Have been lately in the field, cultivating my inner peasant, clearing the land (backyard) of lilac and buckthorn, overgrown onion and phlox, and preparing the property for sale and myself for eventual removal. I spade, prune, rake, pitch, stoop, pick stone, sweat, stink, aggravate back and shoulder pain, acquaint myself with creeping vermin, and acquire gloves of black dirt in these steamy processes under the pines. A network of red, ropy roots has been lashing itself in during twenty years of garden neglect, and invasive species—like the Teutonic Knights and the Russians—have usurped the whole subsoil. Eradication has been a fitful tug of war, but fortunately, to date, bloodless and tearless. I realize, of course, that I have liberated only 50 square feet of backyard, of homeland, from these bonds, but I understand again, remember, how physically hard such work is and must have been. And while the weedless pristine has its aesthetic satisfactions and material rewards, hard work every day kills you, too, over time. One’s tools have sharp edges, and attentions cannot but lapse every now and then. Peasantry, I conclude, should be a phase in human development and not a permanent caste: a freely chosen part-time way of life, a vacation from the bourgeois—or should one say the middle-class proletariat—a re-education camp for two weeks in the summer.
I contemplate selling out in probably one of the worst real estate markets—for sellers out, anyway—in history, home prices having fallen over 30% since their bubble high a few years ago. My timing, like grandfather’s, who bought into Poland between the wars and sold out shortly thereafter at a substantial loss, has rarely been keen. His follow-up, Depression-era purchase of a Pennsylvania farm proved just as, though ultimately more successfully, touch and go. But that farm became home, as has this domicile, my longest residence anywhere, the place where I used to read my kids to sleep, now themselves migrated to distant cities. I will miss this place, ten dom, ("this house/home") no doubt, and won’t shake its dust from my shoes, but I anticipate leaving without distress. Perhaps I haven’t spent enough time digging in the yard. Peasants used to belong to the land, with the land, on the land; there was some question who owned whom; they were rooted, almost inextricably, to it.
