It makes me very sad that the farm on Grant Road could be closed for good.
Driving my freshman daughter and her friends to Mountain View High School every morning, the farm guides us through the seasons. Right now, waiting for spring to arrive, the yellow rape seed is in bloom and I dread seeing it disappear.
I’ve stopped at the produce shack hundreds of times during the summer. We love the home-grown apricots, peaches, and strawberries, followed by tomatoes, potatoes and corn. I buy them fresh, every other day, baskets full of strawberries and cherry tomatoes, two for today, another two for tomorrow.
And then we admire the sunflowers in August. Last year I started buying those too, in bunches, for our house and for those lucky friends whose birthdays fall in September.
In October everything turns orange and the kids come in droves: preschool classes, daycare groups, grade school kids and their parents and grandparents. They all come to buy pumpkins. Every kid gets a pumpkin-shaped orange cookie. They ride the train, admire the goats and the donkey, check out the hay maze and keep on looking for that one magic pumpkin that is just the right size to carve. It is a ritual and an adventure leading up to Halloween.
In November the fields turn brown, meaning that soon the Christmas trees will arrive: Noble firs, Douglas firs, grand firs, in their natural green or flecked with snow. Everybody grabs a bag of hot popcorn while we walk around and debate the size and shape of the trees, singling out the perfect one, the one that we will have put in a net and tie on top of our station wagon. We decide to pick up Jingle, the holiday CD put out by Mountain View High Madrigals, the school’s choral group. Every kid gets a tree-shaped green cookie at this time of year.
Grant Road is a busy thoroughfare. We drive to the high school, we shop at Nob Hill, drive to El Camino Hospital, we go to the Y, further down to St. Simon, and then it takes us all the way to Foothill and across. The SUVs, minivans, and sedans, an endless stream, brought to a halt by the lights. We spend a long time waiting on Grant Road during rush hours.
And then there is the farm. Every time I drive by I am reminded of the seasons, the land and the fact that Mountain View has its history. I have learned bits and pieces of this history talking to the people who shop at the produce stand, flock to the Pumpkin Patch and come at Christmas time.
The farm is a landmark, an open space, and one of those rare community gathering places which we erase in our rush to develop every last piece of land. Upon their loss, we start to miss them and crave to reconstruct them when we revamp our downtowns. It is never quite the same. Couldn’t we just hang on to this one, or at least a part of it?
Christine Welter lives on Cornell Drive in Mountain View.
