driver. He came back one day in 1973 to discover the large field below our house, promised to him, had a big For Sale sign. He went down to see his mother and ask her what was happening. Her response was "Promises don't mean anything." She cut off contact with my family. This was problematic because she lived literally across the road, a short distance away. I never saw her again in person. At the end of her life her dear son kicked her out of her own house. She was a terrible person.

My father decided that we had to move. They had once looked at this farm, back in the day it was for sale for $26,000. In 1973 it was for sale for $49,000. The parents sold the woods next to our house for a down payment. They decided to become dairy farmers. Mother apparently wanted a regular paycheck. Why my father didn't go to work in Traverse City is something I will never understand. He would have made a good used car salesman, he had that kind of personality. So they bought the farm. 

They built an addition on the back of the house for a laundry room and a porch on the front of the house. They installed a bulk milk tank in the barn and a pipeline system. My father had been a Surge sales and repairman in the mid-1950s.

Then there was the incident. Sometime in the fall of 1973 we were moving the Ransom dining room table in the dining room, and my father became angry. He chased me into the laundry room, knocked me to the floor, and beat me with a 2 by 4. I lay on the ground trying to block the blows with my hands screaming 'What did I do?" I never found out. I was covered with bruises on my back, butt, and legs. Nobody did anything to stop him.

If I could build a time machine I would go back to that moment and kill him. Whenever someone talks about spanking a child I instantly am transported back to the floor, lying on my stomach, while that piece of shit hit me over and over again.

He's been dead for 25 years and I felt nothing when he died. He was an awful father. I remember at my mother's memorial gathering Dean E. came up to me and told me what a great guy my father was. I didn't say anything.

He kept truck driving until January 1975. Mother, Bub, and I had to milk and feed the cows. Over the next four years I did a lot of chores. In the summer there was baling hay, I rode the wagon and stacked the hay bales. Afterward I stacked the bales in the hay mow. Nothing I did was ever good enough. He would think up arbitrary rules. I wasn't allowed to go to the house after I finished my chores. I had to sit there while they finished milking cows. One day he decided my dogs had to sleep in the barn instead of the house. He called me names. One time I broke out in horrible red hives. He accused me of making them up. All of the skin peeled off the inside of my mouth, the palms of my hands and feet. And he refused to believe it was real until my brother had the same thing happen. He made fun of the fact that I liked to read. 

We went to Buckley school. What a shithole. 300 kids kindergarten through 12th grade. I was smarter than most of my teachers. The lesbian gym teacher knew I was a little gay boy and hated me for that, always giving me bad grades no matter how hard I tried. The English teacher and the Math teacher were the only good teachers. I think I read every book in the library. I was picked on a lot by the other kids. Being smart was looked down on. I was small, undeveloped. I remember Steven J. telling me he was going to beat me up and sure enough he cornered me and did so. For no reason other than he was upset his parents were divorcing.

Some good things about the farm- picking raspberries, black caps, and blackberries in the woods. We froze them in our two chest freezers. We eventually found a blueberry patch and would go with nice Grandma, Uncle Joe, and Aunt Lillian and pick a huge amount. Aunt LouAnne and Mitzi and Katy coming to stay during the summer. 

In our garden you could find bits of dishes and doll parts. The garden was pretty amazing, the soil there was excellent. We grew all of our vegetables and mother also grew lots of zinnias. 

One day my father plowed an area in the field that hadn't been plowed and found an old dump from the early 1900s. I went and played archaeologist and dug up stuff, glued together broken dishes. I still have some of those artifacts.

They didn't buy the mineral rights with the property. In the mid-1970s Shell Oil started drilling oil wells in the area. All of my father's friends got oil wells. They bought a lot of stuff on credit (and later they all went bankrupt when Shell shut the oil wells down). My father was so jealous. He decided in 1978 that we had to move to a new farm in the Upper Peninsula. That's another story, the only good thing was that I got to go to a better school for 10th through 12th grade.