KYLE MUNSON

Farm is sold, but sense of family remains

Kyle Munson
kmunson@dmreg.com

POTTAWATTAMIE COUNTY, Ia. — It was sort of my fault that my parents chose to live here in the first place.

Family lore says that when Lloyd and Winnie Munson, in the summer of 1975, first stepped onto these idyllic 11 acres in southwest Iowa to give it a look, I burst from the car and ran across the open barnyard at all of 3 years old yelling, “This would be great for me!”

In that moment of wild toddler abandon, no doubt my parents lost whatever leverage they enjoyed in the real estate negotiations.

You haven't seen hot sales items at an auction until you've watched toy tractors and implements sold. People paid around $40 or $50 apiece for machinery that can't farm an inch, let alone an acre.

My dad was a schoolteacher at the Lewis Central district in suburban Council Bluffs, and the three of us lived in a rental house in Glenwood, where I pedaled my Big Wheel around and around the dining room table. I guess I was craving some open space.

Now, 41 years later, my parents are preparing to leave the acreage. They’re 71 years old and ready to downsize before they’re forced to. Finally, they'll get to indulge in such standard conveniences as an automatic garage door opener.

They close the deal at the end of the month and move into a beautiful ranch home in Atlantic. It didn't make sense for me or my brother to buy the place. But this acreage, conveniently situated not much more than a half-hour from downtown Omaha, spent all of two weeks on the market. Last weekend we held the farm sale, a bittersweet milestone familiar to so many of my fellow Iowans.

Sale of family farm spawns tug of emotions

My parents weren’t full-time farmers, but they both grew up on working farms (my dad in Washington County and my mom in Cass County). It was important to them that they hand down what they saw as the serenity and admirable self-sufficiency of the rural lifestyle to me and my brother. He was born in 1978 and has never known another home place. My parents gradually put their stamp on about every square foot of their beloved country paradise, whether it was a newly repainted picket fence or a makeshift brick grave site for a dearly departed family pet.

Just to clarify, I don’t see rural Iowans as somehow intrinsically nobler than city dwellers. And I love bustle and cultural variety, whether in downtown Des Moines, the Chicago Loop or London’s West End.

But a unique calm washes over me when I linger in the front yard of my childhood home and gaze out across the rolling Iowa landscape. I could stand there naked and be spotted only by the occasional passing pickup or tractor, or the mail carrier. (I would be instantly caked in dust unless the driver veered into the ditch in disbelief).

The accumulated agricultural debris of 40 years of rural Iowa life sits in the barnyard, waiting to be auctioned off.

41 years of agricultural debris

A neighbor farmed our modest 6 acres of cropland since it adjoined his fields. But the 5-acre farmstead included a sprawling garden (including lots of cabbage to make sauerkraut), a massive plot of potatoes and sweet corn, and chicken flocks for both eggs and meat. All this provided us not only with homegrown food — the fruits and veggies stored in the cave through winter — but also a continuous supply of goodies to give away as the standard currency of rural neighborliness.

The barn, sagging hog shed, drafty corn crib and other farm buildings held mini empires of imagination where my childhood friends and I built forts and portrayed "Star Wars" characters.

So I couldn’t help but be in a wistful mood as I drove back home for the farm sale. I hit that one sharp hill on the road where, if you churn up dust at 55 miles per hour or more, it feels like the crest of a roller coaster and makes your stomach lurch.

The day before the auction, my brother and I and two of my parents’ best friends (the Stacys from Brighton) hauled items out of every nook and cranny. I was feeling smug after we quickly emptied a small grain bin of all its scrap metal, tires and rusty bicycles. But then I hit the barn, which just wouldn't stop disgorging 41 years of accumulated lumber, baling wire, fish tanks, my old college loft, bricks, gadgets and other agricultural debris. It seemed a fitting metaphor for the lifetime of memories rooted on this sacred land that I couldn't unpack entirely if I tried.

Then there was the farmhouse basement: The morning of the sale, my brother and I barely were able to maneuver and heave a chest freezer up the stairs, only to see it sell for $15. I joked that that wouldn’t even cover my chiropractic copay.

Sale items accumulate in front of the barn.

Even the chopping block sold

The auctioneer dispensed his rapid-fire lingo via a PA system from a custom-enclosed perch in the back of a pickup truck while his spotter teed up items and kept watch for the subtle nods of bidders.

My dad later mused that it felt surreal to watch everybody harvest the accumulated artifacts of our family’s life. But at least the money was flowing in the right direction for a change.

One of the previous owners of the acreage, back when it was a full-fledged farm, had carried tree seeds in her pocket all the way from Minnesota. Now, there we stood in the shade of those massive basswood trees that lined the driveway as one person after another, many of them neighbors and close friends for decades, walked up the lane with a sense of curiosity, moral support or a mixture of the two.

Basset hounds Homer and Molly already were gone, having found a new home on the south side of Des Moines. (Maybe I'll be roaming the capital city this summer with my car windows down and hear a familiar howl in the distance.) But we managed to give away at least a dozen kittens during the sale, including a few to the auctioneer.

It's hard to guess which items will drive up bidding. I knew the canning jars, particularly the blue-tinted glass, would find a big fan base.

Maybe with apologies to Orson Welles, I should have whispered “Rosebud" when my old snow sled sold. But I didn't attach as much sentiment to that as I did to the go-kart that my dad and I pieced together in the '80s and turned our acreage into an amateur speedway. So I kept the go-kart as my token memento.

Even the chopping block was on the sales block. This is the stump of wood with a pair of nails precisely sized to fit a chicken's neck. It's what my grandfather and father used to chop the heads off of chickens in our family assembly line to butcher poultry each summer. A teacher friend of my dad's bought it for a $4 bargain among a bundle of several different items.

My dad's homemade electric hacksaw sold, a testament to rural ingenuity. Even the chicken chopping block sold: It was nothing more than a wooden stump with a pair of nails situated just far enough apart to fit a chicken neck. It was the first step in our family assembly line of butchering poultry. My dad or grandfather swung the ax, while I was relegated to carrying the “gut bucket” out to the field to be emptied. One of my father's fellow teachers bought the chopping block for $4 among a bargain batch of odds and ends.

We didn’t boast the massive machinery of a modern operation, yet the auction still wound its way around the farmstead for more than four hours. And two of the showpieces were tractors: one was a Wheel Horse riding lawn mower that my dad purchased used in the 1980s. It just refused to quit.

The other was a 1951 Ford 8N tractor that was the crucial utility tool for all tasks, whether plowing the potato patch or pulling me on my sled. My dad climbed up into the tractor seat to fire it up one last time, reassuring bidders with the purr of its engine. He sat there with a bowed head as the auctioneer flung out numbers for what essentially was a throne on wheels.

My dad, Lloyd Munson, sits on his prized Ford 8N tractor as it's auctioned off during my family's farm sale Saturday, May 14, 2016.

The day after the sale, we set fire to the burn pile in the pasture to consume stray lumber and old straw. At the end of the month, we'll leave behind this family farmstead, including the hand prints and footprints that my brother and I pressed into concrete in 1978.

I'm obviously utterly Iowan when it comes to the emotional ties that we forge with our land. And this wasn't even a Century Farm that we depended on for our very livelihood.

But 41 years after I shouted that this was the place for me, I also have a deeper appreciation that it’s the people, not the places, that are most important. The weekend of the farm sale, once again we gathered around the dining room table for my mother’s home-cooked food and lots of laughter. We can gather around a table anywhere and still be the same friends and family.

And, fortunately, we didn't sell all the tables in the auction.

Kyle Munson can be reached at 515-284-8124 or kmunson@dmreg.com. See more of his columns and video at DesMoinesRegister.com/KyleMunson. Connect with him on FacebookTwitter and Instagram (@KyleMunson) and on Snapchat (@kylemunsoniowa).