For me, it’s a place: my grandparents’ farm, eight miles north of Henrietta, Texas. Not the homes in which my mother and I lived when I was a child, but the farm.
The town where I went to college comes close. In some ways, college years were the most important and best years of my life. Now, of course, so long afterward, I know not a soul in that town, and the place I lived is surely no longer standing. The University and it’s buildings will have changed, the businesses and the town no doubt hardly to be recognized. Yet some part of me is still there.
Even more so, the farm. My mother dwelt there as a child; she lived there on the day she died. I grew up there, as much as in the town. Running through the woods, wading through the metal bin filled with grain — it was like water, only thick and smooth. Peering everywhere: down into the water tower, through the fence to watch the pigs, hiking around the tank, climbing rusting machinery, watching grandmother wash, cook, garden.
Some part of me grew there, and forever lives there still.
When my mother died, my dreams for exactly one year were odd in this: No matter the subject of the dream, the farm appeared. A dream of travel would be to, or from, the farm. A dream of worry would take place within the rooms of the farm. A dream of flying would espy the farm on the horizon.
Always, the farm. There is no escaping it. It is me.
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