In most respects, my grandmother was a nasty, churlish old woman with little regard for anyone. Her relationship with my mother frequently involved the kind of open animosity usually indicative of hatred—bitter and terse exchanges, mostly true and always mutually galling—though I am certain they found in the end, in whatever bizarrely reasoned manner they did, a way to love each other. My grandmother once restrained my wheelchair-bound mother to prevent her from appearing in a family portrait on my uncle’s wedding day, saying “this is a happy time, and your situation is not happy.” The shock value of my grandmother’s remarks having dissipated over the decades of their strange antipathetic relationship, my mother retreated quietly, left to contemplate both the truth of the words and the sad, baffling implications they possessed for our unusual, though perhaps not unusually malfunctioning family. Endowed with a unique grace, warmheartedness, and generosity which my grandmother lacked utterly, my mother almost singlehandedly shouldered the burden of her antagonism, that inexplicable smallness of heart which produced any number of contemptible scenes—a trait which she regrettably passed in varying degrees to her other children. I initially read my grandmother’s disposition as a species of inhumanity, then alternately as wicked or merely impish, until I eventually came to recognize it as a kind of blind selfishness amplified by the profound loneliness of old age. In the years that preceded her decline and death, however, she softened unexpectedly.

            As a younger man, I moved to Greeley to attend music school, and my grandmother employed me to see after the maintenance of her two houses and their adjacent grounds at the family farm to the east in Kersey. She had at that time settled into a new home near Greeley’s city-center, requiring both proximity to medical facilities and all manner of related assistance to compensate for her slowly failing health. I always made a point to stop by the house and chat with her after returning from the farm. She paid me fairly, and I inquired politely—as our schools have a habit of encouraging young people to do—as to the historical conditions of her childhood. Her descriptions were laconic but colorful; I still harbor within me visions of the farm before electricity and telephone companies carried civilization to it on a seemingly infinite stretch of poles and sagging wires, the ubiquitous and unmistakable mark of infrastructure which still snakes eastward into the distance along the rusted ruins of the old railway line to Hardin. On the balance, I must admit, she treated me well and spoke to me kindly. Once, as I prepared to leave her small room at the top of the 16th-street hospital in the months before she died, after reading to her from the book of Psalms and Tennyson’s In Memoriam, she even told me that she loved me. When she succumbed to a stroke in January of the following year, I found myself missing her company in a way that, had I ever told her, my mother would have almost certainly resented—a sense of loss of which I myself had formerly failed to conceive the possibility.

            My mother died scarcely a year later, and now that both are gone I treasure strangely—and in a manner which I have yet failed to satisfactorily explain—my memories of the long hours I spent working at the farm in the heat of summer, blanching the land into a virtual moonscape with chemicals spewed from a small, weathered plastic tank, an infuriating little apparatus which one pressurized grudgingly every five-or-so minutes by hand until blisters erupted and forced a change of task. In those days, before mineral extraction and the clangorous discord of machines which accompanied it came to dominate the county, the starkly barren grounds surrounding the house and the monocultures of corn and sugar beets surrounding them imbued the land with a quality I find difficult to name, a kind of illusion which thrived in the quiet, wind-brushed moments between passing trucks. It conjured in me visions of an empty planet or of desolate alien worlds; it offered a sensation of solitude so consummate and unprofaned by noise as to fire the imagination with fantasies of total disconnect. Young as I then was, I cherished a certain daydream which recurred just infrequently enough to extinguish the narcissistic impulse to realize it—a sincerely felt impetus to leave the world I inhabited without a word or trace, to pilot my car into the distance without heed of consequence and without imagining any particular destination. As a result, I developed a habit of driving out east beyond the city on afternoons and evenings when I was beset by the particular mood which always accompanied this dream of escape. I lost myself in the maze of dust-shrouded country roads, listening to sad music in the clownish way young people do, until I inevitably encountered a landmark or street sign familiar enough to guide my way home.

            In the years after my mother’s death, I returned to the farm often, always alone. I still visit occasionally when I can be sure to enjoy the quiet undisturbed. Perhaps I feel a kind of unique closeness to her there in the yard of my grandmother’s empty house, staring thoughtlessly across the road into the field where we spread her ashes into the furrows, a bizarre ceremony which somehow lacked the dignity it seemed to occasion. The dull, unfeeling thud of her remains as they spilled dustily from the plastic lining of a cardboard box and onto the soil left an indelible, haunting mark on my memory. I suppose, faced with the vexatious and maddening commonality of death, the arresting reality of such an event seems at odds with one’s sense of the persistence of someone recently departed. I am still occasionally struck with the feeling that as I round a hallway corner I might find my mother sat smiling on the other side. I never do, and poisoned as our farmland now is with the din of the extractive industries, with the ache of loss, and with the jaundice and petty rancor of a family which broke apart after the disappearance of its two matriarchs, I suppose I must learn to leave it behind. Perhaps my sentiments count for little in the end, but I think we all ought to abandon the farm, divide and burn its legacy to fuel the potential for better futures. Moored irretrievably as such a place is in the past, I’ll seek a new kind of anchor.