Picnic

My mother grew up in a community of farms and farmers, farms that had been operated by the same families for a hundred years or more, intertwined on a small island.

These farmers were much the same - taciturn, intelligent, lanky men with kind, practical hearts and drawers full of medals from WWII, and their capable wives who ran the UCW and made pies and raised housefuls of fine children - and every year they would have a community picnic. There were sack races and fishing ponds and a huge spread of food and it was a good, good time.

My parents bought their farm in the late 1970s. There were - and still are - long-standing farming neighbourhoods in this town, but they bought instead in a less-expensive rural area, a place where the farms had all been sold away, and where there were only ghosts of the foundations of the old churches, the old schools remained. So our neighbours were bitter back-to-the-landers, these 60s remnants who thought they could escape the contagion of society and failed, of course. They were large, poor families renting falling down farmhouses full of their dirty-haired, feral children. They were people too reclusive and too angry to live in town, people who needed large houses and sprawling out buildings because they hoarded, people with 15 dogs. And there were, of course, other farmers, people who had bought a farm and then needed to work a whole other full-time job while farming and while falling into permanent crippling debt and while their children became fat and pale and weird.

There should be a community picnic, my parents decided.

You may guess how well that went, and you'll have to guess because I have no memories of it other than wandering aimlessly through a bush, looking at the dappled sunlight falling on ferns and hearing the sounds of raised adult voices just steps away from the trees. I know they tried twice, but it died a well-deserved death and was never attempted again.

I snark a lot about Baby Boomers, about their harmful idealism, and one of their most harmful ideas was this idea that community could be created. But of course it can't, anymore than I can make a man out of playdough and then command it to BREATHE, DAMMIT! Communities are an organic thing, a fragile lifeform, and when the old farmers died the community died with them. The new people who moved in - and obviously I was cruel while I wrote that description of them, but still - were not capable of making anything like a community, not capable of being anything more than people who lived in a constant semi-hostile state on adjoining properties.

The island where my mother grew up only has a handful of residents left. Their children all moved away because Toronto is where the jobs are and because farming hasn't paid in decades and because moving away is what we do now. The only well-occupied place is the community graveyard, full of the well-tended graves of good old men, their bodies lying in the hard-working dirt with the bodies of their neighbours, peaceful, gentle old men who deserved a better epitaph than their farms lying empty and fallow, the picnic grounds still echoing with the gone voices of their children.