Douglas Witmer
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Wednesday, November 02, 2005
the end of the family farm
Last week I attended the public sale of my family's greenhouse business in Lancaster, PA (image above is the forklifts being auctioned off). My great-great grandfather started the greenhouses in 1898 and passed it along to his son-in-law, my great grandfather, who in the 1920s or 30s moved the operation to its current and final location. I didn't grow up on a farm, but always joked that my family did "indoor farming." Below are some photos I took during the sale, interspersed with some writing I did about the greenhouses in 2001 as part of my master's thesis.
Just a memory that I hold dear; my first memory of drawing:
I am with Great-grandpa in the greenhouse. We're spending the day together. Maybe I'm just tagging along behind him. I am four or five years old. Great-grandpa lets me put a quarter into the honor box in the lunchroom refrigerator for a carton of Pensupreme iced tea. The lunchroom stairs lead down into the wholesale office. The wholesale office is just off greenhouse Number 4, one of the older houses the Great-grandpa built himself. It has cement growing beds that are raised off the floor.
It's a sunny day in springtime and the greenhouse is busy. Great-grandpa sets me up in Number 4 with a Sharpie marker and an old order-form pad. I look around and draw.
I don't think I tried to draw flowers. For all I know, I probably drew trucks since they were equally fascinating to me at the time. What I remember from that day is the color--the blocks of saturated colors made by large groups of pansies--the color so alive in daylight. I remember the warmth of the greenhouse; its damp smell, red rubber hoses coiled up at intervals under the beds. I remember the crisp shape of the house made up of a grid of hundreds of panes of glass: four straight walls and a plain pitched roof.
This memory reminds me that looking has always been my form of devotion. I remember it, especially in times of uncertainty, because it contains almost all of my visual interests. It's a way I connect myself with myself.
Labels: drawing, miscellany
2.11.05 