Scenes from a Train - 4

My mother grew up on a farm in Spring Mills, Pennsylvania. She never hesitated to tell me about the difficulties of farm life. She told me that the reason that Shoe-Fly pie was eaten with milk on it was because it was the last pie to be eaten in the winter and by then it had become hard as a brick. But I loved Shoe-Fly pie with milk on it and the idea of having room to roam and a horse or two was very appealing to me. I’ve never realized my dream of living on a farm and note, that what appealed to me about living on a farm was not the idea of planting things or manual labor of any kind. My dream farm is more like the horse farms I see in Middleburg, Virginia, rolling hills with beautiful horses, the bastion of the very rich. And thank God for the very rich, because even though I have no hope of ever living there, it is still a wonderful place to drive through.

This is not one of those farms. This is a farm that, through her stories, I envision my mother might have grown up on.