The Place

Yesterday, coming home from Lake Eerie, we passed some fields that lay right behind a tractor dealership, low-lying fields with nothing but grass, and Robert said, “That’s my place.” It’s been twenty-five years since he’s lived on his father’s farm, since Dad sold the place to Ian, who rides dirt bikes all over the 55 acres of its rolling hills. Robert tells me that when his mom and dad first bought the place so that the kids could learn to farm, it was full of two million tires, a half a million of them piled high between the house and the road. The property was a landfill of tires. The three boys spent their first summer on the farm, piling the half million tires in the front yard onto wagons that they could dump over the hill behind the house. And the tires were a mess, because someone had set fire to them after the property sold, someone jealous of the sale, apparently. Once the millions of tires were out of sight over the hill, the boys made tunnels and bridges and forts out of them. The tires are still there, buried under fifty years of farm life.

The family lived off the farm, raising pigs, chickens, cows, planting an acre of potatoes for storing in the cold cellar, and an acre of sweet corn for bagging up and freezing, or selling at the end of the driveway with a can for payment, and wheat and hay and corn and pasture and a giant truck garden that the boys weeded. And Mom made her own butter, and her own cottage cheese, and cottage cheese veranika for supper with cream sauce, and cherry veranika with cream sauce for dessert, and homemade wine, and canned green beans, tomatoes, peaches and pears.

Once Robert found a garden snake and killed it. He rolled it up in a coil, and left it under the maple tree for his mother to find. He forgot all about it, until the screams started up. His mom had to hide the screwdrivers because he would take them to the kitchen chairs, loosening all the joints so that the chairs were in danger of falling apart. He was a carpenter in the making. And a scalawag. Once he borrowed his dad’s shotgun and shot up the lawn furniture. Realizing that those white lawn chairs were going to get him in trouble, he took them out to the back of the property, where the grass was high. It was summer. Come winter though, when the grass was gone, and everything was bare, the chairs stood out in plain sight in the back field, all full of holes, and Robert waited for the ax to fall, but nothing happened. He figured Dad considered it a mystery how those chairs got shot up and dumped out back, but Dad said differently forty years later. He said he knew more than he let on.

Robert’s room was a scary place. He had a big hole punched in the dry wall where he’d missed punching his brother, who later came after him with a pipe. The fights were serious, and I’m glad they all survived. One wall was covered with a sky blue drape on which hung every sort of weapon Robert could find: pistols, knives, a mace, even a bear trap. Under his bed were dynamite caps stolen from an employer. Robert’s young nephew Ryan refused to sleep in that room, and I don’t blame him. At one point Robert wore an empty bullet on a cord around his neck. The first time he emptied the bullet, he drilled a hole in the casing by hand to empty the powder. The second time, he used a power dremel tool, which heated up the casing, and the powder…he’s slightly deaf in his right ear today, and remembers how the casing shredded right up to his thumb and forefinger, where he was holding it. So there’s a bullet hole somewhere in the floor of that room, too.

Robert and I were married by my dad in the back yard of that place, commissioned to leave, even before the vows were said. We were married under three birch trees on a hot August afternoon almost twenty-five years ago, the same three birch trees that Mom had painted, framing the two girls ice skating on the frozen water in the hollow below the hill, the same hollow we were now driving past. Those three birches are in my wedding pictures, with two starry-eyed young people grinning at each other. And Dad’s proud line up of tractors would have stood just behind them if I hadn’t been silly and asked him to move them for the ceremony. What was I thinking? Now I miss them.

And as we drove past this place, we both had the same question: do you regret leaving this place? Do you regret our life in Mexico, where we raised our kids and made our home? Do you miss what we would have had here, the lost prosperity? And together we decided, no, we didn’t. I can’t imagine another way of life than the one we chose together twenty-five years ago. I’d choose it all over again, bear traps and all.