Farm memories
By Leslie Lang
grow closer
with timeMY mom and I just spent a week visiting her Aunt Lynn, who lives on a farm tucked into a hollow in the Allegheny Mountains. Aunt Lynn lives in a part of West Virginia where the Duffields, my mother's family, have lived for generations.
Her farm feels far away from where I live in another long-time family home, that of my father's family on the Big Island's Hamakua coast. When Aunt Lynn looks out her windows, she sees the hills our family has always walked.
Out my windows, I see the paths my other family has taken, through the bright greens and yellows of the rain forest, and with a view of the ocean and the world beyond.
My mother and I arrived in West Virginia after dark, and found our way down narrow country roads that all look the same. There are no street signs, nor any need for them; the same families have lived there for generations. Before there were cars, their ancestors walked those roads. My ancestors, too. Everyone knows the way.
Visiting Aunt Lynn is like going back in time to how Duffields have always lived.
When we visit every fall, we eat the last of the summer tomatoes and corn from her garden. She makes us cornbread in the cast-iron skillet, and fixes biscuits and gravy the way women in the family have prepared them for generations.
We look at old photographs and retell our favorite family stories, fixing them in our memories.
My mother's English-turned-American forebears, and my father's Hawaiian ancestors, had no idea the other existed. When the 21-year-old Benjamin Duffield sailed from England to Pennsylvania in 1682, Hawaii was unknown to the rest of the world. Captain Cook wouldn't come along for 100 years.
Benjamin Duffield's children lived in Philadelphia. One was a friend of Benjamin Franklin, involved in the politics of the Revolutionary War. That Duffield was a contemporary to my Hawaiian ancestor 'Iaukea, a chief to Kamehameha. He also was involved in the politics of his homeland.
Benjamin's grandson Robert moved to what was then Virginia, in the mid-1700s, and was the first American farmer in the family. Three generations later came Charles Duffield, who started the Duffield farm.
His contemporary on my father's side, my great-great-great grandfather Nalimu, also relocated at about that time: Nalimu sailed off to Honolulu, where he trained to be a missionary to Micronesia, and then left for the Gilbert Islands.
Aunt Lynn, my mother and I drove up to the old Duffield farm where they grew up. It was only recently -- reluctantly -- sold out of the family. The more-than-100-year-old white farmhouse -- built for only $75 or $100 or $125, depending on who tells the story -- is falling in on itself.
The trees -- once aflame in the fall with bright oranges and reds -- have been chopped down for timber.
We drove past the old cellar house where my mother used to get in trouble for drinking the cream off the top of the milk, and up the rut-filled dirt road to the Duffield Cemetery.
Charles' son started the now-huge cemetery in 1870, when he buried his firstborn, Martha, a 3-year-old who died from diphtheria. I noted with dismay that during this visit I could barely make out the writing on Martha's small headstone. It's fading like the farm might, if we forget its stories.
My ancestors in Hawaii buried their dead in a family cemetery which stood when my grandmother was young. She remembered stone platforms that dated from before Western contact, as well as more recent burials.
That burial ground was destroyed 40 years ago, when a tidal wave smashed over Hilo's coast, and carried the monuments and bones away. These memories are also fading.
Like Aunt Lynn's place, my house on the Big Island is also on a farm, and also at the end of a country road without a street sign. It's where the missionary Nalimu planted taro and pounded poi at the end of his life, and where he told his family stories. I soak them in, the ones that remain, and fix them in my memory. Like my Aunt Lynn's stories, they connect us to the past.
I was the first generation born in California, so I didn't grow up knowing either West Virginia or Hawaii well. But slowly, the unnamed roads are becoming familiar. I'm getting to know both places now.
Leslie Lang is a writer and airline employee
who lives in Pepeekeo on the Big Island.
Journeys is an occasional Star-Bulletin feature
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