This is for you girls. Both of you. Someday.
Vern Akers hadn’t done anything with it.
That’s what I noticed. Two years after he bought it, and he hadn’t plowed it up or built anything. He’d
fenced it in with his own pasture and turned his Angus cows out on it. That was all.
The cows had found the pond, of course. They’d tramped the banks bare. Mud all the way around. The cattails along the dam were half gone. The water was brown.
But the cottonwood was still there. And the dam was still there.
And the pond was still there.
Chapter Four: Vern’s Place
I drove out the gravel to Vern’s place on a Tuesday in February. My day off.
He lives about a mile south of Grandpa’s old eighty, in a white farmhouse with a red barn and a windbreak of cedars on the north side. He’s lived there his whole life. He farmed next to Grandpa
