Time's Shadow: Remembering a Family Farm in Kansas, by Arnold J. Bauer (University Press of Kansas, 2012)
In this 150 page memoir, Bauer recalls his life growing up on his family's 160-acre farm in Kansas, starting in the 1930s. It's an affectionate, but not sentimentalized, portrait of that world. His great grandparents were among the homesteaders who staked out plots and farms in Kansas. Most of them were European immigrants, mostly German, many of them Mennonites.
I liked Bauer's plain, unadorned writing style -- it suited his descriptions of his sisters, parents, cousins, and neighbor farmers. They were a tight community, despite the distances between individual farms. Bauer notes at one point that because of the distances, he didn't see his friends, except at school, and when family or neighbors visited in the evenings. Not that he had much time for friends -- he worked hard on the farm as soon as he was old enough.
They were not wired for electricity until 1939 (there was no light for reading in bed, which was very important to me when I was young). The book is divided into short, self-explanatory chapters: Family, Houses, Anna Alexander (Bauer's mother), Electricity, Church, School, Having Company, War, and finally Swept Away, in which Bauer describes the economic forces that brought about the demise of the small family farms.
Bauer writes that, growing up, his gruff, demanding father never hit him, nor did he remember that any of his friends' fathers hit their children. He remembers one slap across his face by his mother. Reports of wife-beating were rare. Not that there weren't other types of abuse, such as emotional abuse, but a husband who struck his wife would have been disgraced and shunned. He speculates that the reason for this was that all the family members were committed to the family enterprise -- the farm. Husband and wife depended on each other, and couldn't do without the other. This acted as a brake on hot-headed impulses.
The theme of interdependence, within the family and within the community of farmers (they often helped each other in times of sickness or need) is played out throughout the book. Always, it was their farm that they worked together -- their cows, their tools, their wheat, their livelihood. Late in the book, page 100, when Bauer asks his aged father when were the best years of his life, he answers, "The thirties, I think, when you children were at home and we all worked together." (As a son who worked many hours growing up in my family's diner, soda fountain, and candy shop, I was moved to read that.)
Bauer describes how the small family farms largely disappeared by the 1960s, sold to housing and business developers, and to successful larger family farms. Hundreds of thousands of farm families moved to the towns and cities, where life was less arduous, less isolated, and more stable. He and his sisters all left the farm, leaving his parents mostly alone in their old age. Despite the notable successes of Bauer and his sisters (he's a distinguished professor of Latin American studies at UC Davis, while one sister enjoyed a long career in the foreign service) the last chapters describe a sad, familiar story of sporadic visits to the farm, of auctions, moves to nursing homes, ending of course in the death of their father. The houses and farm buildings had caved in, the cousins and their families largely scattered.
It is a beautiful book.
