Dear Wendell, old friend, I have an ancient galvanized bucket in the woods, too. But unlike the soil that’s living in yours, mine contains fossilized maple sap.
When we looked at this land to purchase, walking in waist deep snow, I trudged to the bucket and peered inside to see if it contained black humus like yours.
When I stood on my tippy-toes and looked over the rim of the bucket, the maple sap told me, scolded me, that my original place is more like yours. The Southern drawl of the bob-white you hear is what I heard as a child. The soil in your bucket probably smells like my childhood quest for treasure on my own ancestral land.
But this sap-filled bucket is new and precious to me. These trees aren’t Georgia yellow pines but spruce, fir, sugar maple.
This land is almost that mysterious substance that fills the voids between my chromosomes, this land of fern and moss and spongy lichen. I don’t long for the land of the red clay.
Here almost-soil downed cedars cushion my steps. I wonder if these made-up memories of centuries past are based on anything real. Did my ancestors, farming fields in the shadows of the Sperrin Mountains, smell the same jasmine-like scent of the potato blossoms like I do now?
Wind gusts look like the churn of a shoreline when leaves lift, swirl, roil. The birches creak. This wind is the breath that fills the chattering squirrel’s lungs and my own.
This is my home, but I am the stranger.
The warning red squirrel knows it’s true.
I am the stranger you warned against, Wendell – the one who bought up the family farm.
But my own family farm was sold in the 70s when a tax incentive made it more lucrative for my grandfather to sell the dairy.
I mourn that sale, but I don’t belong there anyway. The place of my childhood is gone.
I belong right here. On this patch of moss, my back against a cedar that must’ve fallen 30 years before I was born.
This is the land of the Mi’kmaq tribe. This is the land of the Bordens of New Brunswick. This, today, is the land of the Barnes family. In another time, we’ll all meet and know that we shared this place, loved this land, together.