My Asshole Brother

We’re moving out.  We have to sell the farm, there’s no avoiding it now.  The costs of fighting off Jim’s team of lawyers were way more than anything I could afford. We’re moving into my father-in-law’s house next door.   It’s a lot smaller than the farmhouse, but we’ll adjust. We moved our son’s bed today, and we’ll move ours tomorrow.  We expect to spend the night there tomorrow.  I’ll be making bean soup for dinner.

It’s all so unreal.  I’m still partly in denial I think.  It’s one thing to discuss moving out and selling the place.  It’s all been abstract and kind of distant.  It’s just now sinking in that tonight will be the last night I sleep here.  This house, this wonderful old rambling home that I’ve known and loved all of my life, isn’t going to be my home anymore.  As I sit here in the kitchen writing this, I think of all the jams and jellies my mother used to make here, all the special dishes for church socials and family gatherings. I think of all the meals we shared here, and all the pleasant evenings.  Pop liked to watch TV, and Mom liked to work jigsaw puzzles, sitting right here at this old kitchen table.   I can’t imagine not having this place in my life.

I have to let go.

I’m scared.

I should give some background.  I grew up on a farm in Virginia, the youngest of four children.  After school I married and settled down in New Jersey.  For the next twenty years we built a life together.  We visited my folks on the farm as much as we could, but our lives were in New Jersey.

Then in the 1990’s my mother started asking us to move in with them.  They were getting on in years and needed help around the place.  Neither my brother nor his sister were willing to help, and Mom felt that she and Pop could not keep up the farm by themselves.

I love the farm.  For all that I spent twenty years in New Jersey pursuing a career, I’ve never really felt like anywhere else was really “home”.  Wherever I’ve lived, the family farm has always had a special place in my heart, and the thought of letting it pass out of the family was more than I could bear.   After much soul-searching and discussion,  I packed up my family and moved back to Virginia in 1991.

After some initial dislocation, there followed a pleasant period where I got to know my parents better than I ever had before, and I grew to love and cherish them more than I ever had before.  My parents were truly remarkable people, loved and respected in the community.  I’ll write more about them later, but for now I should cut to the chase.

In 1998 Mom and Pop drew up wills leaving the farm to me, with smaller legacies to Jim and Lizzy.   They each got a parcel off the farm to put houses on, and Mom owned a small house in town that they split between them, and they got some cash, but the bulk of the estate went to me.  At the time they said they were okay with that.

Then in 2000 Mom passed away.

Soon after that Jim and Lizzy showed up by surprise one weekend, wanting a “family meeting” (the first one ever).  They wanted Pop to change his will and Mom’s too.  Lizzy had consulted a lawyer and figured out a way Pop could change Mom’s will even though she had already passed away. They said it wasn’t fair that I was getting the farm and they were just getting little bitty lots to put houses on.  There was a real estate boom going on and they wanted a piece of the action.  All together they wanted more land, more money, and half-ownership in the family farm.

Pop didn’t give them anything they asked for, but that didn’t stop them from trying over and over again for the next two years.  Jim got really nasty about it, and at one point even went so far as to get Pop drunk and get him to sign a new will (more about that later).

Then in 2006 Pop passed away.

Shortly after that Jim served papers on me. Pop was barely cold in the ground, and Jim had lined up a bigshot law firm from across the bay to sue me for everything you could imagine and a dozen other things besides.

Four years later he was still suing me, until finally I couldn’t take it any more. Aside from the immense emotional drain (it meant constantly reviewing and reliving all of the hateful and hurtful things they had said and done), it was also an immense financial drain and I just couldn’t afford it any more. Four years of legal bills had gotten me to the point where I was going to lose the farm no matter what happened.

For me, this has all been about the farm. I love the family farm and I would do anything, give anything, to keep it. Once I accepted that even after we won in court I was still going to have to sell the farm to pay the legal bills, the fight went out of me. I was already certain to lose the only thing I cared about.  I just wanted it all over.

Nobody wins a lawsuit but the lawyers.  I know that, and some day Jim will too.  I have faith that one day Jim will acknowledge, even if only to himself, that he made a mistake.

The tractors themselves don’t really matter.  They’re just a couple of old worn out farm tractors Pop bought fifty years ago.  They aren’t really worth anything.  One of them won’t even start, and the other won’t keep working without constant repairs.  They’re handy when they work, and a waste of space the rest of the time.  They will not be much missed, but their departure marks a transition in my life; it marks the end of my brother suing me.

I could not ask for a more appropriate symbolic act for my brother to make.      I got the farm, but Jim insisted that he had to have both tractors.  It’s a small farm, only about 40 acres.  We grow bamboo and pomegranates on part of it and lease out the rest.  He lives in a cul-de-sac in a suburb.  Here’s what Jim’s house and yard look like on Google Earth:

His house and back yard is the one on the bottom left.  You can see how much use he’s going to get out of two farm tractors.

He’s welcome to them, and good riddance.

Jim took the tractors today. This marks a transition in my life. Nothing so big as getting married or moving to a new town. This marks the end of my brother suing me.

I guess I was about the only person in Northampton County who wasn’t expecting Jim to sue me after Pop died.   I don’t know why I wasn’t.  It really isn’t surprising.  We’ve never gotten along.  This is just the latest of a continuing series of squabble since we were toddlers.  I got a bigger piece of cake than he did, so he threw a hissy fit.  There’s a sister too, but that’s another story.

The whole ordeal goes back many years, to when our parents were still alive, and it has been a very long and painful journey, and I’m left with a lot of unresolved feelings and a lot of unexpressed frustrations.  I’m hoping that if I write about them, that will make it easier to put all this behind me and get on with my life.