FEQ: Nobody owns land, we borrrow it from nature. Anon.
It's not every day that one sells an iconic piece of your past. But life has a way of steering us into tough choices.
My great-grandfather Daniel came to Nebraska in 1872 and homesteaded land along the Republican River. Daniel loved the prairie. He felt about it the same way Willa Cather did. (Willa grew up in the same area.) Daniel especially loved his orchard of fruit trees, his vegetable garden, and fishing and trapping. He passed on his love of the outdoors to his gandson, my dad. My dad passed it on to my siblings and me.
I'm in the grainy photo with two of my brothers. We loved spending time in the summer on Daniel's farm, though he was long gone by the time we arrived on the scene. Our widowed grandmother lived on the farm and ran it with the help of one of her brothers and hired hands. The unbridled freedom to roam and explore more than a thousand acres was a rare and wonderful gift. Grammy would tell us to be home for supper at five o'clock, beyond that we were on our own with the luxury of a whole day to do as we pleased.
We often left on horseback, Grammy had one ancient mare named Queenie and one unruly buckskin named Tony. Queenie and Tony would take us to buffalo wallows, chalk cliffs with fossils, a country cemetery that was next to the boarded-up one room schoolhouse where our dad went to school and the banks of the muddy Republican River. We climbed barns inside and out, rummaged through old sheds full of tools, ran until we collapsed and then did it all over again the next day. And we got into trouble--dipped in a full grain silo where we could have drowned, got gashes from climbing through barbed-wire fences, entered abandoned farm houses with caved-in roofs...
We didn't have a cell phone to call if there was trouble, we had to figure out things for ourselves. We knew if we got lost to climb to a point where we could see the line of cottonwood trees that led to the farmhouse.
I wish that I could provide that kind of freedom for my grandchildren, but I think the window might be closed forever on such unsupervised and unprotected play. The world doesn't feel like the same kind of place as it did back then.
We often left on horseback, Grammy had one ancient mare named Queenie and one unruly buckskin named Tony. Queenie and Tony would take us to buffalo wallows, chalk cliffs with fossils, a country cemetery that was next to the boarded-up one room schoolhouse where our dad went to school and the banks of the muddy Republican River. We climbed barns inside and out, rummaged through old sheds full of tools, ran until we collapsed and then did it all over again the next day. And we got into trouble--dipped in a full grain silo where we could have drowned, got gashes from climbing through barbed-wire fences, entered abandoned farm houses with caved-in roofs...
We didn't have a cell phone to call if there was trouble, we had to figure out things for ourselves. We knew if we got lost to climb to a point where we could see the line of cottonwood trees that led to the farmhouse.
I wish that I could provide that kind of freedom for my grandchildren, but I think the window might be closed forever on such unsupervised and unprotected play. The world doesn't feel like the same kind of place as it did back then.
Daniel's farm belongs to a new family now, a good family who has tended the land for two generations. Long years ago my Aunt found a dinosaur bone on the farm. She gave it to a museum in Omaha. I'm thinking about that bone now and it reminds me that we never really own land, we just care for it for a time.
These are tin cups that hung on a windmill near the house where Daniel lived. An abandoned house that we would poke around in, mindful of snakes and spiders and what else might live in the various holes under the wooden floorboards... A tornado took away the rest of Daniel's house not so long ago.
Daniel probably used the cups as my brothers and I did to have a cool drink of water. Water will never taste so cool or delicious as it did on those sultry summer days when I was young and the world seemed very wide and very free. I won't sell the cups, ever.
Daniel probably used the cups as my brothers and I did to have a cool drink of water. Water will never taste so cool or delicious as it did on those sultry summer days when I was young and the world seemed very wide and very free. I won't sell the cups, ever.
10-31-2010
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