passing into gray

I stood on the edge of the fields, where corn stubble formed parallel lines reaching to the tree-lined horizon. I pulled my peacoat tighter against the biting breeze, trying to stand on the balls of my feet so that my high heels wouldn’t sink into the sandy soil of what was once my grandparents’ farm. It was January, the fields were empty, and I stood dressed and ready for another funeral.

I saw myself, a careless child, running barefoot down the black soil between rows of corn or cotton in these same fields. I remembered afternoons spent stooped over in the backyard, trying to let cantaloupe or watermelon juice drip on the ground, really only caring about the warm, sweet taste of summer. Every corner of the place held a little memory for me, my grandmother’s fig trees, grandfather’s vegetable garden, the pecan trees planted decades ago by my uncles and my father.

I wondered, then, about the nature of a place. What, really, does a piece of land mean to us? When my grandparents brought their young family here 60 years ago and began to build a home, did they imagine how ingrained this property would become in the legends and the lives of their grandchildren?

Every summer as I grew up, we took a pilgrimage to the farm. There we spent a weekend or more playing with cousins, eating dinners out of massive pots of food, swatting gnats and getting grubby and happy. If we woke up early enough in the morning, we could help Grandaddy cut okra to take to the farmer’s market. If we went into the kitchen before dinner, Grandmamma would teach us how to roll out dumplings. Before long, a place like this becomes a part of a person’s soul.

As I grew older, my life with my family began to become my life with my husband, with my children, and finally my life with a family of my own. My trips to the farm became less frequent, and less filled with the cousins who by now were growing up as well. And soon, my trips to the farm became sudden, and urgent, and unexpected, but not really. My trips to the farm began to be mostly for funerals.

One by one, the people, the threads that bound me to the farm, were dying. My parents live far away now, my siblings and cousins scattered like dandelion seeds, like the cotton that scantily dots the gray fields after the harvesters have come. I know that we have lives of our own, homes and lands that will become the new legends in our families, but somewhere inside, in a part of myself that I don’t really understand, I ache for the loss of a touchstone of my history.

What need have I go to the farm now? What gathering will there be, now that the last link, my beautiful grandmother, has died? My children will not know this place, with its reaching cornfields, abundant garden, and the branches of the old pecan trees, like arms, always comforting, always sheltering us all. They will not see, except in stories, the flowerbeds my grandmother carefully tended, the grapevines and apple trees shaped by my grandfather’s hands. This place will pass, like an internet link you can no longer click on, into gray. Inactive. A quilt made by hands long dead, that we fold and place in the bottom of a cedar chest so we never ruin it.

I am assured that someone I know will keep the farm. That it will always be there for me to visit if I like. But why? There’s no way to go back. What I knew, what I loved, has gone.

I thought of all this as I stood between the cornfield and my grandfather’s vegetable garden, once beautiful and orderly, now filled with gently swaying weeds. My mother came up behind me, my children’s hands in hers. “It’s time to go,” she said, and I turned away from the fields to go to the last funeral before the farm passes into gray.