by Jason Green
There’s a farm in North Carolina that has stood for 100 years and very soon it will be reduced to rubble. It’s 1,131 miles from where I sit having my morning coffee, but the double French roast I’m sipping is the last thing I can smell right now. I smell damp leaves. I smell the cold, crisp, fall air. I smell the soil, so full of clay, as I dig around looking for nothing in particular. I smell biscuits cooking in an old, musty farmhouse. I smell holidays and home. I smell love and belonging. I smell a lot of things, all of them good. All of them just memories.
As a child the homeplace was my chance to commune with nature. Leaving the apartment complex in the city, past the mall, and just out to the edge of Durham, you might as well have been onboard Apollo 11 heading for the moon. Slowly civilization faded until the only houses left were the old farmhouse and the one my uncle and his family lived in next door. The one that he and my dad were born in. Instead of a highway filled with angry strangers, you were lucky to see three cars pass all day and each of those drivers knew the Green family. They would wave religiously as if paying a toll when passing by. So fervent was their reverence that at times where the driver couldn’t have possibly known your future narrator was spying from beneath a pile of leaves, they still waved to nobody in particular as the wrap-around porch and swing sat empty. Maybe it was just to acknowledge the old farmhouse’s will to stand in the path of the oncoming storm of city folk and their strip malls and tech campuses. She is a red brick monument to the old days holding strong amid the chaos.
Never have I been as close to nature as I was there. Stumbling through the woods to find the tree fort that my father had built as a child. Finding bullets still lodged in trees from any number of my ancestors’ misadventures in hunting. This is where I communed with nature. This was my sanctuary. Running through the dew-covered grass in the morning would leave my ankles cold and wet only for the sun to shine through in the afternoon and warm the whole world, sending the dew up into the humid Carolina sky as I searched for respite in the shade of one of the old barns. Long summer days would find me dozing off while reading a book or playing with some tin toy from 40 years before my birth until Granny Green yelled “Jaaaay-sun” in the way that only a true Southern belle can call you for lunch.
I smell those things this morning as I think about that farm sitting there alone in the midst of the invading concrete cacophony. A look at Google Maps will show you an overhead view of the destruction that has taken place. Highway 55 that ran behind the house is no longer a quiet two-lane road where it used to be a novelty to hear three trucks a day pass by on their way to the Triangle Brick Company. Now Highway 55 is a roaring four-lane terror, ripping through the landscape, taking businessmen to their next meeting downtown.
The road that runs in front of the old house is still two lanes. Though, even the satellite photo will show you that the flow of traffic to the recently built apartment complex just around the corner is incessant. I bet those newcomers don’t even pay the proper respect to her when they go by. Do they even know Papa Green had a seat back there carved out of a tree stump after the tree was felled by lightning? Do they know about the deer that used to come out in the field in the early morning to graze? Do they know one building was for curing ham, another a chicken coop, and the one that looks like a child’s playhouse up there by Uncle Kevin’s is for making moonshine? They probably show no respect to her anymore.
Pretty soon someone is going to raze the old house to the ground and she will no longer be there for the folks in their sportscars to speed past as they cut across from Highway 55. The smell of wildflowers that drew the deer from the woods all those misty mornings will be replaced by the smell of freshly poured concrete for whatever apartment complex they build over the bucolic playground of my youth. The clay that I can still feel between my fingers this morning will be dug up and replaced with power lines, fiber optics, and a new sewage system. No more barns. No more chicken coops. Hundreds of trees full of a century’s worth of Green family missed shots will be gone.
Papa Green died just before the world really changed in 2001. Some might say he was lucky not to have to watch anymore of this. Granny Green moved home to Virginia after staying a while on her own at the farm. The homeplace has sat there quietly and fought back time for years, but now the weight of progress has become too much for her. As I sit here sipping this cup of coffee, I hold the only thing we will have left of the farm soon: memories. Those could never be taken by any designer-suit-wearing businessman flying down our road without realizing it was ours first. Those memories will always be ours. Those smells. The hard candy in Granny’s bowl at Christmas. The intermingling of honeysuckle and septic tank around back. The smell of the back bedroom as the sun hits it just right in the morning and it gets a little too hot to keep sleeping. The love. All the wonderful memories. Those will always be ours. The memories are the homeplace.
Jason Green is a retired Army veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He holds a B.A. in Multimedia Journalism from UTEP and an M.A. in Professional Creative Writing from the University of Denver. He has been published in Potato Soup Journal and Potato Soup Journal The Best of 2023 Anthology; As You Were: The Military Review, Vol. 16; and Proud to Be: Writing By American Warriors, Vol. 11. He has work forthcoming in Proud to Be: Writing By American Warriors, Vol. 13.
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