Farm

I am writing this from a wide brick house in the middle of a cotton field in West Texas. Well, I say cotton even though that won’t be growing outside for several months. Right now it's just a field. I see cows lumbering by in the dusty distance and a deep green machines resting on the side of the barn. A long sprinkler system stretches lanky metal arms across the field. Rabbits twitch in the back yard. When I sit out there in the afternoon, listening to wind chimes play in the background and feeling sharp grass underfoot, I feel happy someplace deep down that only smiles for very special occasions.

Though I’ve been coming to this house of my father’s oldest sister for as long as I can remember, I still know precious little about farming other than it can be stressful. This week alone my uncle has been hard at work plowing, mending fences, spraying weeds and swathing alfalfa so it will be ready for baling. The walls of the house are coated in decades of prayers for rain. And yet this farm has always been a haven of peace for me. I sit on the back porch swing and breathe in the smell of dirt and grass and cows, and muscles I didn’t even know were tight start to let go.

Yesterday I was driving to town and got hit by a dust-devil boiling across the road like it was a column of dirt leading a nation of tumble-weeds through the desert. It passed and I watched it trudge across the flatness towards the perfectly rounded horizon. I was surprised to realize in that moment how much like home this feels. Or a home, anyway. My Georgia-bred husband looks around and asks where all the trees are. He says he never knew people actually wore cowboy hats outside of October 31^st until he met my cousins. I look around and marvel at how safe this bizarrely barren world makes me feel. As though my own wandering body recognizes its birthplace.

I didn’t feel that way as a kid. But now, in a season of transience, I feel a thirst for roots that this place slakes. I am surprised by this feeling, but not unpleased. Perhaps in a life spent seeking out strangely beautiful pockets of the world, it is nice to know I have one of my own. In some ways equally unfamiliar, but a place to be from. We need those places. I need those places.