I think of my father several times a day, although he died in 1984, more than half of my lifetime ago. It is easy to revisit the memories, since we still walk and drive and work in the same spaces that he shared with us all those years ago. We have acquired newer vehicles, but we are still driving the same tractors and tilling the same fields. Some of the tools in the shop were his – the socket set, the wrenches, the bench grinder, the chain saw.
I go into the walk-in cooler and remember his rants about how much it costs to open that door every time ($5). I park the John Deere in the Truck Shed, and sit there for a moment, gazing out at the Driveway Patch, just as I have seen him do so many times. Often when I drive up the steep driveway toward the house we all lived in, I think of his purposefully exaggerated estimate of how many miles you take off the clutch when you stop and start on that hill (500 miles – I have since thought this one through and realized that he was way off base).
Dad was the designer and builder of so many spaces that we inhabit from dawn to after dark – and although most of the people now on this farm never knew him, they are living and working in parts of Tony Newcomb’s world. He figured out where the roads would go and he made them with an ancient road grader, he filled in some of the slopes and made flat fields. We cleared brush, took out stumps, made a vegetable farm where there wasn’t one before.
He designed and built the roadside stand on Leesburg Pike – a two story building with a steep roof and a sturdy concrete floor, completely different from the flat, temporary structures on the way to the beach. It pleased him to have storage space upstairs, and to have a permanent building. The stand has had a few small renovations, but it looks almost the same as it did in the early 1970s.
In August, behind the stand we stored hundreds of baskets of tomatoes under the trees, and baskets of squash under other trees. There was one long, lightly built shed that covered the tomato belt where we sorted tomatoes in the afternoons, singing and laughing and talking.
We had an air conditioned room (the Melon Cooler, which often sparked a laughing rendition of “Melancholy Baby” because he liked that kind of word play) that was just behind the walk-in cooler, with a sunken dirt floor. When it rained, it flooded, since the stand is at one of the lowest points of the farm (my father used to say, “the next time I build a stand, remind me not to put it at the bottom of a hill”).
From those early days we worked Behind the Stand. Behind the Stand was a destination – all the vegetables arrived from the surrounding fields and the distant farms to be sorted and packaged and stored. There was a lot of loading and unloading from July through October.
It was a major advance when Dad got running water to the stand. And he was almost more excited when he paved the road that circled past the coolers and beyond. Before that, the road was mud and gravel, and often rutted and reminiscent of a developing country. I remember how he demonstrated his joy about the pavement by throwing a bucket of water on the asphalt and exclaiming, “See?! It gets cleaner, not dirtier!”
About fifteen years after he died, I decided it was time to expand the covered areas Behind the Stand. This new roof provided enough shade for eating and hanging out, since we now had a collection of eight little kids (between three sets of parents) and these small people needed food and a place to be near their working parents.
We continued to add more sheds, more coolers, more covered spaces for CSA work. Now we have meetings and potlucks Behind the Stand – it is our outdoor living room, kitchen, office, storage room, the hub of the farm during the season. We unload bins of corn in the same space that we sort tomatoes and bag lettuce. We clear the table for Friday lunch, and then clear it again to bunch flowers on Friday afternoons.
CSA customers walk through this rustic, cluttered space to get to their special air conditioned room. They wave to us, they stop to chat. It is probably the most unusual area of its kind in all of Fairfax County – unpolished, unpretentious, purely functional, with no purchased furnishings. We are just a few feet from our closest neighbors beyond the fence whose large houses loom over our outdoor headquarters, but we never notice those mansions. They are outside of our field of vision, tucked behind the gigantic crape myrtle trees and the bamboo that provides a bushy buffer.
Nothing stays the same on this farm, or anywhere, but Tony Newcomb is still with us, in the buildings, on the roads, with every reused tin roof, and whenever it floods at the stand.
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