Excerpt from One Degree West.
Chapter One.
Disappearances

    I grew up on the mild-green, short-tufted buffalo grass prairies of northwestern Kansas. The High Plains they are called, and my family's spot upon them was Highland Farm. We were lifted on that great plain, four-thousand feet above sea level, exposed to the sky, not cradled and protected by the earth the way Iowa or Minnesota farm families are. Each family in rural Kansas was alone together on the flat. At night we had distant yellow lights to remind us that we did have neighbors, but when those blinked off at bedtime, only the moon and stars penetrated the dark. Coyotes howled in our front yard.
    When the Thanksgiving season approaches, I think of that home place and our big corner of Kansas more intensely than at other times, though, to tell the truth, it is on my mind always. Our rock-hard farmyard, gnarly with implement tracks and bony bumps, is the ground I walk on still, the given against which the baseline of my city life is too many eons removed. Here in town, the earth suffocates beneath pavement. Reality seems smoothed over, and I feel as if I'm the only one who isn't fooled. Beneath sidewalks and somehow beyond my neighbors' shiny cars and their meticulously raked yards, and then at whichever friend's house my son and I dine this year, a wintry defiance lurks, reminding me that except for that one savory hour when we eat, this holiday is a heart beating out into nothingness.
    Thanksgiving, that day when we feasted on the bounty of our work, was often a forlorn holiday in Kansas. The hour at table was joyous, but the season itself boded emptiness and decline. This was especially true when we traveled. I have visions of desolate blacktops, straight and narrow between flat fields of stubble. The destinations were always towns where widowed great-aunts lived, their nondescript Plymouths parked in the unpaved drives of their trailer houses. Wandering the foreign burg with a remote cousin, I would try to imagine glamour in the unfamiliar surroundings despite streets of inelegant frozen mud. The movie theater, if there was one, would be shuttered, and the only traffic would be a sedate dirty pickup, jiggling slowly over the ruts as a farmer, with his belly full of food and relatives, headed out to a pasture to check his livestock.
    The high point of those Thanksgivings came for me once when my brother Clark, home from his first teaching job in the far off, eastern part of the state, let me drive his black GTO the entire hundred miles from our farm to Aunt Rosie's. I aimed the car with earnest precision, filling with pride as Clark complimented me. "Wow! You're a natural!"
    I stared at my brother for as long as my fear of going off the road would allow. "You're just saying that, aren't you?"
    "No! I mean it. If I didn't know better, I'd think you'd been driving since you were ten."
    My brothers were that age when they started driving the pickup around the farm, but now Dad told me I would have to wait until there was a "teen" in my age number, which wouldn't be until the following May.
    Clark had graduated high school when I was only nine. He came home less and less frequently as the years passed, his departure merely the first of many disappearances I would witness. Thirty years later, he would be killed in a bicycling accident on Highway One, in California. "So far afield," I wrote in a memorial piece a year or so after the funeral, and my mother, who tends to hold her emotions close, confessed that those words caused her to set the article down and cry. We kids always took it for granted that to leave Kansas was a good thing.

    Thanksgivings at home were more fun, although the guests delayed their arrival to the last anguished minute. The smell of roasting turkey reached into the farthest corners of the house, and my brother Bruce, five years my elder, became bored enough to play with me. He would challenge me to a contest I was sure to lose, such as seeing how far we could skate in our stockinged feet down the planks in the fake wood grain linoleum our mother had waxed the day before. Promptly yelled at, we would then loll in the easy chairs beside the windows at the far end of the big dining room. I would try to concentrate on a book, but my hair caught electricity from the vinyl recliner, and a menacing ionic charge hovered between Bruce and me as well. I could tell when his boredom was about to erupt in scathing sarcasm. The only potential victim in the vicinity, I would flee out into the frost-killed forest of my mother's yard. I bounced a stick along the sidewalk, stooped to cuddle a cat or dog, or went down to the barn to stroke the neck of Queenie, my ill-tempered mare. Sparks and dust would shoot up from her roan coat, thick for winter, causing her to lay her ears back and turn her rump on me. I would wander the back lot near the windbreak and climb around on ancient combines and in rusted truck cabs until finally I heard cars pulling into the yard.
    The day was transformed. My girl cousins and I would dart back and forth among our aunts and uncles, swiping all the olives and sweet pickles off the relish tray. After the meal, we would tiptoe behind the barn and slide the door shut before Queenie made a dash for it. I would jam the cold bit into her mouth, then lead her out the front door and over to the abandoned concrete stock tank, where each cousin would perch in turn. After many attempts, we usually managed to get Queenie positioned right and steadied long enough for all to get aboard. We would ride out beyond the windbreak. Once, when a pheasant squawked and burst from the stubble, Queenie saw her chance and shied. My cousins and I, still holding onto one another, flew off. I clung to the reins, which jerked us around in an arc and thudded us to the ground beneath the mare's front feet. Bruised in that exploit, we all four grabbed shovels and went to work on the anthill out by the storm cellar. We dug out of scientific interest in hibernation, we explained to our parents, but really it was out of a will to wreak vengeance on the animal kingdom, no matter how far down the ladder we had to stoop.
    Even though I grew drunk with companionship on those rare Thanksgiving afternoons, dark would fall inevitably and the cousins would leave. The next morning the long weekend would begin. A thousand ewes chomped ensilage in the corrals, but the place seemed empty to me.
    Our way of life was dying. I sensed this even then. Only old people lived in the fifty houses in my great-aunts' towns. Nearer home, a crop of widows and divorcees -- my parents' sisters -- began migrating, with my cousins, to Colorado cities. My brother Bruce and I departed as Clark had done, when we graduated high school. Today only my father and one of his Colorado-dwelling sisters still own farms. No one in my generation works the land. Some of us have tried our hands at farming, but generally only when other options have fallen through. I, for instance, went back to the farm at thirty-five, pregnant and broke after a failed marriage. The return was humiliating, but soon the Kansas elements reclaimed me. Having been reared in the harsh environment, I hadn't felt truly alive since I last battled dirt and wind. That first spring, I rejoiced in the texture of the earth behind the plow. In the shop, armed with a grease gun, I scooted on a dolly beneath tractors, soothed by the smell of dust and grease, and by the massive machinery.
    I reveled in its power. Ancestors only a couple generations before me had made their tenuous claim on the prairie, and now we were thundering over it in tractors bigger than their houses. But there were fewer of us. My parents, like so many farmers, had moved to town many years before, trading the farm I had grown up on for land closer to their other holdings. Children had spilled out of my grandparents' sod shanties; now I was living alone on this other ground, in a two-story, four-bedroom house with one baby boy. My parents thought I was crazy to want to live, as Mom said, "out in the middle of nowhere like that, in that ramshackle house." Dad commuted to this farm as if it were a factory, the land suited only for the mass production of crops, no longer a place to live.
    The prairie of my childhood, with its cloud-shadowed rises and mild ravines, had disappeared. Instead of buffalo grass, rows of irrigated corn and soybeans vee-d into the distances. The state's floral pride, the sunflower, wasn't prominent along roadsides anymore, where only the toughest grasses survived the many poisons. When I walked through ditches on my way from the pickup to a waiting tractor, no grasshoppers clacked aloft to startle me. As a child, I had grown oblivious to their landings on my breastbone. The snake population had diminished as well, making such treks across ditches less foolhardy, but I missed the edge of adventure in the landscape.
    Denuded of snakes and cousins, of friends, life in Kansas was even lonelier than in childhood. After two years, I began to make plans for my second migration.

    The last Thanksgiving dinner I had in Kansas was at my parents' house. My son Jake and I were the only guests. My brother Bruce, although he was writing for a newspaper in another Kansas town, had taken his family to Arkansas to see his wife's parents. Clark was teaching chemistry at a junior college in Chico, California, too far to travel for a brief visit. There were no aunts and uncles around anymore. My mother and I went through the motions -- stuffed the turkey, baked the pies, even got out the good china. But after we had loaded the dishwasher, put the tinfoil over the turkey and packaged up my share of leftovers, Mom went off to join Dad for a nap, and I, glad to have the event over with, plunked Jake into his car seat and started back to the farm.
    The southerly sun cast angled light over miles of stubble -- wheat, corn, and sorghum. Harvest had been laid up in the fat corrugated grain bins on the farms, and the sun made the elevators -- twin white towers in every town -- glisten. Jake fell asleep, and once home, I carried him inside and laid him in his crib. The house was silent, grown dingy in our absence. To offset the loneliness, I sat down in the kitchen and ate another piece of pecan pie. Then, stuffed beyond belief, I pulled on my farmer's flannel-lined denim jacket and went outside into the falling evening to walk. I followed the ruts the combine and trucks had torn through the yard after an early snow, which had frustrated our corn harvest. The shop's wide doorway gaped black on quiet where the day before my father's hammer had clanged, realigning a bent sweep rod beneath the flame of his acetylene torch.
    I strolled among the grain bins, some squat, some tall, all of them full. At the bases of their doors lay mounds of grain that had escaped through the cracks. When I came to the largest bin, I stretched out my arms to embrace it and lay my cheek against the cold tin hillocks. Back in July I had waded this wheat in the beds of trucks, holding my scoop out to direct its flow from the combine augers. Yet in the harvest rush, I'd forgotten to capture a bag full before we dusted the crop with Malathion and binned it. Beneath the metal lay twenty-thousand bushels of wheat, and Mom had baked her Thanksgiving bread with white flour from the store. With winter coming and Jake asleep in the quiet house, all that bounty seemed sterile and useless, the future hollow. I asked myself the question my father has obsessed on ever since his boys left for other occupations. Who will carry on?
    Julene and her son Jake, he came to think during the two years we lived there. I relished my stature in the wake of my brothers' defections. I wanted Jake and me to be his answer, but had come, finally, to the disappointing conclusion that we were not.

    Today, I live eight-hundred miles from western Kansas, too far to travel for brief holiday breaks, but I've returned for the past four summers. I want my son to know his grandparents and their land. I can't uproot myself completely, nor reconcile myself to the fact that the land, once lost, then briefly reclaimed, is not our future.     Summers are always a busy time in Kansas, as long as it hasn't hailed or come a severe drought. Wheat trucks barrel down the gravel roads in July, hauling their bounty to the elevators, then, rattling empty, careen back to the fields, where the combines graze like giant mantises. I like to see the wheat before the machines pull in, a county full of it. I like to walk in it when it is unscathed and trackless, its trillions of bristles whispering. The effect is delusory, as if the occurrence of so much grain in one place is a natural phenomenon, and walking in it, I am in communion with a natural element, as ubiquitous as air or water or heat.
    It was on a day like that a couple summers ago, when the buds were burnished gold but the stalks still too green to cut, that I decided to pay a visit to the home place. The road carried me out there, past both abandoned and still vital farmsteads, where green combines and red and white trucks waited silent and ready, the sun glinting off their windshields. On the sole curve, past the Rickards' place, I felt the excitement in my belly from when I was a kid driving home from high school and would take it too fast. I drove with my windows down, the air rushing in, fire-lapped and dry. Fifteen miles of that, the tires rumbling over gravel, an occasional rock dinging the tail pipe, and then there it was, still five miles away, but prominently visible because of the gentle rise on which it stood. The Carlson farmstead was my family's center of gravity, but others could drive right by it, not even feeling the magnet's pull in their stomachs, as someone in a wheat truck did just then, filling the car with dust. I swerved and re-fastened my attention to the road until I arrived at the turn onto the half-mile of dirt track. After a dip between what used to be two pastures, but were now wheat fields, the trail dead-ended in our old farmyard.
    I parked below the knoll leading up to the house. Opening the car door onto what I expected to be mere heat and wind, I was startled by a deer with a huge crest of antlers. It tore out of the thicket that had once been our north yard, where Dad had braced up the cherry tree with a makeshift post and rail crutch, and leapt past the remnants of the sheep barn into the wheat field. The pasture beyond that long building had once seemed to reach into eternity, but was now reduced to a single circle of wheat beneath the breadth of a pivot sprinkler. I watched the deer bound through the wheat like a merry-go-round animal, his rack aligned in the cross hairs of the vacant afternoon, then turned back to the house yard.
    Some of my mother's yellow rose bushes were in bloom, and I imagined her posing before them, as she had for one of the pictures in the family photo album, the skirt of her housedress hugging her belly and thighs in the wind, which was always too intense and bothersome -- full of dust in summer and needling cold in winter -- to be called a breeze. I walked carefully, pulling back the branches that had overgrown the sidewalk, trying not to break or trample anything that would make the deer's haven less familiar when he returned. Millions of moments circled inside me, stirred by this visit as were the leaves overhead, tossed by the perennial wind. Should I tell Mom about the deer and the flowers, I wondered? She would be pleased to hear about them, but reminding her of the empty house would upset her. She never would have agreed to the trade, she once told me, had she known the farmstead her father built would wind up abandoned.
    Grand by local standards, the old house is a monument to our dead: Grandpa Carlson, with his bald head, his Swedish accent and his way of turning big dreams into reality; Grandma Carlson with her nubbin bun, her sternness and her complaining; Uncle John, the farming hope of my mother's family, who was struck by lightning while driving a tractor; and now Clark, my older brother, who had died just the previous year. It was his death, so recent, that brought me to the home place that day.
    Someone planted two evergreen trees after we moved. I had to lift their branches to make my way up the wide steps of the south porch. I ran my hand down the beveled glass in the front entry, then discovered the door unlocked. The house was as cold as a walk-in meat locker, holding the chill over from the night. Glass still lined the sashes of the bay windows, some of it original, rippled, hand-blown -- a wonder, since the Carlsons, then the Bairs had raised children in the house, and at least two other families had lived in it since we left. I had forgotten how big the windows were. No easy chairs beckoned from in front of them, however, and the air conditioner had been removed from below the middle one, leaving a hole that framed a square patch of brush. Someone had torn the wall out between the dining room and Mom's sewing room. They laid a turquoise carpet over the wood grain linoleum Bruce and I had skated down. During my long absence, the house had restored itself to its original elegance in my memory, so I was disappointed all over again by the north wall, which separated the dining room from the kitchen. Originally, a set of leaded glass cabinets and a mantel with a mirror above it appointed that wall, but, saying these features were too old to repair, my parents had them torn out the same year they had the upstairs balcony removed.
    My mother had hung Clark's senior picture in the middle of the wall, when it was newly blank. As a child, I stared at the picture often and proudly, noticing how perfectly squared were his shoulders, the bows of his tie and his flat top. Remembering that picture's isolation reminded me of the time his classmates went on a field trip to Colorado Springs and Dad made Clark stay home to help with lambing season, and another time, when he dressed up in the same gray suit he wore in the picture, to compete in a high school best-groomed contest. He wasn't able to get the grease out from under his fingernails, had even tried gas, and then reeked of the fumes. I remembered him standing in the dining room beside the varnished pine door leading onto the mud porch, where he'd scrubbed for nearly an hour. He let Mom perfect his tie knot, then said, his eyes brimming, "I look like a dumb farmer."

    Upstairs, the hallway was still fifteen feet wide. Mom and Dad's room, gaping and bedless, no longer exuded mystery. Mom had always kept the curtains drawn over the windows, making it darker than the rest of the house. My cousins and I once got in trouble for sneaking into the room at night when the adults were gathered in the living room below. We tried on Mom's costume jewelry and wobbled in her heels before her big round dresser mirror.
    Bruce's room had one window, looking west over the back yard. When as a child I entered his messy lair, through the narrow corridor walling off the stairwell, the afternoon light exploded through that window, and it seemed as if Bruce lived in the most spacious room of all. I now leaned my forehead against the filmy pane and looked down into the back yard. Concealed in the plum and olive thicket, I knew, was a concrete dome with a rusted vent pipe sticking up in the middle -- the cap over the septic tank. To me as a child, it had been a mysterious surface on which to prance. There was no odor, just the bewitching contour of a spaceship. I would sit on it early evenings and watch the sky blaze over the elm windbreak beyond the hog lot. During fall sunsets, it was as if the yard's bare limbs were strewn with a giant canopy of rainbow satin. I would watch until I could barely distinguish the outline of the tall, ark-shaped hog feeder beyond the wire fence.
    My mother told me that her older siblings had grown up in a sod house near the spot where the feeder now stood, but the roof had blown off and the blocks were crumbling by the time she was born. I would sit until she called me in to help serve supper at the big Formica dining table, where waited my father, two or three hired men, and my brothers, whose work among the men I envied.
    I turned and leaned on my brother Bruce's sill. His room was bare now, like all the others, but had once contained two floor to ceiling stacks of cigar boxes filled with things I was afraid to sneak peaks at as a girl. I feared he may have tied an invisible thread between the dresser and his blue-painted chest of drawers or come up with some other devious detection system and would then repay me for the trespass. He collected arrowheads, animal teeth, sulfur for stink bombs, bullet casings, bird bones, bug carcasses, gunpowder gleaned from spent firecrackers, and chunks of molten glass he'd found in our dump, a bulldozed hole south of the house. He had slithered about the farmstead, making discoveries on his own ever since he was a toddler, sparking proud wonder in our parents, who were impressed by his curiosity and genius. And then I had come along, diverting some -- but nowhere near enough, I had always felt -- of their attention. I followed him everywhere in the manner of a younger sibling, trying to share in his discoveries, trying to win his admiration, while he fended me off with insults and made it clear he wished I would evaporate.
    A different dynamic was at work between him and Clark. Bruce out-charmed his brother, whose temperament, as the eldest child, was serious, sensitive and eager. While our father held Clark up to the First National Bank calendar and taught him his numbers when he was only three, then taught him to spell the word "International" by pointing out the letters on a wheat truck dashboard, Bruce engineered his own education. He found arrowheads on pasture hills, built a raft on which he attempted to float the Republican River (but wound up sinking), and subscribed to the Junior Audubon Society. He was the only one among us who knew there was no such thing as a chicken hawk. The hawks we referred to in that way were sometimes red-tails, sometimes ferruginous, he replied without hesitation when, a decade into adulthood, I developed my own interest in birds.
    I crossed the hallway and paused for a moment before entering Clark's room. I wished there were some ritual by which I could make his ghost appear, some means to convince myself he still existed. The frequent dreams I had about him were not enough. I crossed the threshold and blew a kiss onto the air where his tin-framed bed used to be. During my early childhood, when Clark was a teenager, his room had radiated brains and accomplishment. His grand prize 4-H ribbons, for bottle calves, lambs and for test plots of wheat, had hung beside his Future Farmer of America and honor roll certificates. I walked to his window. He had stared out at the same baked gray farmyard as I had, with the big barn opposite and the dead cottonwood tree by the concrete stock tank where my cousins and I had mounted Queenie. The house stood at the center of Grandma Carlson's land, leased by our father, and when Clark got up mornings, he must have looked out to where his tractor waited for him in the nearest field. Behind it, a straight-edged line would have separated the dark dirt from the gray. He might have computed, on waking, as I did years later when I finally got my chance to farm, how many hours it would take him to finish the field. If he had any daylight left, he would use it to wash and polish his car, a red Chevrolet Falcon. On Saturday nights, Dad let him fill it up from the farm gas tank, and he drove it to town, where, in the manner of kids all over the High Plains, he cruised Main Street in search of fellowship with his own kind.
    At home, he played Connie Francis and Everly Brothers albums on his two-tone, vinyl-covered stereo with the fold-out speakers. Stereo was new then, and he was an aficionado, as he was of all technology. I associate my brother Clark with the Soviet satellite, Sputnik. We watched it together as a family the first night it passed over us, and Clark followed its arc every night thereafter. He spoke of the achievement with awe, and fear, not of what the Russians could do, but of what he might never get to do. He wanted to go to college and become a scientist, but there was always the danger that he might return home. Both boys received a mixed message from our compelling, charismatic, strong-willed father, who admired his sons' brains, but himself lived to farm. Either thing they chose, whether a career elsewhere or farming, would constitute failure, because each precluded the other.
    Clark named our white tom cat Sputnik and hung wadded paper on a string from the dining room ceiling register. We would watch the cat bat the makeshift toy around for hours, Clark giggling "like a hyena," Mom accused. She didn't like her eldest's indelicate humor -- his burps, his demonstrative laughter. She had too much invested in his perfection. I realize this because, as the mother of only one child, I struggle against investing even more such hope.
    My parents gave Clark a telescope for Christmas when he was fourteen. It was a year when Dad got his way and we opened the presents on Christmas Eve. Mom had a Calvinist streak in her and believed that waiting until Christmas morning would make us more worthy and appreciative of our gifts.
    We heard shouting after we had all, I thought, gone to bed. "Come here! Come here! I found it!"
    "What's all the bellering about?" Mom said, fastening the rhinestone buttons on the new rose satin quilted robe Dad had given her. I trotted behind her and Dad down the stairs, through the dining room and mud porch, and out onto the east porch steps. Bruce slept on upstairs.
    "I found Saturn!" Clark shouted.
    "Good Lord," Mom said. "Have you been out here all this time? You'll freeze to death." But she bent over the eyepiece he held for her.
    Clark ran the fingers of his free hand through his flat top as he waited for her to see.
    "Where? I don't see anything."
    Clark readjusted the scope for her, and she looked again. "Oh my," she said, forgetting for a moment even to shiver. "That sure is something."
    "I tell you," my father said, "if this son of yours uses even half his brains, those Russians won't stand a chance."
    When he was seventeen, Clark taught me to jitterbug to Elvis Presley albums. "Toe-heel, toe-heel, back, toe-heel," he chanted, showing me the steps.
    I stood on his bed to compensate for the height difference. "Twirl me," I begged. He sent me out to the ends of us long arms, spun me and brought me back.
    Mom shouted up the stairs for us to "watch out up there! You're going to cave the house in!"
    Then he went away to college. I was supposed to be happy for him, and was, of course, because of his great accomplishment. He had graduated valedictorian from high school a year early. He had shown the town kids, and this after attending a one-room country school for his first eight grades. That school had been closed after my first year. I now rode the bus twenty miles to town. I too got good grades, and Clark, on his visits home, told me to study hard. I could be a scientist too. Like him.
    When he died, he was forty-seven and I thirty-nine. The sadness over losing him to his world was miniscule compared to his sudden and complete absence from all worlds. The finality of death weighed the corners of my lips down in an expression that had been unfamiliar until then. This was not just sadness, but grief, my first complete lesson in it. The three-pointed constellation he had been part of, with Bruce and me, now sank below the horizon each night more quickly, without him at the top of it. Its three-dimensional shape had devolved into a mere line.
    It seemed fitting, on this tour of the past, to save my room for last. Vacant like the others, it had been painted a rude aqua, though pink and blue ribbony things still swirled against a white background in the wallpapered closet. The only child with two windows, I had the influence of Clark's bleak easterly view as well as the romance of Mom's south yard, where her best irises grew and where the locust tree brushed the rails of the balcony. There had been a mockingbird who clacked angrily at us whenever we ran up and down the rickety planks. Out that window I had first heard coyotes yelp, up close. I had imagined a whole pickup full of children screaming.

    Standing in my room, looking east. We took life in this house our grandfather built for granted. Like most kids, we fought and didn't know we loved each other and felt sorry for ourselves and longed to escape, but our lives had a spiritual edge. The bleakness and the distances nurtured a psychic dimension. The sky, whether endless blue or roiling with thunderheads, dwarfed our vanity. At night, in the summer, Mom and Dad steadied us, each in turn as we reached the age for clinging to the front fence, our toes wedged in the wire. They told us in amazed tones what little they knew about the stars. Once we saw moving lights in the sky that no one could explain.
    Now, staring at the miles of wheat where the immense fan of buffalo grass had once opened onto sky, I reflected on how ironic it was that our migration to the cities had not diminished our impact on the land. With the aid of machinery and chemicals, and with families a tenth of their former size, we conquered the Plains, not just out of greed, but out of a failure to recognize what we loved and that love was reason enough not to destroy. Unable to fill the Plains with people, we settled for writing our name onto every inch of them, lest we forget ourselves and succumb to the spiritual vastness. Our farm once seemed infinite and painfully empty, whereas today even the world has limits. Were I to visit the house at night, I could now track dozens of satellites in the sky overhead. With this technology, we photograph the globe whole, the daytime shots optimistic with blue oceans, green prairies, a swirl of delicate clouds. But night shots reveal the glitter of manmade lights, blue-white fire along seacoasts encroaching inland -- my aunts, my cousins, my brothers and I folding back on ourselves, devouring.
    I went outside and leaned on the gate post of the south yard, facing into the wind and the billowing wheat. Two kingbirds dove and chattered at me, their bellies yellow as sunflower petals. Most likely, they were direct descendants of the pair who had nested in the locust during my childhood. I scanned the branches overhead. My whole life, it had been this tree I imagined whenever I heard "Rock-a-bye Baby" -- Rock-a-bye baby, up in the treetop. When the wind blows, the cradle will rock. When the bough breaks.... It had been this tree I thought of when Clark died. I had imagined a giant portion of it severed, as if by lightning. But the tree was thriving. The wind still gushed in its leaves. Its flat pods still rattled. On the outer reaches of a southern branch a nest bobbed, framed in blue. Fuzzy heads peeked over its edge.
    I walked toward the old shop. Red ants toiled over the ground near the corner of the storm cellar, toting tiny pebbles of rose and white quartz up their immense mound. Although much larger, this had to be the same hill whose residents my cousins and I had tormented that Thanksgiving all those years before. Clark sat on the hill when he was two, a story Mom told just the previous Christmas, her eyes damp from both laughter and her loss, and from his pain, which she remembered as if it were her own.

    Although I was home again last summer, I didn't go back out to the old place. I prefer remembering it when we lived there, as I have found myself doing more and more often this fall, as the air grows crisp, and the somberness looms. This Thanksgiving I'll spend in the city, where, like the ground, my ties seem smoothed over, my present unruffled. There will be an afternoon of companionship with colleagues who, like me, have no history here. The kingbirds will spend the day in Texas, or wherever it is they migrate winters. Some fall, after all the field work is done, the farmer who owns our old farmstead will throw one end of log chain around the locust tree, loop the other end over his tractor hitch, and pull the birds' home down. He'll soak some rags in diesel fuel and set fire to ours.
    I prefer envisioning a natural, or supernatural combustion -- lightning or the light of stars magnified -- but I am jumping ahead, I guess, to the final verdict, when the deer's home is gone, when the yellow wheat that engulfed it is forgotten, when only the ants survive, emerging from their underground tunnels to have their day.