Want to catch up on this particular story line? Start here.

As you may have read in my previous post, we listed the farm in mid May and settled in for the unclear adventure of realtor showings and getting out in front of perspective buyers’ questions. The big one in our mind was the state of the aging drain field and septic tank. As the “boots on the ground” for the family, I spent a lot of time in the days that followed pursuing an inspection. Everything turned out fine and I’ll spare you the details; but I’ll say with some integrity that I dealt with over fifty years of family crap in just under three weeks.

Sorry about that. Had to be said.

The showings came pretty steadily in the ten days that followed the listing. We would get the backstory when we could: a pair of Ph.Ds moving to University of Michigan looking to build their dream home, a land developer scouting out a possible project, and many others. All of them seemed interested, but tentative; and in a worrying twist, the pace of the showings seemed to wane as May came to an end.

It started feeling like anyone who was interested in a largish plot of land in Washtenaw County had found out about the farm, taken a look and pushed back from the deal. And now we were waiting for new eyes that had not yet caught the dream. But even as we were steeling ourselves for a longer wait – maybe months or years – for the right buyer to present, something happened.

Jocelyn and I were entertaining friends the last evening of May when my phone lit up with a message. It was from the realtor.

We had an offer. Not a perfect one, but workable.

There was the back and forth of negotiation that is always a nail biter for both parties; but forty-eight hours later and with a strange flutter in my chest, I signed a purchase agreement on behalf of Dad and the family. The closing was set for July 18.

And we were off to the races. The thing I had most wanted and most feared was happening.

The next month or so was some of the most stressful I had experienced since Julia’s surgery. Dad had gone to great lengths over the years to declutter; but the enormity of unwinding a half century or more of accumulated family heirlooms, possessions and detritus would hit me more than a few times.

At the outset, though, I committed to two things:

• Be it through estate sale or chucking it all in a dumpster, I was going to walk out of an empty farmhouse on July 5th and go on a long planned family vacation at our favorite beach rental in South Haven.
• I was going to own every single emotion as I did the work necessary to let the farm go. Any sadness, any frustration, any grieving that needed to happen was going to happen right then and there. If I needed an ugly cry, I would excuse myself from the work and cry for a while. Then I would pull it back together and get back to it.

But there was still a lot to wrestle with.

Some of it was abundantly clear. There were the heirlooms that each of the siblings wanted – the cherry table that Mom had saved up for, the 1864 Springfield muzzle loader that my great grandfather (a Prohibition Era Treasury Agent) had seized from some local ne’er do well and the fly-speckled thermometer that had been in the barn since my show cattle days. Those and many more were divided up and made their way off the property.

The larger farm implements found homes with neighbors and friends. The golf cart was sold to the guy who had faithfully kept it running for years. Dad’s pride-and-joy Case 430 tractor and mower deck was picked up by the family that had been working our fields for fifty years. The old Jeep that just never seemed to die went to the new owners of the farm (more on them in an upcoming post).

Then there were the photos, legal documents and memorabilia that reached back into the four or five generations of Bob Cook and Mabel Gleason. These were the things that we had a responsibility beyond just ourselves, but to the extended family. With my sister Lauren’s tireless effort toward the end of the month, it all managed to find its way into two filing cabinets in Bob’s apartment. There’s still a lot to think through there, but everything is safe and accessible.

But then there was everything else. The things that were of value to someone or to no one that had to be addressed. That was the regular gut punch that we had to navigate through: walking through the house, the barn and sheds and seeing literally hundreds of silent touchpoints and totems of our idyllic youth on the farm. With each object, the question was out there – what do you do when everything feels like an heirloom?

Here’s the realization I finally came to: The value of anything is the value one places upon it. Because my father’s hand gripped the hammer as he rebuilt the back porch, or that it was one of dozens of my mother’s half-finished craft projects that haunted the upstairs closet, it deserved a place in a museum right alongside the belongings of history’s great minds.

Call it sentimentality – I’ll own that. But Bob and Mabel Cook are and were some of the greatest people I have ever known.

But I don’t have access to a museum – or even a good sized garage. So even in the exercise of parental lionization, pragmatism demands an emotional tipping point. I couldn’t take it all, and leaving it would have been a worthless annoyance for the incoming residents, so responsibility and good stewardship demanded that it be passed on – either to the auctioneer or the dumpster.

We had the good fortune of finding a company that would come after we left, clear out any remaining items from the house and outbuildings and sell them via auction and garage sale. They would take a percentage and send us a check. So we were able to leave the farm with much of contents still in place for the auction company to take.

And in the early morning of Thursday, July 5th, my sister Lauren and I took our memento laden cars to the top of the hill for one more look back. Then we headed off – Lauren toward her home on the East Coast and me to the title company to pre-sign the closing documents. At the time, my thought was to let it go for a year or so before I returned. Curiosity got the better of me and I drove by once since then.

But in the end, for all of its magic and life-giving wonder, the Farm on Willow Road was just another possession that I needed to release.

But there is something deeper that remains. More on that soon.

The story concludes here.