Down to the Creamery

This poem is about my father.  Or rather it is about my relationship with him; and it is about our history.  It is also a portrait of the Sherman farm in Island Falls where my grandmother grew up. There are still Shermans living on the  farm, which was for a time a commercial dairy, but now the great barn and outbuildings stand empty, as they did when I wrote this poem.  Although I never worked on this farm, nor did my Dad, to my knowledge, the opening description is paradigmatic of my own youth.  Growing up on the farm meant that every weekend belonged to my father and his 'hobby'.  One of the reasons I went to work at 15 was to get off that farm and to exercise some control over my time.  And to this day, I feel uneasy just 'sitting around' on the weekend - reading a book or watching a movie.  My experience as a child and a teenager colored , naturally, my own experience as a father.  In particular, I seldom if ever have asked my children to help me.  They grew up free to do whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted.  They never had to know the dread I felt on Saturday mornings, waiting to be called to work. Would we have been closer if they had had to help me fix fences or get in hay?  I'll never know.  I suspect they would have harbored the same resentment I felt, so I think I made the right choice. Even so, of course, by the time I was in college (when this poem was written), I was already nostalgic for rural life. Or was it a nostalgia for all things forgotten and left unattended?

I wish I could tell you where the quote in the final stanza comes from, but I can't find it in my notes. And again with the banging door. . . .

                                                i
Behind my father, I skipped and pranced,
Following his patient, rumpled bulk,
His great-bear, lumbering gait;
Down that narrow way we went - 
                                 Down to the creamery.


Clean winds, keen and swift,
Over rain-washed oat fields rushed
To push the bright grass down.
Into the mud-slick path beside the barn
Our splattered boots pressed
Leaf and stalk into the sodden earth.
Against the grey morning, 
Blustery clouds rolling on across the sky, 
Stood,
               White and fresh,
                                            The creamery.


Inside: white walls, white floor, and stainless
Steel; glistening mechanisms churned and throbbed,
                              Oblivious to our coming.
Empty bottles for milk and,
Smaller, cream, waited to be filled . . . . .


                                         ii
I believe they wait there still,
As cobwebs weave the corners tight.
The abandon separator rusts in silence,
While sunbeams flow in through
Dusty window panes.
Loose doors bang in the breeze now,
Left forgotten an age ago.
"And my child heart is dancing
with a ghost on the narrow path."
Down beside the barn
                        Down to the creamery.