Sometimes You Can Go Home Again
There’s an old saying, “You can’t go home again,” which is rooted in the fact that if you try to return to a place from your past, it likely won't be the same as you remember it.
The saying echoed in my head as I stood in the old stone barn on my family farm back in 2015. Stalls where my favorite speckled Holstein-Jersey cross and Brown Swiss cows had once stood, beckoning for ear scratches with their big brown eyes, now stood empty. The milkhouse had worn down over the decades and the roof was beginning to crumble. The east-facing sliding wooden door, where golden rays of light had crept in as the milking machines hummed their comforting, pulsing song, now stayed shut, barring out the sun and holding in only the memories of the life that once went on here.
So many pivotal conversations of my childhood had happened under the barn’s gambrel roof, milking cows alongside my dad, or leaned up against the bulk tank as we waited for the milkers to wash. But years of rocky dairy prices had dragged the farm into debt and the cows were sold in 2011. That had been a sad day, watching one after the other load onto the trailer, taking a piece of our hearts and our way of life with them.
Dad and I at chore time in the old stone barn, back in 2007. We milked a small herd of 32 cows morning and night throughout my childhood — and our conversations often centered around my dreams of someday raising my own family here on the farm. Somehow, this is the only photo of the two of us together at chore time.
The very next day, Dad headed off to the oil fields of North Dakota to start a new chapter. My husband, Jesse, and I were starting our young family and had put down roots in a nearby town. For a few years, the barn sat empty. Frozen in time, and yet not. Waiting, and weathering in the elements.
Back when we were knee-high to a grasshopper, if you’d have asked Jesse or I what we wanted to be when we grew up, each of us would likely have answered “farmer.” Jesse has similar fond memories of days spent milking cows, putting up hay, and living life in the country. Fresh out of college, I’d landed a job as an ag journalist, traveling the state, visiting farms, and sharing the happenings in Wisconsin agriculture. That led to my current job as the Communications Director for Wisconsin Farmers Union — a role in which I get to help lift up the voices of farmers and be a part of a community that is working to keep family farms on the land. Jesse had worked as a mechanic, food plant operator, and in maintenance, while also doing relief milking for local farmers for many years. Yet we both felt as though a piece of the puzzle was missing.
That’s how two former farm kids, knowing full well how much work goes into farming, often with little income to show for it, found themselves standing in an empty barn with two toddlers, dreaming up how maybe, just maybe we could go home again.
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Join us on the journey!
Danielle
