My Peace of Land

It had taken at least a couple of years for that play gym to get finished. First, Dad and Bobby worked on it. Then, when my brother left home, I took his place on the two-person construction crew. I hauled boards, hammered nails, strung up swing chains, and loved every minute of working with my dad. The splintered masterpiece was all for me now. No kids lived nearby, and I needed a haven to call my own—somewhere I could go to be alone with my constant onslaught of thoughts and growing emotions.

 

At the very top of the structure was where I’d escape reality, laying for hours in a blue netted hammock, listening to my off-brand Walkman and reading classic stories that no other child of ten would ever read just for fun. A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Where the Red Fern Grows were my Diaries of a Wimpy Kid. It was the introvert’s sanctuary.

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Thirty-six hundred acres of a working pine tree farm surrounded my little 2x4-constructed patch of Heaven. Everywhere you turned, there was a dense forest full of pine, oak, maple, and sweetgum. My family had lived on Mrs. Kelly’s farm since I was about three years old and paid a meager rent to do so, as I learned later. In exchange for a low cost of living, Dad helped her with the land and anything else our elderly landlord needed him to do. This included helping with her progressive ailments and, one day, her death.

 

Mrs. Kelly always treated him with respect and trusted everything to his faithful hands. Everyday tasks on his docket included managing the trespassers that always turned up at the start of hunting season, prescription errands, and grocery runs. Once, in the middle of the night, she called Dad—frantic. Having fallen while trying to get out of the bathtub, she couldn’t get up from the tile floor; a later x-ray would reveal a shattered hip and the start of her health decline. Anytime an older person falls, it’s dangerous, and this time was no different. She came home from the hospital but was never the same. Dad never thought twice about that elderly, naked bundle of a lady on the bathroom floor as being anything other than a friend who needed help, and he would be that help for her until the very end.

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The entire property had only four residential plots, consisting of three mobile homes (sitting on about two acres each) and Mrs. Kelly’s 1940s custom-built home that looked straight out of a Better Homes and Garden magazine. My window overlooked her property, and I adored gazing out of my bedroom window to see that huge green house with the big wrap-around porch. That was the first time I had seen a detached carport with an upstairs loft, and I remember thinking it could be a house in itself! Sitting in my little single-wide, I marveled at how much money she must have had.

 

The first time I went alone inside her house, I was “hired” to read her the newspaper. I felt grown-up ringing her doorbell with paper in hand (only rich people had doorbells). Mrs. Kelly welcomed me in, and I could have sworn that I had stepped onto an old movie set or into a history museum. Not only was she wealthy, but apparently, she was also well-traveled. Artifacts from all over the world lined her walls. Walking into her parlor, African masks and Chinese tapestries greeted you, hanging perfectly over ornate furniture that never showed signs of wear. Most of her treasures were given by dignitaries or purchased in foreign markets. Even her olive-green kitchen shelves had rows of plates collected from different trips she and her late husband had taken. I heard a few of those travel stories, but I always wished I had heard them all.

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School days were typical while living on the land, but summers never were. Regular school breaks looked like riding in Dad’s white pick-up truck with the windows down and CCR blaring through the buzzy speakers. We were partners in our summer work: inspecting fence lines, planting deer food plots to maintain the wildlife, thinning underbrush, and operating control burns. I thought it was normal for girls to know how to inspect and keep an inventory of wood duck boxes and then pull beaver traps on the way home. The other girls never understood my life, and the boys were jealous of it. I loved that land and, for the most part, was okay being the odd one out—at least, until I wasn’t anymore.

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I spent countless hours on those green acres. If I wasn’t working on various chores, I was cloud-watching from a blanket on that pointy Mobile grass. Outside of school, I didn’t have many friends. We lived too far for regular playdates, and I always swore that was why I never played with anyone. Our animals were my closest friends, and I had my version of Noah’s Ark. We didn’t breed any, but we usually had two of several different kinds of animals. At various times through the years, we shared our small trailer with mismatched pairs of dogs, cats, birds, turtles, snakes, squirrels, rabbits, and, for about a week, even a baby alligator. My science teacher loved me.

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Some weekends when it was warm, Dad and I would go camping near the Beaver Pond (Mom was always too afraid of water moccasins to go with us). With the tent set up, after clearing our patch of earth, we gathered firewood. The squeaky call of wood ducks from their towering perches on the pond filled the daytime, while crickets and cicadas would lull us to sleep at night. Even those adventures took work to set up and break down, but I learned more than how to camp in those days—I learned how to enjoy the work of my own two hands. I think Dad knew that.

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Most of the memories of living out in those woods were pleasant, but not every kid wants to do chores one hundred percent of the time. Filling in washed-out dirt roads and taking pitifully sick deer or foxes to the environmental study center for rehabilitation came with its hardships. The most unpleasant part was when the animals wouldn’t make it. Death is a quick teacher when you work in nature’s playground. More than once, a leaping doe would be blinded to the top of that fence line that she thought was lower than it was. Before school one day, I looked out the window just as one beauty attempted to clear the wire. I yelled for Dad, and we both raced across the drive. Her neck suffered the miscalculation. She was still fighting for breath when he loaded her up in the truck to race her off to the center—her head lying in his lap. He told me later that she had died on the way, and I will never forget the terror in her sad eyes as he shut the truck door behind him in his futile attempt to save her life.

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While other kids watched T.V., I pushed through death. While others shopped at the mall, I picked and bagged pounds of blueberries. When kids rode their bikes through neighborhood streets, I tried to ride mine in a yard full of gopher mounds and stumps. I was so excited the morning Dad told me people would be coming to pave the dirt drive running in front of our yard. I knew this would be my lucky break when I could finally ride my bike without struggling to maneuver the wheels around the holes and pinecones. The workers came while I was in school, and I was very confused when I returned. It wasn’t the smooth gray street my friends had in front of their yards. They were just rocks! Who paves a road with big, white, chopped-up rocks? I quickly learned that graveling the road was not the same as paving the road. Still, I tried to ride that bike, convincing my young mind that I could make it work. Walking my bike out onto the newly graveled drive, I hopped on. I didn’t even make it a foot — so much for normalcy.

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I suppose that was the beginning of my discontentment. Something as normal to a kid as riding a bike eluded me. A year or two passed as I lay in my skyrise hammock, listening to Reba McEntire and Vince Gill croon “The Heart Won’t Lie” to each other through my headphones, thinking my childhood was broken. When the wind blew through the dogwood tree a few feet away, I imagined I heard kids laughing and playing games after school. If I wasn’t working with Dad or cleaning with Mom, I was alone. The loneliness grew stronger the older I got, and I couldn’t seem to do anything to “fix” my situation. Since the only thing I could identify as different from others was my living environment, I labeled that as the cause of all my social problems. It’s funny how your hurt often turns away from what it needs the most. The peace I called loneliness would be highly desired only a decade later.

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As my annoyance with the land’s solitude grew, so did my mother’s. We wanted to socialize, and somehow both believed we couldn’t achieve that where we were. I suppose living behind a locked property gate will make you feel that way. Dad loved that land, but he loved us more. As Mrs. Kelly’s health declined, my parents decided it was time to move. The goal was a neighborhood with other kids, but we could only afford an old street with neighbors that were either elderly or reclusive. Mom and I still convinced ourselves it was better, and I never heard Dad complain.

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We moved into the “new-to-us” house when I was thirteen and starting high school. At the time, I didn’t think twice about all the windows and front door having thick, black iron bars built into them. The previous owners were of the paranoid variety. There were the occasional break-ins in nearby neighborhoods, so I suppose this was their way of deterring the criminals. If a house looks like a jail, you probably don’t want to go there. The home was much more than we had known before, but it was nothing spectacular, just a humble brick home with a fenced yard. I still thought we had moved up in the world from our single-wide trailer on the tree farm. Instead of iron bars, I grew up with a door wedge and a shotgun in the closet. Indeed, this was an upgrade.

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As school progressed, the “showering of friends” thing didn’t really happen. There were a couple of sleepovers with one or two girls, but nothing like what I had imagined. Overall, we were a little happier; at least Mom and I were. Poor Dad missed the land, but he adjusted reasonably well. The emotional hit happened when Mrs. Kelly died. Up until the move, Dad was her right-hand man. She was family to us, and we were always there for her. There were no hard feelings when we left; she was a businesswoman above all else and thoroughly understood our need to move (primarily for my sake). We kept in touch and, as morbid as it may sound, were also comforted knowing that we would be included in her will, possibly with some land being left to us as a bit of help from our continuous financial struggles. That’s what was promised, and Mrs. Kelly always kept her word.

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I walked in the door from school one day to find Mom in a tizzy and Dad looking very sad. As I dropped my bag, I prepared for the bad news. We had been prepping for Mrs. Kelly’s death since she had been hospitalized for a few weeks. I hate to be flippant, but due to her age and health, her passing wasn’t the worst of it. A sudden onset of dementia, coupled with some sly manipulation by her estranged daughter, had caused her to make some very unexpected decisions. Mrs. Kelly had two daughters. Genie, who was always supportive of her mother and our entire family, was supposed to inherit the vast majority of Mrs. Kelly’s estate and the farm. The other, Scoot, was the estranged manipulator that came on the scene only at the end. She was to inherit little to nothing.

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Along with her twisted attorney, Scoot somehow convinced the poor woman to change her will in her final days. Everything that was supposed to be Genie’s was now willed to Scoot, and Dad was never mentioned. It was bad enough losing a family friend, but now the light at the end of the tunnel for our financial struggles had burned out, and Dad had to say goodbye to ever seeing his beloved land again.

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I lay on my white daybed many nights, falling asleep to the few crickets that decided to spend the summer outside our door. I would imagine cicadas joining them in a lullaby as I tried to ignore the frequent trucker’s horn that now traveled the highway a hundred yards from our walls. As I closed my eyes, I could see the stars peeking between the canopy of leaves and hear the flutter of duck wings on the water. I felt guilty and now missed what I thought I needed to escape. I couldn't even imagine how much Dad must have missed it.

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Years passed and revealed that moving didn’t change much other than a shorter commute to school and that we didn’t have to unlock a gate to leave. About ten years after I last saw that gate and the painful white rock drive, I asked Dad what had become of the tree farm. I wasn’t prepared for what he told me, so one day after work, I decided to go and see for myself.

 

Driving alone, I tried to mentally ready myself but could never have prepared for what I didn’t see. I pictured my beloved wooden play gym in the distance as I passed familiar streets. I could almost feel the wind blowing through my hair as I lay in that blue hammock, listening to Reba in her rendition of Etta James’ “Sunday Kind of Love.” I knew these roads; I knew the turns. As I coasted up to what should have been a little green street sign that said “Spice Pond Rd,” I couldn’t find it. The long dirt drive was gone, which had led to the big metal gate. There was no drive, gate, or hand-built playground that my dad and I spent countless, priceless hours building. We left it behind, and it was no more.

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Instead of my childhood memories, I saw Truman Show cookie-cutter houses and parking spots in rows—not one lovely home with a wrap-around porch—such a waste of beauty. Everything had been sold, and there wasn’t a single piece of evidence left that lush land had ever existed there. How is it even possible to build homes over a huge beaver-inhabited lake? There were no mobile homes, and nothing else was remotely similar to what I had left behind. They paved paradise and put up a parking lot. My heart broke as I squeezed the tears dry. The earth didn’t even have time to settle above her mother before Scoot sold the property for development, without any thought for the family who had been there for her mother for over a decade and in her final years. She played Judas to my peace.

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At twelve, I wanted nothing more than to have a sense of normalcy, a typical life. I learned that no life is typical, and “normal” is rarely memorable. As I stared out at the pitiful houses that sat where my yard was supposed to be, I wished for the peace I felt in those days. I wanted to hear wind rustling Dogwood leaves, not car doors slamming and dogs barking at squirrels. I had wished away what I now needed the most, and I longed to see that land again. The memories would have to do. I walked slowly back to my car and pulled away from the alien ground. As I drove back to my parent’s home, which I had desperately wanted as a kid, I went through mental blueprints of where to put my blue hammock at my own house and dreamt of owning enough land to build my kids a play gym.