donnalotus | The land wants flowers! (Reply)

The last three times in particular that I’ve been home I’ve been communicating with the totems on Dad’s farm, the farm where I grew up with. I used to do this a lot as a child, but I’d forgotten how to, or just stopped doing it. I didn’t realise it’s what I’ve been doing, because they’ve been very subtle, and they’ve taken a step back at the moment due to the physical “damage” he’s done to the place.

In Dad’s defence, he’s just “cleaning” the place up, and I think they understand that, but they see in me someone who knows how this land should look and feel, and it feels very dead at the moment. Times have been harsh, and dry, and there hasn’t really been anyone there to nourish this land in a long time.

Dad doesn’t understand any of this. I have spent just the last couple of trips up there just trying to reconnect with him, and have him get to know me as the new person I am, but now I am seeing a greater thing I need to talk to him about. The future of the farm, and the reassurance I need to give him that I don’t want him to sell the farm, that I want to see it stay in our family, and that I will continue to look after it when he is gone.

That is the big thing he is asking himself. Why is he pushing on when none of us want the farm to work? The truth is none of us want to farm, that’s true, but we don’t want to see the farm fall into strangers’ hands either. My sister and I see Home as refuge from the City, when it all gets too much, the sheer NUMBER of people around us with the energy beating down on us and our mental state gets to a state of frantic, we go home.

So now I need to talk to him about that. How I see myself coming Home to live in my old age, and that I will die there, and be buried in the cemetery with our family. It’s not morbid, it just is how it is and I have always known this, and I can’t see myself anywhere else when I’m 100 years old! (And yes, I have this insane thought that I’m living until 112.)

When I am there, I will want trees, and vegetable and herb gardens, fruit trees, and so on. He’s cut a lot of the orchard down because the trees were getting too old, and a lot of the trees that I knew and loved as a child have been cut down (including the gum tree who claimed me as a child and protected me from harm) and they haven’t been replaced.

Some of these trees were dead, that’s why he’s removed them, they were centuries old and the drought had just done them in. Some of them are so HUGE that their stumps are still in the ground because he hasn’t been able to get them out yet. It makes for a desolate looking place when all you see are dead stumps and no greenery.

I look at them and wonder how I can heal that loss. You know, there has been so much loss on this farm, it’s overwhelming sometimes. Dad is so incredibly lonely there now, wrapped up in his bitterness at the betrayal of my uncle, his family, and all that entails. He is 61 and still having to work like he’s 35 to pay off the debts incurred from that betrayal – not that he’d stop anyway, but he’d at least have the choice.

The totems I realised, when in my semi-delirious state want me to plant gardens, they want creepers to be planted to climb over the dead stumps, they want butterflies and birds again! When the time is right, I’m going to speak to Dad about at least planting some new trees around the house, and in the orchard. About getting things established for the future, and talk to him about what I’d like to have when I live there, so he will have something to focus on when he is feeling unsure about how to proceed with the land. I can’t put in flowerbeds, and herb gardens yet, no one is up there to care for them, but I can make a start with the trees, and that will need to be the next thing I bring up with Dad.......