Saying Goodbye to the Family Farm Rob Cardillo for The New York Times The author, who is selling her six acres, on the lane of the farm where she grew up. IT'S time to leave the farm in Maryland. My brother has sold the fields that surround us and the new owner has put "No Trespassing" signs at the end of the lane that goes past our barn to the old tenant house and then down to the stream. "You and Rock can still walk down there if you ask permission," the new owner told us. It would be easier to move than to ask permission to walk over fields that I know like the curve of my own hips. I know where the stream turns, where the otter lives. "We should have left when your mother died," said Rock, my longtime boyfriend, who recently became my husband. He was the one who asked, 10 years ago, with the clear eyes of a stranger, "How can you walk through this tangle of briers?" He cut a system of intimate paths around these fields and along the stream to our secret places, where the sycamores rise as tall as a cathedral and the stream bends to form a little sandy beach. And he mowed them faithfully, so friends and family could walk the grassy paths without tearing their legs on thorns or going home covered in poison ivy. I'd never thought of making paths to the stream. We just climbed over the briers, tearing our shirts, scratching the rashes. For the last decade, seeing the farm through his eyes has been part of the fun. But now that we're leaving, we have both begun to see it with new eyes - those of the next owners, whom we try to envision. Will they be young or energetic retired people who want to grow their own food, raise chickens and run a market garden or C.S.A. on our six-acre farmette? That sort of person might love the way we have let the grass grow high on the barn bank, so full of wild chicory that the yellow finches perch on its branches to eat the seeds. But most people would surely prefer mowed green grass and orderly trees and shrubs, not a pear tree so full of dead wood it's a banquet of bugs for woodpeckers. Do you think we should cut that tree down and have a clear view of the hayfields? I ask Rock as we stare out the windows of our loft. We finished the apartment together 10 years ago - it's an airy SoHo-like space in the former haymow of the barn - and hung bird feeders from the branches of the pear tree. Song birds come to feed here, and to sing: bluebirds, cardinals, mockingbirds, Carolina wrens, cat birds, Indigo buntings. Sometimes the hammering of a great pileated woodpecker will bring us to the window to exclaim over its size and magnificent coloring. But to the casual observer, this tree is an ugly thing, full of dead sticks. Which way to go, manicured or natural-looking? Anything but out of control, the way it looks to us now. We love the cardinals chattering in a forsythia so overgrown it has taken on the shape of a whale, with Virginia creeper and little mimosa trees flourishing in its tangle of arching branches. And we encouraged the sassafras and cedar trees sprouting on the front lawn, and the milkweed flowering with its honeylike scent near the barn. "Think of the monarchs we're feeding," I used to say, looking for their little golden eggs on the backs of the smooth leaves. But now we look at our wildlife preserve differently. "They'll just see it as a nightmare," said Rock, who knows what it means to mow for too many hours after work. Living here wouldn't have been his first choice. He belongs on a river, rowing with long, steady strokes against the current. Or wandering down city streets, reading history in the shade of a roof, the frame of a door. But when we met, I was heading out of Manhattan for an old family farm in Maryland, to help my mother. We had a few good years with her here, laughing and telling stories and driving her to all the specialists who kept her reading and walking and hearing. We went through a long string of helpers, trying to find one or two who had the knack of assisting her without destroying her last threads of independence and self-respect.