One-hundred-twenty acres of solitude, nothing by woods
and wild things—he bought it all for $12,000 in 1951,
dirt cheap even then because nobody wanted to live
that far from anything. Growing up, we hated it—
all that nothingness, nearest neighbor a quarter-mile away,
unseen beasts crashing through bramble, the stuff
of childhood nightmares. Our mother hated it, too—
amputated from her city friends, left alone and adrift
all day with three mewling kids in a world without
cultural color, drama, dazzlement. None of us understood
his attraction to that vast tract—not until years later
after his passing, when I walked the property with siblings,
realtors, appraisers, those eager to claim my father’s land
for themselves, discovering secrets he’d known about
all along: the camouflage of dappled light on forest floor,
the gush and gurgle of bolting streams, the rock walls built
by farmers long since buried beneath its rocky soil—
wonders I neither fathomed nor cared about as a child.
Father, how I wish we could walk your woods together,
you silently signaling to arrowheads, fossils, ginseng,
a midden of bottles and bones, the discarded rack
of a ten-point white-tail buck, a pink lady slipper orchid
about to break bloom. But your land belongs to others now,
and you are in the company of the farmers who preceded
you in owning it, farmers who sleep now, if not warmly
then at least peacefully, beneath a thick blanket of leaves,
the genus and species of which you’d surely have known,
another part of the legacy lost to me now.
