My Place and a Conversation with Grandma.

So a few days ago, when I was still hepped up on painkillers due to injuring my back, my family came to visit me and bring me pizza and make sure I wasn't laying in a field somewhere since Scott was at work that day. So they showed up and we shoved the mediocre fast food pizza of love and family into our faces and then had some of Grandmas home made cake that tasted like the breath of angels. Then we gathered up everyone and went outside because Grandma really wanted to see my chickens.

Considering the last time they had been to my place was way back when my dad was alive, there was a lot of changes. She was really super impressed with our stone walls, and seemed delighted with her great grand chickens. As we were wrapping up our tour I showed her the retaining wall. As she was gazing at the many tons of fucking rocks we had moved, she looked back the way we had come over the fields and into the sunset and said “you know what, after he died we never thought that you would stay.”

And then I said. “Of course I stayed, I love it here.”

Then we had to turn around and walk back because Granddad was tired from a long day and then I never got to say what I really meant.

Because when I said, 'I love it here', what I really meant that everyday is a new story in that anything could happen and that just yesterday the frogs that live in the small stream had stopped leaping away in fear from me and the dog because they know us now and that when I see the sunlight hot on the meadows contrasting the forests dark, and the shadows of the clouds rolling across the mountains that I feel so happy it's like my heart might burst and that the little patter of chicken feet behind me in the grass is the sweetest sound in the whole wide world and that this was the very thing I had dreamed of my entire childhood and it was what I always wanted and never thought that I would have, and that sometimes I feel like I can see the whole universe on a cold winters night and when I stand in that special spot in the meadow I can see the rolling mountains and it feels like the whole world is falling away from me and that if I closed my eyes and then opened them again I might be flying, and how I have learned where all the little birds keep their nests and watch them become the parents I know they have always wanted to be, and when I see the creek running cold and clear in the dappled sunlight on a hot day and then I peel off my socks and farm boots and put my feet in to the rushing coolness I feel just like Calvin and Hobbes must have felt had they been real people and or tigers and how every morning I wake up and see my own trees and know that whatever else happens in life this is my land and no one can take that from me.

Although, after looking at all we had done and all we had been through, maybe I didn't need to say it.

Maybe my land said it for me.

Maybe.