We are selling the farm. We bought the homestead and 80 surrounding acres in Pike Township, Minnesota, in 1989 from Inez Saari, widow of Arvo Saari. She could no longer keep up the place and was moving into Alice Nettell Tower, a retirement home in Virginia, Minnesota. 

We are still fit and fully capable of taking care of farm chores and upkeep, but the day will come when we’re not. I don’t want that day to sneak up on us. Neither do I want to be warehoused in Alice Nettell Tower. Better to take charge while we have our physical and mental capacities. This summer we are going to pack up a few possessions and turn over the keys to the farm to our friends Lisa Garretson and Sam Harvey-Carlson and their new baby Winnie who will start accruing their own memories at the farm. We are moving to our other, now only, home in Sonora, Mexico. 

For quite a while, our world on West Saari Road has comprised five people, Chuck Neil and Mickey White, David Smith and me Suzanne Winckler, and Virgil Saari, the last Saari to live on West Saari Road. I have known Chuck the longest, since 1974. What will be unspoken here – what cannot be unraveled or explained to others and is private to me – is the depth and intricacy of love and friendship. 

I can explain how we came to buy the farm and write about a handful of many memories.

Inez and Arvo were Finns, and Finnish was their first language. Arvo and his brother and sister grew up a mile to the west in the Saari homestead on the banks of the Pike River. Arvo acquired land adjoining the family place. His sister Helia and her husband John Lahti had a place across the road. Arvo’s brother Tom and wife, Nannie, settled in the old homestead. Their son Virgil Saari still lives there. He took care of Nannie until she died in 2014 at age 100. Virgil is the last surviving Saari to live on Saari Road. 

We were skiing across a gently sloping snow-covered field when we first saw Arvo and Inez’s farm off in the distance – the big red barn, the yellow bungalow, an assortment of sheds, and the sauna – sheltered in a stand of red pine. We were visiting Chuck and his family over Christmas 1988. He told us it was for sale. 

I still get a thrill when I’m walking down that slope and see the farm, little changed in the years we have owned it. 

I don’t think I am embellishing, but it seems David and I barely discussed buying the place. It was as if we both knew when we saw it that we would. Within a few days we had contacted the agent selling the farm on behalf of Inez. We drove back north to meet with him on January 15, 1989. We negotiated a price, and he drew up a contract for deed. It was impulsive and impractical. Neither of us had ever bought a house, much less a farm. The last thing we needed was property in northern Minnesota. We knew we weren’t going to live there, at least not any time soon. David was finishing his post-doc at Mayo Clinic in Rochester in southern Minnesota and would be looking for a full-time position at a university or medical school most likely out of state. 

Looking back, I think three things propelled us to make this crazy purchase. I had a small legacy that allowed us to put down a substantial down payment. There was something compelling about owning a place with an authentic Finnish sauna. And, though largely not articulated or even very well understood, owning the farm would seal our friendship with Chuck. 

I had met Chuck in 1974 at the University of Minnesota, where I’d gone for a semester. I kept up with him through letters. In 1977 he and his wife Susanna – part of the back-to-the-land movement in the 1970s – left the Twin Cities and homesteaded on an acre of land given to him by his Finnish great uncle George Warho. They had two kids – Maley born in 1979 and Sedge in 1981. A few years after we bought the farm, they divorced. Time past. David and I watched Maley and Sedge, mostly from faraway, grow into adulthood. Chuck had a number of relationships with women, none lasting or right. Then in 1996 he met Mary Margaret White, Mickey. He met his match, they married in 1999, and we glided into friendship with her. 

Over the years, we came to the farm on holidays and during the summers from homes in Memphis, Omaha, and Phoenix. Then in 2008 David retired from his research position at Mayo Clinic Arizona, we sold our house in Mesa, and we moved to the farm. Since then we divided our time between Embarrass and our place in Mexico, but West Saari Road has been home in the strict sense of the word. Many friends have visited the farm over the years. The sauna has been lit countless times. How many feasts have we prepared and shared? How many have we partaken at Chuck and Mickey’s table? Numerous dogs have come and gone, four buried by Billie’s Pond in our west woods.  

Sauna

The first time David and I took an authentic Finnish sauna was under the supervision of Chuck. It was in his Uncle George’s old log sauna, which was just a short walk through the woods and brambles from Chuck’s to George’s homestead. It remains in my mind the most beautiful and picturesque of all saunas and to walk through the door into the changing room is to enter a time a century ago. When Uncle George died, Chuck inherited the land, house, and sauna where he and Mickey live. We have taken sauna there countless times. On September 7, 2023, the night before I flew to Mexico to join David, I took sauna with Chuck and Mickey. It won’t be my last sauna there, but it was a culmination: the last night of our 34-year ownership of the farm.

Given the impression Uncle George’s sauna made on us, it’s no wonder we wanted our own. Arvo Saari, undoubtedly with help from family and friends, built all the structures on the farm, including the sauna. It is a simple rectangular box with a gable roof. It looks like a child’s stick drawing of a little house. We have done practically nothing to alter its exterior or interior since the day we took ownership. We did upgrade the old wood-burning stove with a Kuuma, built by Lamppa Manufacturing, the premiere maker of wood stoves headquartered in nearby Tower, Minnesota. Numerous friends were on hand the day we installed the Kuuma. I stupidly failed to properly secure the ball hitch on the trailer. As our helpers were shoving the stove to the back end of the trailer to lift it off, of course the trailer tipped up. It fell with full force on Francie Lovejoy’s foot. Francie was a nurse, her partner Dan Michener, a medic. But it didn’t take medical expertise to know she’d broken one or more toes, for which little could be done. She was in excruciating pain. We called Renner Anderson, Chuck’s brother-in-law doctor in the Twin Cities, who phoned in a prescription for codeine to a pharmacy in Tower.

Over three-plus decades, Francie’s broken toe is the only medical calamity that occurred on the farm – which I think is something of a miracle. In the early years, the sauna was the locus of high-spirited bathing with multiple friends, often chased with beer or champagne. In recent times, suiting the onset of maturity, taking sauna is a more subdued event. There is one timeless lesson sauna teaches about mutual respect. No one is ever pressured to take sauna except on their own terms regarding personal preferences for nakedness and companions. 

The Chevy

In the summer of 2008, when we moved to the farm, David almost immediately began constructing an outhouse of his own design. He obtained the specific regs from the county and inquired about permits (none, as I recall). He dug a pit, a big, deep pit almost his own height. Our sandy soil made the task easier. But, still, it is a big pit. While excavating, David found a metal medallion from a Chevrolet – Arvo was a shadetree mechanic; we were always coming across old car parts in the yard and woods – and at that moment or soon thereafter David christened the outhouse the Chevy.

Standing like a sentry next to the wood shed and the sauna, it is an airy and serene place – David understands structural proportions. Rather than an airless, dark closet, the Chevy has screened windows, the better to enjoy the surrounding trees and buildings in all seasons, and a bird feeding tray for sunflower seeds, so visitors in their privacy can enjoy chickadees and nuthatches and the occasional pine siskin or redpoll up close. 

We have appointed the Chevy with art and various objects like rocks and shells. There is a winking Jesus and a cloud identification chart, which includes my photo of a shelf cloud taken near the Pike River. I use the Chevy from time to time (I found myself there more often this summer for sentimental reasons), and guests occasionally use it. But it is David’s place. He retires there almost daily when we are here and in all kinds of weather. The lowest temperature of his visits over the years was -35^oF. 

The Farmall B

Keeping in mind that memory is faulty, this is how I remember it. We saw a sign on Highway 52 for antique furniture near Zumbrota, Minnesota, one of many small farming towns surrounding Rochester. We needed some furniture for the farm, so we followed the sign. Minnesota – indeed the entire Midwest – is chocked full of small antique stores that deal mainly in farmhouse and bungalow furniture, crockery, and knickknacks galore, or ad nauseam, depending on your opinion of knickknacks. Though seldom authentic brands, much of the furniture is reminiscent of Craftsman and Mission style furniture – or at least that is what I gravitated to in these second-hand places. We bought a beautiful simple drop-leaf dining table which has carried the bounty of many wonderful dinners with friends. I will miss that table. We also bought a church pew to serve as a bench for two or three worshippers at our pagan table. The husband of the couple who owned the antique store sold Farmall tractors that he had meticulously restored and mounted with mower decks. David grew up driving Farmall tractors on their cotton and soybean farm in Mississippi. It was immediately apparent to me that we would not be leaving the premises without buying a Farmall B tractor. 

We then had to figure out how to get the tractor up to the farm, about 300 miles north. At the time we were living in a farmhouse south of Rochester. David rented a flatbed trailer from a local farmer. We picked up the trailer and headed north. Driving in construction zones and urban traffic on Interstate 35 through the Twin Cities was nerve-wracking for me. Returning south pulling the trailer was even worse – with no weight to hold it steady, it bucked, bounced, and shimmied the whole way. I don’t like to think back on the tractor journey. When packing up for the move to Mexico this summer I came across the receipt for the tractor. I’m a haphazard archivist. I’ve thrown away thousands of receipts; a few I have kept. At the moment of sale, a receipt is typically of little interest. Only as time passes does it serve as proof and fact of a transaction, in this case a significant one. We purchased the Farmall B on September 6, 1989, for $2,500. The receipt was signed by Allen Graves. I recently read that he passed away in 2022 at age of 77. He was a church-going family man, farm equipment mechanic, owner of a farm supply business, with his wife the proprietor of two antique stores, and a life-long tractor man. The Farmall B is one of the best farm purchases we ever made. David and Chuck maintain all the trails on our places – a contiguous area of about 160 acres – which we and friends use year-round for walking, skiing, and snowshoeing. Many kids have gotten their first tractor ride on the Farmall B, sitting on David’s or Chuck’s lap. Before we left this summer, David made sure Sam and Lisa, the new owners of the farm, know how to drive it. 

The Cedar Bog

On June 3, 2023, David and I went to the cedar bog with Chuck and Mickey on our annual trek to look for calypso orchids. The bog is on the Goldberg’s property who own land just east of Chuck and Mickey. We’ve been going there to look for calypsos for a number of years now. We descend from a north-south running ridge into the bog, a watery, hummocky, sun-dappled wonderland. Do the Goldbergs know what a treasure they own? It is gnarly walking down into and around in the heart of the bog. It is the kind of slow-going I love. We met Chuck and Mickey at the top of the hill at 8 a.m. We first stopped to see if the Saw-whet Owl would appear in the hole of the giant nest box where it seemed to be roosting. Chuck scraped the tree trunk with a stick. The Saw-whet popped its head out, looking exasperated (forgive the anthropomorphism). Mickey found the first calypsos around 9:20 a.m. They typically grow in clusters, so if you see one you likely will see several. It is a dainty orchid, only a few inches in height, and would be virtually impossible to find but for its glowing hot-pink-purply inflorescence. We noticed some faded trail tape tied around a cedar tree, which one of us put there a few years ago to mark a calypso area. David also found a  number heart-leaved twayblade orchids, tinier and more inconspicuous than the calypsos. Over the years he has identified fifteen species of orchids that grow in various specific habitats and soil types surround us.  

Wolves

On July 17, 2023, around 7 in the morning I was lying on the kitchen floor doing some stretches. I was listening to some Spanish on my earphones. David came running into the kitchen, imploring “Get, up, get up!”, which is not so easy for me anymore. “Wolves,” he said. I managed to upright myself. There outside the kitchen window, I saw one, then two wolves moving through the trees to the west of the house. They paused, or at least this is what I recall, for nanoseconds and stared piercingly around looking for who knows what. They seemed to quiver with concentration. They trotted along the driveway and up the east meadow and disappeared. Their fur was mottled black, brown, golden orange. They had long legs. One had a squarer, bulkier head. I assumed it was the male; the other slender headed one, the female. Seeing wolves is freakishly uncommon. Even though we live among them, it is as if they exist in a parallel universe that rarely intersects with ours. We have heard wolves call from time to time off in the distance. We see wolf sign regularly. The dogs find and bring us bones of kills, most often a deer shank. We see scat. The only other time we have seen wolves on the farm besides this recent event was on the morning of September 25, 2020, when we watched in amazement as a pack of nine wolves ran south along the far edge of our west meadow and disappeared up the path going into Guy Johnson’s property.  

Garlic

This is the last summer I will harvest garlic. I planted a row of garlic on September 27, 2022, before we left for Mexico – a third of what I typically plant. The garlic is the only crop in our outdoor garden this year. It is a lonely patch amid the weeds. I am embarrassed about it. I pulled the first heads on July 28 – big heads of Music and German White, two hard-neck varieties. My soft-neck Nootka Rose variety looks pitiful. I will let it go a little longer and hope for the best. For years I have always purchased my seed garlic from Filaree Farm in the Okanagan Valley of Washington state. I could hold back some of my own seed garlic and save a lot of money, but I have a strong customer fidelity to Filaree. The family-owned business has been around since 1977 and they have the largest publicly available collection of garlic varieties in North America. They still have real human beings who provide customer service, and the seed garlic arrives in a box, each variety packaged in a tidy brown paper bag. Receiving this box in the mail is one of my life’s greatest joys. The other company with whom I have unflagging loyalty is McMurray Hatchery in Webster City, Iowa, renowned supplier of heritage chicken and poultry varieties. The task of harvesting garlic in late summer and hanging it in the garlic shed to dry is a seasonal passage and marker as exhilarating as neighbor Craig Keskitalo haying the fields, the first frost, the maples and tamarack turning, the birds heading south. I have made a ritual of cleaning each head of garlic, using a pocket knife our friend Dennis Lorenzen gave me. Because for years I raised far more garlic than I could use, I took to mailing friends small boxes with several heads of garlic nestled in tissue. I believe my garlic procedures might qualify as a fetish. Besides Chuck and Mickey and a small tribe of other human beings, the two things I will miss most about the farm are my garlic and my chickens. 

The Fence to Nowhere

Early on at the farm David and I talked about assembling large sculptures and earthworks in the west meadow. Like many musings we discussed over beers in the afternoons, we never implemented this grand plan, except for one piece constructed by David in 1990 to commemorate our fifth marriage anniversary. We called it the Fence to Nowhere. It is a wooden slat fence which we stained in bright colors. Standing on the eastern edge of the west meadow in an alcove, it was quite striking and became the subject of many photographs and several pieces of art and pottery by our friend Dennis Lorenzen. It was especially beautiful in winter when the fields were snow covered. At some point we decided to let the red pines grow back in the alcove, which happened fairly rapidly over a few years. The Fence to Nowhere – its bright colors long faded to pastels and some of its slats askew – has become a hidden treasure discovered when friends walk or ski on the trails cutting through the woods. In 2021, as the result of two utilitarian decisions to upgrade the farm’s infrastructure, we added by happenstance two more pieces to our west meadow art enterprise – a sleek sculpture that is a solar panel and a septic mound that is an earthwork we seeded in prairie grasses and flowers. 

Clouds

I’ve always admired clouds in passing, but in 2016 I fell into their thrall when I uploaded the Cloud Appreciation Society’s Cloudspotter app on my smartphone. A tenet of cloud-watching is to pay attention to the clouds out your door. I have seen some of the most fleeting, most beautiful, most ethereal, most fearsome clouds on West Saari Road, often in my bathrobe. Horseshoe vortex. Sun pillar. Cloud bows. Crepuscular rays. Mammas. The titans of clouds, Cumulonimbus thunderstorms, a couple of them decked out in front with a formidable arcus, or shelf cloud. We have watched countless flame-colored cloud-enhanced sunsets over Virgil’s fields. One blazing sunset I will never forget was during the COVID pandemic when we spent the winter on West Saari Road. It was on January 6, 2021, the day the insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol. 

On promising cloud days, I wandered the backroads in my cloud-mobile (our old Subaru). One of my favorite stops, a few miles from West Saari Road, will always be Clyde Johnson’s fields. Here, the road crests a hilltop, and the sky opens up to become a grand stage for clouds. Someone still maintains the farmhouse and yard, but the barn is collapsing. I never met Clyde (now deceased), but Chuck knew him. He had a missing limb, but Chuck couldn’t remember if it was a leg or an arm. It is not all that unusual for farmers to be missing a body part. When I am looking up at the clouds over Clyde Johnson’s fields, I sometimes think if I lifted my arms skyward, I would float up and join them.

Dark, quiet

By selling the farm, we are moving from a rural place to an urban one. We are relinquishing all the particulars above – the seasons, the rituals, the routines – and much more not enumerated here. One aspect of our life on West Saari Road which seems to me the most irrevocable, like the palace gate slamming shut, is the dark and quiet. There are fewer and fewer places on Earth where night is unadulterated. There have been nights when we walked home from Chuck and Mickey’s that were so pitch dark we piloted our way by touch – our foot falls on the gravel road, calculating by memory the distance to our driveway, then catching a glimmer through the pines of a light in our house. Many nights we stood outside under a vast black umbrella strewn with diamonds. On moonlit nights the dark gave way to a spectral glow – these were the best nights to go skiing across the fields and through the woods. The absolute quiet on West Saari Road is even harder to describe than the dark. It is like being enveloped by a void. Some people are unnerved by such silence. I am not one of them. To underscore what a profound decision we have made by leaving the farm: Alamos, like most Mexican towns, is never dark, never quiet.