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By Root 773 0

I was used to thinking of that first family as long-suffering but philosophical, wise and robust. I found a picture up in the attic of a later family, standing out in front of the house, all of them, even the baby, looking grim as hell. I actually don’t have too much rapture about time past, although Alice has accused me of being hopelessly sentimental. There has never been a time of simple light. Still, I try to imagine the land for the taking, and what it must have meant to have space for as far as the eye can see. The Wisconsin Indians in 10,000 B.C., perhaps sleeping right where our yard was, hunted mastodon. Mastodon. They ate bison, giant beavers, caribou, and elk. It is unthinkable now that anyone could ever have drunk out of our rivers and lakes. I don’t have the power to imagine what it must have been like. I can’t even visualize the endless prairie, the vast tracks of woodland. I can’t hold it in my mind long enough to know absolutely what we’ve lost. And so the loss is magnified, knowing, as I do, that my powers are poor, and that our world has become diminished beyond all measure.

I have thought about the boy who lived on our farm, Gurdon Huck, who in 1908 fell off a hay wagon and broke his neck. I found his father’s log of weather and planting and harvesting, on the floor of our closet. It was under a hatbox like a piece of trash. His last entry says, “June 9, 1908. Yesterday our boy fell off the wagon. Broke his neck. Dead.” I showed the notebook to Dan, but I wasn’t willing to give it up to the Dairy Shrine. It belongs to the house. In the attic, in an old trunk, we found books on agriculture and etiquette and religion, a fountain pen, a bag of lace, a cracked platter, a pie tin filled with black-and-gray stones. We had no idea who gathered the stones or where. We brought them downstairs and set them in the middle of our kitchen table. They were smooth as could be. As the weeks went on they gathered dust and crumbs and jelly spots. They came to look less and less like relics from the ages and more and more like us. I cleaned them up and put them back in the attic.

The people who lived in our house probably considered, as most of us do, that our moment is what is real. It wasn’t too long after we moved to the farm that for me time began to run together. That way of seeing probably comes with age. The past seemed to flow into the present, in some instances taking over the here and now. It was all the traces that made me feel the quickness of passing time, of passing generations. Alice wondered what we should do with the old things, the laces, the stones, the pens, the books. For her it was a matter of deciding between Goodwill and the monthly trash pickup. “They’ll stay in the attic,” I said. I tried to tell her that that pile of stuff served as a reminder that we are passersby, nothing more. Yet I also believed that those few things in the chest, all of the associations long gone, the layers of wallpaper in our bedroom, the journal in the closet—all of that experience matters. Alice reiterated that I was an incurable romantic. I could only say again that the past, the details of the past, in some terrible and impossible way, matters. I say impossible because what seems important today is probably not tomorrow, and in any case most everything is lost and forgotten, or else destroyed. I stubbornly believed, in the six years we lived on the farm, that the people before us in our house left their history to us, knowing that we would safeguard it.

It took those six years we lived in Prairie Center to really know the place. Even Claire, young as she was, knew the haunts and the hunts. In May, when the grass was so green it hurt to look at it, the air so overpoweringly sweet you had to go in and turn on the television just to dull your senses—that’s when Claire knew it was time to look for the asparagus in the pastures. If it rained she wondered if she should check our secret places for morels. In June, when the strawberries ripened, we made hay and the girls rode on top of the wagon. I was ever mindful of the