The Lake Today

There’s a line in an old John Denver song that goes “Hey it’s good to be back home again, sometimes this old farm seems like a long lost friend.”

I have a habit of turning on my favorite cable music channel and letting it play while I work around the house or sit at the computer. This past Sunday morning as I was doing exactly that when that song began playing and I was struck with such a wave of nostalgia it almost overwhelmed me.

As I have told you before I grew up on the family farm in northeast Missouri and for all of my childhood and most of my adult life that farm provided me with a safe haven from the hardships and tensions of the outside world.

My parents retired from farming in the middle 1980s, moved to a nearby town and turned the farm over to my brother. Mom and Dad are both gone now and while the farm is still in the family and I am always welcome there, it just isn’t the same anymore.

I love my baby brother and he has done an excellent job of caring for the land, but the house I grew in and all the outbuildings that played such a large part in my childhood are gone now and the only thing that keeps the farm alive are my memories, a few faded photographs and, apparently, that old John Denver song.

I left home at 18, married two years later and lived more than 30 years of my life in the Quad City region of Illinois and Iowa.

Most of the most important events of my adult life occurred in the Quad Cities. My entire career as a wife was spent in there. My husband and I adopted our son there and after he started school I went back to college and got my first job as a journalist in Moline, Ill. We owned a lovely home in Silvis, our son graduated from college in Davenport, Iowa and began his career in Rock Island, Ill.

I spent nearly an entire lifetime in the Quad Cities and even lost my husband to cancer there, yet no matter how wonderful the memories of those 33 years are, today thoughts of the Quad City doesn’t quite conjure up the same feelings of a being in a “safe haven” the way thinking about that old 120-acre farm does.

As I grow older, I often find myself waxing nostalgic about playing in that big three-story barn as a youngster, fishing in the pond with my husband, son and parents at my side, and enjoying a Sunday dinner of Mom’s fried chicken surrounded by my brothers and sisters and their families.

And the frequency of those memories and the sense of safety and comfort that goes along with them makes me wonder - do an infant’s feelings of security provided by a loving parent’s arms become so engrained in our souls that we never get past the need to return there whenever the world overwhelms us.

Or is it simply that deep down inside we never really grow up?

Whatever the answer – I agree with John Denver – “Sometimes that old farm seems like a long lost friend” and I intend to continue returning there, in my mind, for as long as I am alive.