The Old Glendale Farm

Today while going through some of my great-grandmother's letters and memorobelia, I came across this poem that she had cut out of a newspaper nearly a century ago. Edith Minter wrote of going home to Glendale. My grandparents also lived on a farm in what now is Kendall, but in years past the farm had been in Glendale, before Kendall gained prominance. In fact, the story goes that the original farm house had been built from the wood of the general store in Glendale that had been dismantled and carried to its new location.

This summer while visiting in Wisconsin, I drove past the old Kendall/Glendale home which now looks new and updated with fresh siding and paint. I thought about all the wonderful summers we cousins had played in the creek, "helped" to milk the cows, had wandered through the fields, and had been recipients of my dad's great skill as a willow whistle maker from the tree by the barn that hung over the road. The old barn in gone, the horse barn, built in 1916 is beginning to slip off it's foundation. The rutted driveway has been updated and the old path is fading. But I still know the way to Spring Brook Farm (later known as Pine Terrace and after that the Old Weber Farm), the home of four generations of Sherwoods since 1868. A cousin still owns the land, but a few acres containing the house were sold off, so the heart and soul is gone from the old place. But I walk there in memory, hearing the lowing of the cows, the meowing of the hungry barn kittens and watching the evening shadows turn to lightening bugs. As I sat in the car along the road, I thought of the old phrase, "You can't go home again" and knew that it was true. I can though, carry home with me in my heart. And I love Edith Minter's words evoking the old days in roughly the same place.