Before my mother died last month at the age of 93 we had a few days to visit and reflect in the town hospice building just a few miles from the southern Ontario farm where she lived for 60 years. As we talked I was reminded of the many different paths that lead each of us to these small farms we call home.
Mum was raised to writing and the theatre and worked as a teacher for much of her career. But she was born on a farm that her grandfather Walter Massey bought in 1897 on the eastern edge of Toronto. Walter had been thrust into the role of president of the multinational Massey Harris farm implement empire at any early age by the death of his father and older brother. He was no farmer either, but he decided the company needed an experimental farm.
Walter stocked it with chickens, pigs and purebred Jersey cows and then put a dam across Taylor Creek to make a trout hatchery. The farm became an obsession. He built a four level 80 cow dairy barn with glass walls on the north and south sides to let in more light for the animals and amazed the neighbours by installing a concrete floor.
As a little girl in the 1920s, my mother vividly remembered running down the hill to the great glass barn to watch the cows being milked. She learned to love all the delicious smells of a working farm.
In the 1950s she bought her own 100-acre property an hour’s drive north of Toronto and began dividing her year between summer on the farm and winter in the city. Her place had a trout stream that meandered through the pastures and she too stocked the barn with pigs, chickens and a little herd of Jersey cows. This is the place where I grew up.
I went away to study economics and worked in the city for fifteen years as a writer in government and business, but always in my mind’s eye was the memory of those sweet-smelling Jersey cows. I remembered following their swinging hips home along the dusty paths through the cedar trees for evening milking. I remembered shovelling scoops of steaming silage into their mangers on frosty mornings at their winter quarters up the concession road.
During all those years in the towers of downtown Toronto I made regular pilgrimages to my old rural community to listen to its voices and restore my mental health. When I was 37, I bolted from the city with my young wife to make a home on a little property even further north within sight of Georgian Bay. I tracked down the last surviving Jersey from my mother’s old herd and started a one-cow operation that is still in place today.
It always helps if we are lured to farming by a strong and sensible desire to make a living at it. But there is no accounting for the quiet pull of affection and memory. At the opening of each new season I look at my place in much the same way my great-grandfather the city-slicker must have looked at his, with hope and curiosity and an abiding sense of possibility.
- Dan Needles